I took a ferry yesterday with a friend to visit a beautiful island, and I noticed, as is usual in such places, that the most spectacular houses were the ones right on the water. I mean, the other island homes were all lovely, but one look at the houses on the water made it clear that their inhabitants are operating in a whole different economic realm.<\/p>\n
Which makes sense. Not only are the views from the shore spectacular, but such land lots also constitute a distinctly limited commodity, a result of simple geometry: The number of houses you can fit on the perimeter of any landmass, even a modest sized island, is far smaller than the number that can fit in the interior.<\/p>\n
And because my mind works in odd directions, the first thing I asked myself was how all this would play out in a four dimensional world. In that case, the “real estate” on an island would be some sort of solid volumetric shape within the three dimensional “surface” of a hyperspherical planet.<\/p>\n
The shore would not form an undulating shoreline, like it does for islands in our world, but rather some sort of undulating two dimensional “shoreplane”. A lot of houses would be able to fit on the volumetric interior surface of the island, but far fewer houses would be able to fit on its bounding shoreplane.<\/p>\n
In such a world, the total number of houses on even a smallish island would probably be vastly greater than could ever fit on one of our islands. And from our perspective, there would also be room for a lot of houses on the shoreplane. <\/p>\n
But you can be sure that the people who lived right on that shoreplane, with their fancy views of the volumetric waves, would be the wealthiest of all the hyperfolk.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I took a ferry yesterday with a friend to visit a beautiful island, and I noticed, as is usual in such places, that the most spectacular houses were the ones right on the water. I mean, the other island homes were all lovely, but one look at the houses on the water made it clear … Continue reading “Beachfront property”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12629"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12629"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12629\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12648,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12629\/revisions\/12648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}