Sign in with Facebook
“Finally, power-law distributions have “thick tails,” meaning that they have a nonnegligible number of extreme values. You will never meet a 20-foot man, or see a car driving down the freeway at 500 miles per hour. But you could conceivably come across a city of 14 million, or a book that was on the bestseller list for 10 years, or a moon crater big enough to see from the earth with the naked eye—or a war that killed 55 million people.”
― The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
― The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
“The London Blitz. Feller recounts that during the Blitz in World War II, Londoners noticed that a few sections of the city were hit by German V-2 rockets many times, while others were not hit at all. They were convinced that the rockets were targeting particular kinds of neighborhoods. But when statisticians divided a map of London into small squares and counted the bomb strikes, they found that the strikes followed the distribution of a Poisson process—the bombs, in other words, were falling at random.”
― The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
― The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
“The military historian John Keegan notes that by the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE, the chariot allowed nomadic armies to rain death on the civilizations they invaded. “Circling at a distance of 100 or 200 yards from the herds of unarmored foot soldiers, a chariot crew—one to drive, one to shoot—might have transfixed six men a minute. Ten minutes’ work by ten chariots would cause 500 casualties or more, a Battle of the Somme–like toll among the small armies of the period.”14”
― The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
― The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
“Does it never strike you as puzzling that it is wicked to kill one person, but glorious to kill ten thousand?”
― The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
― The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
“In theory, Mars could oscillate, causing a war on 3 percent of his throws, then shifting to causing a war on 6 percent, and then going back again. In practice, it isn’t easy to distinguish cycles in a nonstationary Poisson process from illusory clusters in a stationary one. A few clusters could fool the eye into thinking that the whole system waxes and wanes (as in the so-called business cycle, which is really a sequence of unpredictable lurches in economic activity rather than a genuine cycle with a constant period).”
― The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
― The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Jack’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Jack’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
1,714 books
|
48 friends
889 books
|
72 friends
767 books
|
106 friends
359 books
|
44 friends
830 books
|
45 friends
389 books
|
106 friends
63 books
|
16 friends
158 books
|
13 friends
More friends…
Polls voted on by Jack
Lists liked by Jack
