When disasters aren’t “normal”: power-law, nature’s curveball - Blog No. 136
We humans tend to expect nature to behave in predictable, gentle ways. We expect most phenomena — heights of people, sizes of apples on trees, even daily rainfall — to cluster around an average. That’s the world of the normal distribution : bell-curves where extremes are vanishingly rare. But, as I argued in a previous post, many things in nature defy that normality. Wild bursts of energy. Rare catastrophes. Mega-events. This is the realm of the power law . As described in that post, when you plot things like income distribution (via the logic first sketched by Vilfredo Pareto ) — or the size of world wars, or the scale of disasters — you often don’t get a neat bell-curve. Instead you get a long “fat tail,” where rare, enormous events are far more likely than a normal distribution would predict . On a log–log plot, the data forms a straight line: frequency decays as a power of magnitude. In that post I explained how, in simple probabilistic games (like repeated coin tosses or the in...
