Coastlines and a minor complaint

Mike Ellis wrote:

> Listserv interface was doing some weird things again. Expect to see this
> message twice.
Strange things are happening here too, of late-- repeats of earlier msgs.,
replies before originals; and some of mine take up to 24 hours to get back
to me. Plus a couple bounce-o-grams for msgs I hadn't sent.  I'd been
blaming msn.com for all but the last.........
---------------------------------------------
>
> Adrian Morgan wrote:
> > A technique I invented about a decade ago for drawing coastlines:
> >
> > http://web.netyp.com/member/dragon/temp/islandmap.htm
> >
> > Just in case it interests anybody.
>
> Neat. Gives you peninsulas and bays and everything. Here's my result:
>
> http://suzsoiz.free.fr/tempy/map1.jpg
>
It is neat, and I don't want to rain on the parade, or pontificate...but
there's a couple problems IMO.

1. a map with such a detailed coastline would have to be extremely
small-scale, no? Seems to me it also implies a rocky land mass because
otherwise---

2. erosion by the surf/tides would surely tend to smooth out a lot of
irregularities. (I'm thinking of the east coast of Florida, which even on
small scale maps tends to be a gentle long curve, with occasional inlets)

3. a riverbank, lakeshore, or island in an uninhabited area, might be quite
irregular; but would tend to get smoothed out within a town or city, where
the hand of man has set foot.

When I was playing around with my (fairly large scale) hand-drawn maps in
PAINT, I could blow up the bmp and make things as irregular as I wanted, but
when reduced back to normal size, most of it didn't show up.

>> H. S. Teoh replied:
>
> >Interesting way of creating maps. :-) I wonder, though, what I should
> >do if I already have an approximate idea of what the map should look
> >like, but just need to set down the "fuzzy bits"?
>
(snip Mike's suggestion, which might be worth a try.)