Sublime

“Benford’s Law doesn’t just apply to galactic distances,” she says, turning left, and then right. “It applies to everything measurable, assuming there is variation. Let me frame this in twenty-first century numbers for you. You could take the population of towns and cities worldwide, remove everything but the first digit, and the curve would fit Be

This “prey-switching” behavior is common to generalist predators and turns out to be ecologically stabilizing for the whole food web. As generalists turn their attention to different prey species, the species that were getting depleted get a chance to recover, reducing the risk of extinction.

The prefactor, Y0(t), is independent of scale, N(t)

In this sense, cities are an outstanding example of complex adaptive systems: collections of individual constituents (people, in this case) that interact in myriad ways, usually mediated by some sort of network.

probabilities attach themselves to the descriptions of events and not to events themselves.

rabbit. So you can think of the economy as a series of shocks moving to an equilibrium, shock, moving to an equilibrium.

The value (“fitness”) of a given combination of building blocks often cannot be predicted by a summing up of values assigned to the component blocks. This nonlinearity (commonly called epistasis in genetics) leads to co-adapted sets of blocks (alleles) that serve to bias sampling and add additional layers to the hierarchy.