Sunday, February 12, 2006
As regulars know my favorite distribution is power-law.
I think there is a lot of system design that would play out a lot better if people admitted that one or another key statistic about the load on the system will be power-law distributed. It troubles me to read about system designs that implicitly assume that [...]
Because it is proported to be about emotions I have been looking forward to getting my hands on the new book out of the Harvard Negotiation community (Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as you negotiate by Roger Fisher and Daniel Shapiro). Most books about emotions written by rational intellectual people are crap, so it’s a [...]
Thursday, October 27, 2005
Here is a another really delightful metaphor for the power-law dialectic between the elite and the long-tail.
In his essay on Tolstoy’s philosophy of history, Berlin starts with the fragment of the Greek poet Archilochus, “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” The conventional interpretation of this proverb is that the [...]
Saturday, October 1, 2005
Recently I assembled a bridge in between my interest in business models and my interest in the wealth distribution. Business models span some space of actors, coordinating their actions, driving actions with motivations of all kinds. If we rope in other institutions (church, state, professions for example) we need to reframe these as [...]
Wednesday, September 7, 2005
Cities are a geographic solution to the matching problem. Want to find a spouse, a model train caboose, a slide rule, a bar were they play music but not too loud, huitlacoche? At the same time cities aggregate webs of links that last over time. These networks of links sustain the urban [...]
Thursday, September 1, 2005
Most excellent article in Slate about New Orleans.
…The river system’s inexorable downstream current swept cotton, grain, sugar, and an array of other commodities to New Orleans’ door. Because of the region’s geography and topography, many 19th-century observers believed that God—working through nature, His favorite medium—would see to it that anyone shrewd enough to build and [...]
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
In the southwestern united states they warn you about flash floods in the canyons. Storms dump a few inches of water at someplace upstream and this water is then aggregated into a giant pulse of water that sweeps down thru the canyon your standing in, killing you. The sky is clear and there [...]
In growing markets new buyers lack information to select the best vendor, the one that fits their needs best. In this absence of information they grasp at straws; other measures which they can understand. Proxies for quality. The simplest model for why you get highly skew’d distributions, like those seen in market [...]
Paul Ewald’s book is a rant against conventional wisdom. It opens with a flat out denial: parasites and diseases do not tend to evolve toward more benign relationships with their hosts. The conventional wisdom is based a series of just so stories, an optomism that would do Pangloss proud and a [...]
Imagine the plight of the poor bacterium. It want’s to be a big player, but it’s just one of a huge number of bacterium and it’s tough climbing up the rankings. First off it needs to get past that huge barrier to entry, the stomach. Very occationally it manages that. But [...]
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