I once heard, from a potentially unreliable source, an interesting story about this. When countries border each other and also share a coast there is a issue of how to decide who owns the water. The simplest way is to find the point where the two countries and the coast meet. Then from there draw a line along the longitude. However, that is problematic, because there are countries like Libya and Egypt where their boarder is along the latitude.

During those times the British were very colonial, and one of their methods of keeping power was to cause the colonised people to fight amongst themselves (as can still be seen with the Indians and Pakistanis, Israelis and Palestinians). Well, they invented a method to split the coast by first finding the angle of tangent on the point of the boarder between the countries and the sea. Take 90 degrees of the tangent, and that is the sea boarder.

While this looks good upon first glance, due to the coastline paradox, you can always find a different tangent line. That then could be the cause of conflict between countries as they try to determine the sea boarder.

If anyone knows if there is any truth to the story, I would be interested in hearing.