if you were to make a graph of the number of towns by population, you wouldn’t see anything remotely like a bell curve. There would be way more towns smaller than 8,226 than larger. At the same time, the larger ones would be way bigger than the average. This kind of pattern typifies what are called “power-law distributions.” These are also known as “scale-free distributions” because they characterize quantities that can plausibly range over many scales:
