While looking something up on Wikipaedia, I read about Great Bear Lake that
The shoreline is 2,719 km (1,690 mi)...
I have to wonder what metric and what rounding algorithm they used to come up with that measurement.
When I read that statement, I was reminded of one of the things I read when learning about fractals, namely that the length of a coastline depends on how fine the measurement units are. If you measure a coastline using millimetres as your unit of measurement, the length of the coastline will be much greater than if you use kilometres.
Again from Wikipaedia,
The coastline paradox is the counterintuitive observation that the coastline of a landmass does not have a well-defined length. This results from the fractal-like properties of coastlines....
More concretely, the length of the coastline depends on the method used to measure it. Since a landmass has features at all scales, from hundreds of kilometers in size to tiny fractions of a millimeter and below, there is no obvious size of the smallest feature that should be measured around, and hence no single well-defined perimeter to the landmass. Various approximations exist when specific assumptions are made about minimum feature size.
