Talk:Border/Archives/2012

arabic page

the link to the arabic translation page is not right this page is about another thing —Preceding unsigned comment added by Sherifhany (talk • contribs) 09:55, 18 October 2009 (UTC)

--Sherifhany (talk) 09:58, 18 October 2009 (UTC)

Lengths of borders

Many pages describe how long the coast or border of a particular state or nation is. In light of the work done by Mandelbrot in his paper How Long Is the Coast of Britain? Statistical Self-Similarity and Fractional Dimension and the work done by Lewis Fry Richardson, I'm a little confused because it seems to me that stating a country's coast or border as being x kilometres means nothing unless it is specified how these things are measured and what scale of measurement is used. How is the standard the measurement done? For example, what does it mean when the CIA World Factbook states that certain country's coastline is a particular length?

In my opinion, "border length" discussions are of no value. From a political or practical point of view, the length of a border does not reveal anything. Take some European examples: Germany might have one of the "longest" borders in the EU, but, as all neighbouring states belong to the Schengen Area, the German border may be crossed at any place and, by virtue of EU law, must not be guarded. On the other hand, Andorra does not belong to the Schengen Area, and the operation of border control to that microstate might cost the Spanisch and French taxpayers some money. Italy has an extremely long coastline, but the costs and problems of border control and rescue of boat people focus on spots like Lampedusa and not necessarily Venice. Take the example of Spain: The Ceuta border fence might only make out a small percentage of the Spanish (and EU) external border, but, however, its operation might well entrench spending a remarkable amount of European taxpayers' money. Thus, it is simply not conceivable why the CIA mention "border length" in their factbook. As a person who does well believe that intelligence services, even the CIA, do cook with water and not with magic potion, I think that they simply refer to an irrelevant fact. --DanSchultz (talk) 20:21, 3 April 2009 (UTC)