I got just what I deserved for my birthday; a bag of wet straw.
My family and I are dutifully keeping it wet. We mist it every few hours. We keep it in a big bag so it doesn’t dry out.
Fungus is blooming out the sides of my bag of wet straw.
Soon, dinner.
As an advocate for the power-law distribution one frustration is how difficult it is to visualize. You can use examples like Mark Twain’s delightful description of evolution: “Man has been here 32,000 years. That it took a hundred million years to prepare the world for him is proof that that is what it was done for. I suppose it is. I dunno. If the Eiffel tower were now representing the world’s age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle-knob at its summit would represent man’s share of that age; & anybody would perceive that that skin was what the tower was built for. I reckon they would. I dunno.” I.e. those at the top of the power-law wealth distribution it makes no sense to bend over and pick up a thousand dollar bill.
We generally assume that things are distributed uniformly. The rain, for example, falls reasonably uniformly overy my back yard. These systems with power-law distributions aren’t like that. They are more like some freak storm passing by and dropping all it’s rain into a bucket in my yard.
One of the classic examples of a power-law distribution is the size of cities and towns. Stop and think what that means. It means that every time you look at a geographic map of which displays some human activity your being horribly mislead. Because humans are spread out evenly like the rain in my backyard. Instead they are all concentrated in a handful of buckets. In New York, Paris, Hong Kong, etc. etc. large regions of the city have from a quarter to a million people per square mile. It is as hard to think about that as it is to think about men who’s income is so high they ought not reach down and pick up a thousand dollars.
It’s no help trying to address this problem by telling outlandish stories like the ones above. The listener’s mind just locks up and switches over into denial. For example, if I say that social networks are power-law distributed what should you immediately think? You should expect to find people who’s place in the social network is like the lower east side of Manhatten; who are like the skim of paint on top of the Eiffel tower. Can you think about that?
If people can not think about these distributions what is one to do? If people can not get into their head any reasonable model of rich the rich are, or how dense real cities are, or how long evolution takes how can we expect to work thru the consequences of these facts?
Visualization of data is one possiblity. One possible technique is the cartograph. For example here’s a nice short article by the Mark Newman that tries to give a more accurate visualization of the last election.
A drawing like that is just barely accessible. Notice that how you can see San Fransisco bay on that map. Notice the scale of Long Island.
That map was drawn using technique outlined in this paper. That paper includes some wonderful examples of how hard this kind of visualization is. For example here are two maps of the 2000 election. The more distorted, and hence somewhat more accurate, map reflects a more accurate model of were the population lives. New York, New Jersy, Massachusetts, and Pennsilvania all become distorted to show where they have urban centers. But even maps like this can’t quite capture how dense the population really is in places like Manhattan.
That paper also has a very nice example of how important it is to get this right. In this example we look at cancer cases. In the first drawing we can see that if your looking to find somebody with cancer you’d best go to NYC. But that is an entirely different from saying that NYC is a place where your likely to get cancer. In the second drawing the incidence of cancer looks almost entirely independent of population density; just the slightest sign that Love Canal near Buffalo and the poor districts of upper manhatten and the south Bronx might be problem areas.
But again second map certainly doesn’t look at all like New York State. In fact it’s proably a good rule of thumb that when visualizing data about human society if the drawing bears any resemblance to something in the physical world your probably about to be mislead.
This is the problem. How can we get people to think constructively about systems that are inherently hard to think about?
The drawing above shows three thousand species arranged around the perimeter. The arcs in the interior are the result of pattern matching on the rRNA of those species, and show an estimate of what evolved from what. So at about 5Pm on the clock we have the Archaea which were discovered only recently hot springs, and other exceptionally hostile environments. Running counter clockwise from there we have the Bacteria, the Protoists, the Plants. At 12 pm we have an assortment of things between plants and animals. Then the Animals (including a mark reading ‘You are here” for we homo spaiens). Finally the Fungi. You can down load this chart as a PDF off this page. It really makes your PDF viewer work hard!
This mushroom emerged up the street, here in New England, between the sidewalk and the street. On the roots of an apparently healthy maple. I have no idea what it is; that’s quite a solid mass at the base. Smells great. It’s slightly, but very slightly orange. The tops are dry.
Update: I checked again. It actually is on the remains of a very large street tree that probably fell down 5 or more years ago. The roots of the adjacent trees probably haven’t invaded the space yet.
The official 5am forecast discussion for hurricane Ivan contains this quote: “If I did not have a previous forecast to maintain some continuity with. I would have shifted the track even further to the left.”
Professionalism assures that these guys are striving to output the very best forecast they possibly can. I assume they know that you get better forecasts if you don’t start from scratch every day. Better may mean more effective, or it might mean more accurate; I wonder.
