With hindsight, I imagine it's a problem that will be familiar to anyone working in a research-based or semi-documentary field, and it further strikes me that the nature of the phenomenon is probably mathematical. There's a form that's frequently used to exemplify fractal mathematics known as the Koch Snowflake. What this is, basically, is an equilateral triangle. An iterative computer program is applied to this and told to append a smaller equilateral triangle, exactly half the size of the original, to each of the three exposed sides. This gives a sort of Star-of-David shape, which now has twelve exposed sides. The computer will then add half-sized equilateral triangles to each of the three exposed sides. The computer will then add half-sized equilateral triangles to each of these twelve new facets, making the basic star shape more prickly and giving it lots of new exposed facets to which the computer will continue to add half-sized equilateral triangles ad infinitum. As you can imagine, the perimeter line of the shape becomes crinklier and pricklier with each new iteration of the program. The interesting thing is that since the original equilateral triangle can be drawn within a circle of a given diameter and area, the area of the resultant snowflake-like shape can never exceed the area of the original circle. The perimeter of the snowflake, on the other hand, can become infinite.

Alan Moore, num extenso diálogo com David Sim, explicando as razões pelas quais eu demoro escrevendo qualquer coisa mais complexa que um hai-kai.

Acho que não foi a intenção, mas larga lá. (RSF)