Slashdot Mirror
Washington Shoreline Photos
molywi writes "Between 1992 and 1997, the Washington State Department of Ecology acquired oblique aerial photography of the state's entire 2,500 miles of marine shoreline. The collection of over 10,000 photographs provides a valuable educational monitoring tool for coastal managers and the public. The true-color photos comprise a continuous series, panning left to right along the shoreline. The photos were taken to optimize sun angle, shoreline orientation, and low tides. Oblique photos are useful for interpreting bluff geology and land-sliding, riparian vegetation, and shoreline modifications such as bulkheads and seawalls."
What is a fractal you say? This site has some info on fractals.
I once shot a man who posted too many, "Imagine a beowulf cluster of these"
Coastlines are fractal: the closer you look, the longer they get.
Both the ocean and the continent are made of atoms, so the fractal approximation breaks down when you look too closely, and you end up with a finite path length. For the purposes of aerial photography, you might as well take a minimal cover of the coast using discs of radius ~1km and sum their diameters. Small crinkles are completely irrelevant.
It's one of the few really fundamental mathematical discoveries of the last century.
This sounds like a troll, but there is a shred of truth hidden inside. There have been plenty of deep, fundamental mathematical discoveries in the last century, and I doubt you can find many mathematicians who would agree with your sentiments. All of the people appearing on this page have done very impressive work, and you may notice that fractals are not featured at all. Unfortunately, fractal geometry is one of the few recent advances which can be understood even superficially by people lacking a background in mathematics, and this seems to raise the public profile of the field substantially.
"Your notation sucks!" -- Serge Lang (1927-2005)
There are two main piers at NSB Bangor. The larger one is called the Delta pier for obvious reasons. The ordnance loading dock? is actually a dry dock. These pictures arent anything the soviets havent seen for many years via satellite, but the dry dock is covered among other reasons because the shape of the propellor is classified. This is why any picture you might have seen of a sub out of water has a nice little propeller cozy on it.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?