But do realize how broad the distribution of predictions really is at this point. They may say they are predicting land fall near the border between Alabama and Mississippi; but really they aren’t. That statement is just the highly condensed version of a set of predictions. This enumerates their real prediction. For each location along the gulf coast it has their current probability that the hurricane will make landfall close to it. None of them rise above 16%. At one end of the coast line the chance that Key West get’s it is 9%; while at the other end all the way over in in Galveston Texas it’s 6%. New Orleans is 14% only 2% lower than the center of their forecast landfall probably curve.
That means that shifting the center a bit left or right would only change the threat level for these locations by one or two percentage points.
Will Pate asks and Tim Oren responds. A long fun Just So story. Maybe he doesn’t answer the question but at least he illuminates it. “So why do shareholders have limited liablity?”
The nugget in his story is that limiting share holder liability lowers the risk for shareholders of investing their capital.
Sounds like moral hazard to me. I.e. it’s an invitation to investors to engage in morally suspect behaviors because they know they can avoid the consequences of those behaviors.
Tim’s story is fun because he’s entirely honest that this benefit for investors came about because it was a benefit that King’s enjoyed. When kings take risks that bear foul fruit the peasants smile cheerfully and eat the fruit. When power began to devolve from the king into the hands of the wealthy the limited liability corporation was a way to get the same benefit for the corporation’s investors.
There are many models of what a corporation is. For example some folks think of a corporation as a knot of contracts. But clearly one model of the corporation is that it’s a license to investors take a risk and dodge the full liabilities there in. A chance to pretend to be king for a few days.
Of course risk taking is necessary part of economic growth; so it’s in societies best interests to make choices of where and how much risk to license.
To hear Tim tell it America – pause for a moment of silent respect – would not exist if not for this devolution of kingly powers unto the investor class. It’s a story that takes my breath away.
Actually, to be a bit more accurate Will’s question was “What is the best reasoning behind why shareholders have limited liability for a corporation’s environmental and social costs? …”
In my noodle that collides with Tim story of early english colonialism’s corporate roots. I find myself remembering things. after the european-asian germs wiped out most of the native populations. That the European earth worm spread across the continent and wiped out much of the ecology. The slave trade. The cod. The elm. The beech.
Nothing is simple.
When we get the remains of a hurricane here in Boston the air sometimes smells of Sargasso Sea or some other tropical ocean. I wonder, after moving over the Caymen Islands will Ivan bring us the smell off-shore money? Maybe it will suck up some of that money and rain it down on Jamaica and Cuba!
Meanwhile in Florida the garden walls are falling and the rich find “They can see each other. That’s going to drive them crazy.” In a world of garden walls the landscape gardners are first responders.
I’ve been looking for years. A beehive! 
An example in nature of a two sided network effect! It provides brokage, exchange, or agency between two classes (pistil and stamen). It draws off a tax (honey) for the maintainance of the hub (hive). Since these kinds of hubs become more valuable as more and more particpants rondevous around the standards set by the hub I think we can assume that the flowers of the client population evolve to fit the exchange standards made manifest in the hub. I.e. they evolve to interface well with bees of a certain size et. al. of the dominate bee population. Overtime that should drive other polinators out of buisness.
My household is going on vacation! As I exit my current job I’ll be drawing down all my remaining vacation, so it only seemed polite to share it with the rest of the family.
We have a preference for city vacations. Shopping around for air fair we discovered we could fly to Seatle for around $230 round trip from Boston. So it’s off to Vancouver.
I’ve been involved with the Liberty Alliance Project over the last few years. Liberty is a industrial standards alliance and one way such organizations attract sophisticated labor and keep the lower classes out is by having the meetings in lots of exotic locations all around the planet. I hate that, but I really liked Vancouver the time we went there. Good food!
I’m reading a very nice book about Vancouver written by a Canadian humorest. It reports that while some people call Vancouver the “Evergreen Playground” since it has only rarely fallen below freezing there. Others refer to it as the “Everpiss Grayground” since they get a hell of a lot of rain. He assures me that July is the driest month; unless you plan you vacation visit in July. So we are going late in August. The mountain range that rises next to Vancouver catchs all that rain. The closer to the mountain the more rain. So one side of Vancouver gets about a 160 inches a year while the otherside only get a small fraction of that. I wonder why none of the pictures of Vancouver on the net seem to show clouds or rolling banks of fog.
We will only be there for a week, but send in your suggestions for fun stuff to do. We still need a place to stay as well.
Bloom on our Bragmansia:
These blooms are about ten inches in length. I assume these are some kind of tropical weed; the certainly grow like a weed, fast. Blooms on plants that haven’t undergone lots of manipulation by human breeders are typically shaped to fit exactly the creature that pollenates them. It’s a little sobering to image the huge creature that climbs into these blooms. A bat maybe? … Oh I do love the internet. Let me introduce the Bumblebee Bat which, sadly, may well be extinct.