However, to his great surprise, Richardson found that when he carried out this standard iterative procedure using calipers on detailed maps, this simply wasn’t the case. In fact, he discovered that the finer the resolution, and therefore the greater the expected accuracy, the longer the border got, rather than converging to some specific value! Unlike lengths of living rooms, the lengths of borders and coastlines continually get longer rather than converging to some fixed number, violating the basic laws of measurement that had implicitly been presumed for several thousand years.
