Counting is hard
From Stuff: Japan just found 7000 islands it never knew existed
That’s not quite what happened, as the story goes on to say. We’re not talking about Kupe discovering Aotearoa or even Abel Tasman ‘discovering’ New Zealand. There are three main groups of ‘new’ islands:
- Pairs or small groups of islands that were counted as a single island before and are now recognised as multiple separate islands.
- Islands in rivers or lakes, which were known about before but not part of the previous count
- Large sandbars, which were known about before, but used not to be included in the definition of ‘island’
There are also islands genuinely appearing and disappearing, because of volcanic activity and erosion, but that’s a tiny fraction of the discrepancy.
Counting things requires both a definition of the thing to be counted and good enough measurement to see and recognise them. In other news, the New Zealand Census is on!
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
This reminds me a lot of a motivating example in fractals. It seems that Portugal always measured it’s border with Spain to be longer than Spain did. This happened because the smaller country more carefully detailed every kink in the landscape (and it was based on all sorts of landscape and not lines) and the bigger country did more approximation with lines. Exactly the same thing with 2 different measurements based on how precisely the landscape is followed.
1 year ago