And while I'm on this kick...
Explaining people with (relatively) simple formulas and such, here's something I was telling Derek about a while back, meant to post it but couldn't remember what it was called. "Power laws", not Prime directive. That's Star Trek...
That graph on the right matches with unusual accuracy the following things:
-income distribution-population size of cities
-death rates to age (read right to left of course)
-animal metabolism to size
-light intensity with voltage
-Fractals (somehow)
-Stress and Plastic strain (some materials, like steel, harder as they are 'bent' (or stressed in their plastic ranges) try bending a paper clip and you'll notice this)
-Newton's Inverse-Square law of Gravity
Even distribution networks, from lungs to traffic systems. See Constructal Law
For an atheist like myself it's just boggling to see the universe adhere to something so rigidly. I guess if there is a god, he probably has a totally fractaled out beard that will trip you out in inverse proportion to the square of your distance from his kindly visage.
posted by keith at
11:37 AM
2 Comments:
Pretty neat, but some things are just bound to happen. Surely there would be 1000 times more other systems that don't fall within this dynamic.
I don't get what the factors would be in "population size of cities" population/geographic size?
Ah, number of cities with populations of certain sizes. So there's one Tokyo with 30million or whatever, then there are like two with 20 million, 5 with 15million, 10 with 10million and so on until you start getting hundreds of cities the size of Minneapolis at 500,000.
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