The Paradoxical Coastline Contest, and Canada’s Commanding Position

“How long is the coastline of X?” is a famously impossible question, as the answer depends on the scale of resolution. Due to the intricacies of fractal geometry, rugged coastlines grow much longer the more one focuses in on them, as Benoit Mandelbrot demonstrated in his noted 1967 article, “How Long Is the Coast of Britain? Statistical Self-Similarity and Fractional …