✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

Andart II – Part of Anders' Exoself

aleph.se · 1,412 words · saved by 1 readers

What are the weirdest probability distributions I have encountered? Probably the fractal synaptic distribution. There is no shortage of probability distributions: over any measurable space you can define some function that sums to 1, and you have a probability distribution. Since the underlying space can be integers, rational numbers, real numbers, complex numbers, vectors, tensors, computer programs, or whatever, and the set of functions tends to be big (the power set of the underlying space) there is a lot of stuff out there. Lists of probability distributions involve a lot of named ones. But for every somewhat recognized distribution there are even more obscure ones. In normal life I tend to encounter the usual distributions: uniform, Bernouilli, Beta, Gaussians, lognormal, exponential, Weibull (because of survival curves), Erlang (because of sums of exponentials), and a lot of power-laws because I am interested in extreme things. The first “weird” distribution I encountered was the

Avogadro’s number — the count of atoms in a mole — is about . The number of stars in the observable universe is, depending on whose galaxy survey you trust, somewhere between and . These are, to within the squint of an order of magnitude, the same number . Sean Carroll asked if this is a coincidence . There are other big number coincidences that actually do have a deep reason. Mammals get roughly heartbeats per lifetime (due to allometric scaling). Stars live for roughly a light-crossing time of their radius multiplied by (see below; this is due to Carter). Carbon-12 has a 7.65 MeV excit

Explore this link on the map →

related reading