Honestly I'm more surprised that the border with Belgium is longer than the border with Spain
this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2024
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I think it's just measuring the longest contiguous border.
The border with Spain has Andorra in the middle
There isn't a 2nd number on the east side of Andorra so I think the 623 is the total with Spain.
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Arnt most borders fractals so can any border be the largest?
No, because borders are made up by humans and humans can't write down or even measure infinitely small
Some borders drawn as straight lines on maps sure. But we also define borders by rivers and all sorts of other fractal things.
Borders are just social construct
You'll have to represent each border on the same scale, so no. Also, why are you being flagged as a bot?
I was writing a bot and must have accidentally enabled it for my main account. Fuck im retarted.
Even Firefox's coloured containerisation can't fix stupid
LIES!!! AI IS TRYING TO INFILTRATE US!!! BURN THE BOT WITCH!!!!
Your username is cursed, thanks for bringing that combination of words to life
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Anyone can just go into their account settings and mark their accout as a bot. Idk why you would though
You would do that if you were running that account using a bot.
Yes, but non-coastal borders become nice curves at a certain resolution just because they're legally defined by points.
Coastal borders are legally vague AFAIK, since they're defined as a nautical mile from "the shore" or something like that, but when you're already on the ocean a matter of a few meters tends not to matter.
considers
Well, they aren't fractal, that's for sure.
It is true that we could make borders more-closely-map to physical features, and that would increase the length somewhat.
And we can define borders however we want, so that's up to us.
But ultimately, matter is quantum, not continuous, so if we're going to link the definition of a border to some function of physical reality, I don't think that we can make a border arbitrarily long.
Coastlines are indeed fractals, and a similar argument could be made for any border defined by natural phenomena (so like, not the long straight US/Canada border).
Coastlines are not self repeating and they are fundamentally finite.
I believe they were referring to this, where technically a coast could be seen as similar to fractals
Literally from that page
The coastline paradox is often criticized because coastlines are inherently finite, real features in space, and, therefore, there is a quantifiable answer to their length.[17][19] The comparison to fractals, while useful as a metaphor to explain the problem, is criticized as not fully accurate, as coastlines are not self-repeating and are fundamentally finite.[17]
Fractals are not necessarily self repeating, they just contain detail at arbitrarily small scales.
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Well, quantum mechanics is continuous, just in a way that often maps to discrete things when measured. I'm sure someone has written a research paper on quantum law, but I wonder if anyone who actually knows quantum mechanics has.
It is only continuous because it is random, so prior to making a measurement, you describe it in terms of a probability distribution called the state vector. The bits 0 and 1 are discrete, but if I said it was random and asked you to describe it, you would assign it a probability between 0 and 1, and thus it suddenly becomes continuous. (Although, in quantum mechanics, probability amplitudes are complex-valued.) The continuous nature of it is really something epistemic and not ontological. We only observe qubits as either 0 or 1, with discrete values, never anything in between the two.
Sure, but if you measure if a particle is spin up or spin down in a fixed measurement basis, physically rotate the particle, and then measure again the amplitudes change continuously. You could also measure it in another basis, which themselves form a continuous family, and get a similarly logical answer (although not independently of the first one). I don't know much about quantum field theory, but I do know that fields in it are continuous, just like they are in classical theories.
All in all, while quantum logic is part of what makes it continuous, I think I'd still stand by that it is continuous.
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this would be a great trivia question
"EU's largest national park is in South America" is a fun fact.
They also have a border with Canada at St Pierre & Miquelon.
The map only includes land borders. St Pierre and Miquelon are islands, so they have none. France has several small islands scattered around the world as legacy of the French Empire which are also absent from OP's map for the same reason. Saint Martin on the center left is a notable exception, since it's divided in two between France and the Netherlands.
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