Title: fractal dimension of countries - is wikipedia imprecise? Post by: cKleinhuis on November 25, 2012, 04:02:33 PM hello all,
this might be of interest for many, i am right now playing around or searching for fractal dimensions of countries, especially libya, england and norway ;) and i stumbled upon something that i would like to discuss wikipedia does not give information on border lengthes for countries, what wikipedia does is giving the area of a country either measured in squaremiles, or in square kilometers so, it occured to me that there must be obviously calculation errors when calculating the area of a country out of its measured square miles area, compared to a country that is measured in square kilometers and then calculated back to square miles so, and funny enough i actually found an example and i would like to know from you what do you think, is the error due to the measurement scale? for example usa: in the german wikipedia the give the area of the united states with: 9.629.091 (UN 2007)[2] kmē and in the english wikipedia version the state it with: 9,826,675 km2 [1][c](3rd/4th) 3,794,101 sq mi the latter is obviously bigger, might it be that the latter one is measured in square miles, and then the square kilometers are out of this calculated ?!?! shouldnt wikipedia give the base format from which a derived result is obtained state ?! or i am getting something wrong and this is just due to measurement failures !? Title: Re: fractal dimension of countries - is wikipedia imprecise? Post by: kram1032 on November 25, 2012, 05:20:05 PM The area shouldn't technically change too much from the fractal structure coastlines. As you nicely quoted, both measurements have sources associated with them. You could easily look at those sources and possibly find out how they were measured. |