She did not tell anyone that she spent much of her time looking out at the Pacific from empty beaches, some of them narrow with coarse sand, though farther north many of the beaches were rocky, desolate in the falling dusk, when seagulls circled hungrily and waves deposited dead seaweed.

NEWYORKER: Alone

It is a short hop from the bow onto the coarse yellow sand, the start of a four-hour walk back to Marahau.

BBC: Hiking New Zealand��s smallest national park

Try to measure the area of a Frisbee disc with wooden blocks and the answer is pretty coarse, but do the same thing with 10 billion grains of sand and you can get pretty damn accurate.

FORBES: Computing Desire