Editing 2803: Geohydrotypography

{{w|Plate tectonics}} is the understanding that the Earth's lithosphere is divided up into separate 'plates', which carry the continents and (in the case of the Atlantic) are slowly moving apart under geological action that mostly drives the respective coastlines away from the deep centre of the ocean. Here, Randall explains that if the surface of the Atlantic Ocean were covered in a certain size of printed text (as if its surface were a giant sheet of printed paper, which it is not{{citation needed}}), the shifting of the continents would increase the amount of text by about 100 words per second.

[[Randall]] says that his hobby is geohydrotypography, which is a portmanteau of {{w|geology}}, {{w|hydrology}}, and {{w|typography}}. Basically, it means that his hobby is typing on rocks and ocean.

The title text reports the rate of the ocean's expansion, about 40 millimeters per year, in points per month. A point in typography is 0.3528 millimeters. The expansion sideways would steadily allow more characters on the first line (and thus intermittently more words, 'unwrapping' the first word seen on the next line) and cascading this effect onto every subsequent line spread out vertically along the roughly 13,000km (depending upon your choice of limits) North/South 'height' of the writing medium.

The exact calculation needs various assumptions. Font families of a given well-defined vertical size/separation can each exhibit varying general widths of character, and be subject to various possible degrees of [[1015: Kerning]] depending upon what precise choice of text is made (unless using a strictly a fixed-width font). Similarly, the word that does (or does not) have to be wrapped at the first line-break can effect which groups of words may (or may not) need to wrap on subsequent lines, in a cascading effect that can create almost chaotic changes from just a single reassessment. The exact extent of the Atlantic Ocean can also be differently interpretted: where it meets the Southern and Arctic oceans, whether to include bordering 'seas', what to do where the 'text' may have to cross/break-across islands (e.g. the Bahamas, Azores, etc, some of these being treated as Atlantic boundaries with the comic's relatively much larger size of "ocean text"), possibly even whether to track the precise tidal inundations at the coastlines at any particular moment (though they should even out, on their twice daily cycle, and high-/low-water marks could be chosen as the standard). All these factors, and more, make it difficult to precisely define the total characters (and thus words) that would 'fit', though the approximate annual increase in the approximate area of the ocean could allow us to assume some approximately greater number of characters (based upon an approximation of their average page-area requirements) which could be divided by the approximate number needed for a general corpus of words (and its spacing) to determine the approximate additional text that could now be added for any given span of time. Knowing Randall, he has used the best approximations that he could find and determined that the possible cumulative errors were not unacceptable.

:[A depiction primarily of the Atlantic Ocean and the surrounding land-masses. The land is black, leaving the oceans and seas white except for the following words written in sixteen lines of text (from just below the tip of Greenland/Arctic Ocean down to slightly above the Falkland Islands/Southern Ocean) that are, for the most part, wrapped between the Atlantic coastline 'margins' (as defined by the Americas on the left and Europe/Africa on the right, or significant island groups:]

:If you covered the surface of the Atlantic Ocean with twelve-point printed text, with the lines wrapping at the coasts, the expansion of the ocean basin due to plate tectonics would increase your word count by about 100 words per second.

:My hobby: Geohydrotypography