On the ubiquity of power law behavior
The signature of power law behavior (short things are more probable than long ones in a predictable way) is often used as a benchmark (for instance, of a system poised at criticality).
In that pursuit, many remind us that we need to be mindful that all sorts of (not very remarkable). things can have that signature. One of the most colorful illustrations I've read is this one here:
Some Effects of Intermittent Silence
George A. Miller
1957
Imagine that a monkey hits the keys of a typewriter at random, subject only to these constraints: (1) he must hit the space bar with a probability of p() and all the other keys with a probability of p(L) = 1 - P() and (2) he must never hit the space bar twice.
Word length will fall off with power law behavior.
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Hopfield 1982 and his accompanying historical paper that explains the context: "Now what?". That doesn't exist anymore on his webpage (I've reached out to get that fixed; will email it to you).
nostr:npub1skvad2l2wrxgdmt6yxk9kt2rjhw5tucjzhf54pktfq2gg0qhgwyqdlaky3 What I meant by "pseudoscientific" (including the scare quotes) is that the model/hypothesis Kepler initially conceived, and never in fact fully relinquished, was a completely false description of the solar system, based on an epiphany he had that the relative distances between the orbits were explained by a celestial arrangement of the five platonic solids. The sun was indeed at the centre of it though! 🙂
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Got it! And now that I do (again, sorry to be dense): can you spell out the lesson? My sense is that it’s something like: don’t be afraid to think outside the box; even if you’re wrong, => progress!
I dipped a toe into Bluesky for a bit and I'm not impressed. A lot of quirky trivia but not so much interaction happening there. To each their own! I have a small pile of invites; if you want to see what it's like, PM me and I'll be happy to pass them along.
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Yes - that was the book I was thinking of. Congrats! Looking forward to checking it out.
And great to see you push forward on the Cognitive Atlas (https://www.cognitiveatlas.org/). Cognitive ontologies and how we think about what it is that the brain and mind do is such a fundamental topic; it's one that I didn't appreciate for far too long. (For anyone curious to know more, this is a great talk from Russ on the topic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHbcTnv8Zik).
On my end, I'm still very much thinking and researching memory. I'm also working to finish a book focused on diagnosing why it is that we've been learning so much about the brain and mind but new treatments for brain/mind dysfunction have emerged so sporadically. It's been fascinating and thrilling to dive into the history and philosophy of science as well as arms of research well outside my own.
Yet evolution has found thousands of functional proteins, some marvels of design.
Evolution is easy.
2/2
#proteinevolution
#blaugust2023
https://sfmatheson.blogspot.com/2023/08/the-library-of-possible-proteins-is.html
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What a great blog! I love the Borges story. And taking it from there to launch into the Big Question: How could this ever work? Really great.