A long-tailed black swan visits

A quick visual inspection of the visit stats for this blog reveals a rather startling anomaly: in general a typical day will see a couple of hundred visits, but when I first checked on Tuesday morning the figure was well over 2000 and ended the day close to 4000. I was, to say the least, astonished. There was also highly anomalous twitter and facebook traffic, and it rapidly became clear that all this excitement originated from a post on Reddit, which in turn originated from this, about the extraordinary sand art of Andrew Clemens. This became linked to a very recent episode of Antiques Roadshowbroadcast from Des Moines, Iowa, where the State Historical Society hosts a collection of Clemens’ work and kindly gave me permission to reproduce images in the book. This all led to a cascade – indeed, an avalanche – of links and the unprecedented, unpredictable, and unique event on this blog.

The segment on the TV program is well-worth watching – for the moment, at least, it’s available on the New Hampshire Public Television site – the discussion of Clemens begins at around 22 minutes.

What happened has, when I think about it, always been within the universe of possibleevents, but well outside the historic metrics and the limited world of expectations – hence this post title. When I wrote the “Sandpile world” post last week, little did I think that this would be dramatically illustrated by imminent events on the blog itself!

[By the way, Sandglass will shortly be travelling to distant parts – a couple of posts have been pre-scheduled for the coming week, and I hope to be reporting “live” soon thereafter.] SIGNATURE

Comments

Brian Romans (2011-02-18):

That’s always fun when an order-of-magnitude kick in visits/views happens. And can be fun to try and figure out why. I once had a simple post showing an image get on StumbleUpon, which led to several thousand hits in one day. I consider it a win if just 2 or 3 of those thousands of visitors actually come back again someday. Safe travels.

Richard Bready (2011-03-20):

This is a wonderful example of how determinate activity can (briefly) overturn a power law. For some reason that graph made me think of Zipf’s law (I used to work as a vocabulary monger), and a quick search found this: http://web.me.com/kristofferrypdal/Themes_Site/Scale_invariance.html
Reading backwards from your latest, I keep focusing on sorting, the intervention that turns grains to images, assembles museum collections, drives traffic above its usual Boltzmann flow. It’s not a bad functional definition of life, as Prigogine of course pointed out long since.

Sandglass (2011-03-20):

And then of course there are all the application of granular physics to life in general - jamming, both grains and traffic, and so on. It’s all just too entertaining!
And thanks for reminding me of Zipf’s law…

Originally published at: https://throughthesandglass.typepad.com/through_the_sandglass/2011/02/a-long-tailed-black-swan-visits.html