For my fellow nerds who are wondering for realsies, you can 512 Polands in the Pacific ocean (although you’d probably have to chop up a few to get them to fit neatly)
A coastline may be infinitely long (coastline paradox) but the area of the ocean is not infinitely large.
Just think about it this way: go close to the coastline while still being 100% certain you are on land. No matter how precise (and therefore long) you measure the coastline, the area of the ocean can never be larger than the area inside of your 100% on land line.
For my fellow nerds who are wondering for realsies, you can 512 Polands in the Pacific ocean (although you’d probably have to chop up a few to get them to fit neatly)
And since a random close 2D packing of disk-like shapes averages around 80%, probably 409 without cutting them.
Considering that all the landmasses on earth could fit into the Pacific, that number sounds surprisingly low. But the math does check out.
excited German and Soviet noises
Cool. Now all of us fellow nerds are obsessing over the fact that it’s a perfect power of two.
Turns out, the polandgon (polagon?) has an ideal shape with a perfect binary ratio of area to circumference.
Depends on how you measure the coastlines.
A coastline may be infinitely long (coastline paradox) but the area of the ocean is not infinitely large.
Just think about it this way: go close to the coastline while still being 100% certain you are on land. No matter how precise (and therefore long) you measure the coastline, the area of the ocean can never be larger than the area inside of your 100% on land line.
Thanks for mostly getting the joke.
Ok. Now explain the joke.
Puts up the first terrible map for the lols, somebody inevitably complains (something like this)
(whoosh)
OP puts up the second map to reinforce that this is a gag.
Plus, the 17th Poland was “made room for” by removing New Zealand, a mapping error so common there’s a dedicated sub for it.
Didn’t even notice xD