Zipf’s law is just a specific example of a power law. Other power laws exist for lots of different things, just with different exponents.

the jury seems out about cities. This paper suggests they don’t follow a other distributions: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0264275124002592 , but this one suggests that they do: https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2013/12/on-city-size-distribution_g17a2442/5k3tt100wf7j-en.pdf - specifically it suggests they DO follow Zipf’s law, within a given country. Inter-country differences are likely due to different developmental trajectories over time.

Looks like a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law

Are there open bugs/feature requests about it?

You can type the hashtag in the URL on the web, and follow it from there.

E.g. https://pixelfed.social/i/web/hashtag/urbanSketching

I wonder if they would be interested in implementing ActivityPub?

Biol and maths. Then climate science. Now working in climate risk, and it turns out everything at that point is basically sociology anyway, because it all comes down to belief in predictions, uncettainty, world views, subjective risk tolerance and decision making…

There is no way to find text about anything without various biases and values embedded in it. You just need to approach reading with a critical lens. Obviously more critical in some domains than others.

Oh yeah, that’ll do it 😂

What discipline are you in? Something stemmy, or more social science?

Awesome! Ping me when you’re done, if you like. Happy to chat more.

I agree heuristics are a good approach, but I’m not conviced maths people are the ones to do it - at least not alone. There is too much messy sociology at the edges of the problem to ensure good problem specification. Some interdisciplinary approach could kill it though. If you get through that intro article, there’s a short article in the same journal that gives a neat intro the Critical Systems Heuristics, which seems like an excellent wrapper around this kind of approach.

Thanks, I saw that flohmakrt link in another comment too. Excellent!

Does that yrpri site work well?

That’s true of lots of non-federated sites. Anything with an API…

Oooh, awesome, thanks for this link!

A version of this focussed on a gift economy/trading platform (e.g. like freecycle, or the buy nothing groups on facebook) would also be cool.

Also person-to-person buying/selling, rather than business-to-person would be nice to have, like craigslist, reverb.com, gumtree, or used items on ebay.

If this was focused on a craigslist/gumtree style of selling, where most of the actual trade is done off-site/in-person with cash or bank transfers, it would completely side-step the payment processor problem.

Also:

• gift economy/trading platform (e.g. like freecycle)
• buying/selling (e.g. like ebay)
• local community/bioregionalism networks (e.g. what nextdoor should be)

These seem kind of ideal for a federated network, IMO.

I actually think Lemmy would be a pretty decent format for something stackoverflow like - just maybe needs to UI tweaks to minimise the visual space that replies take up, plus maybe answered post flair

At first I was like “why?”, and then I saw the last word and I was like “Arrr” 🏴‍☠️

What kind of classes did it come up in?

Ah right. I think that’s what I did, but I think the UI automatically made it a link? Anyway, thanks.

Appreciate your domain, BTW. Gross.

Yes! They are both forms of systems thinking, for sure.

I guess the intermediate discipline would be systems engineering? But one of the problems with systems thinking is that it’s extremely diverse, and there’s a lot of similarly-named fields that aren’t quite the same thing. I posted about DSRP, which is an attempt to universalise the fundamental concepts of all of those fields, from science and engineering to sociology and art.

There’s a pretty decent broad overview of systems thinking (aka complexity theory, the study of complex adaptive systems) in the wikipedia page linked in the sidebar - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_thinking

I’d say it’s more of a way-of-thinking than anything (so I guess philosophy?), kind of a counterpart to reductionism. In practice, it applies (and has been applied) to basically any field, definitely including physics - early work was very physics focused, but later on the field expanded to include economics and other social science questions. There are models that do use maths/computation (especially some of the earlier approaches), but there’s also a lot of qualitative work associated with it as well.

So I guess the answer to all your questions is “yes”? :)

The first two posts on the community are good deeper introductions to the field.

Did that link in the body not work on your instance?