Started reading John McPhee’s tetralogue on geology, Annals of the Former World. Here is a memorable sampling of the thick sediments of geological language (p. 33):

As years went by, such verbal deposits would thicken. Someone developed enough effrontery to call a piece of our earth an epieugeosyncline. There were those who said interfluve when they meant between two streams, and a perfectly good word like mesopotamian would do. A cactolith, according to the American Geological Institute’s Glossary of Geology and Related Sciences, was a “quasi-horizontal chonolith composed of anastomosing ductoliths, whose distal ends curl like a harpolith, thin like a sphenolith, or bulge discordantly like an akmolith or ethmolith.” The same class of people who called one rock serpentine called another jacupirangite. Clinoptilolite, eclogite, migmatite, tincalconite, szaibelyite, pumpellyite. Meyerhofferite. The same class of people who called one rock paracelsian called another despujolsite. Metakirchheimerite, phlogopite, ktzenbuckelite, mboziite, noselite, neighborite, samsonite, pigeonite, muskoxite, pabstite, aenigmatite. Joesmithite.

He could have included turbidite, tsunamite, tempestite, unifite, homogenite, debrite, hyperpycnite, and contourite as well. As if this wasn’t enough, there are sedimentary geologists who suggest introducing new ‘ites’ (PDF link) like gravite and densite.

Bullshite.

Power laws are gathering quite some attention again, thanks to a few new papers (e.g., this one and this one) by Albert-László Barabási and his coworkers, published in Nature. Cosma Shalizi and others disagree: once again, just because some dataset on a log-log plot looks like you could easily fit a straight line to it, it is not safe to conclude that it is a power-law distribution.

One of the papers looks at the letter-writing habits of Darwin and Einstein, and concludes that the response times have a power-law distribution with an exponent of 3/2. The other “reports that the probability distribution of time intervals between consecutive emails sent by a single user and time delays fro eamil replies follow a power law”. Shalizi and Stouffer et al. claim that these are in fact lognormal distributions.

I am wondering if you could ever get a paper published in Nature that looks at some dataset, shows that it has normal or lognormal distribution, draws some overarching and universal conclusions from that, and… and that’s it.

Or, to translate it to the much more mundane language of geologists, that only applies to dirt, not to Einstein’s letters: there is no interesting story in showing that bed thicknesses or sedimentary body sizes have a lognormal distribution, but if it’s a power law, suddenly you can talk about the “scale-independent physics of turbidite deposition” and the importance of non-equilibrium thermodynamics in the geometries of deltas and everything else under the sun.

That’s why power laws are great.

Here is the reason why one should think twice about buying or building a house on a barrier island that is in hurricane country. This USGS website also shows convincingly that Hurricane Rita should not be misunderestimated 🙂 just because it barely touched the Houston-Galveston area. It did plenty of damage where the right-front qaudrant made landfall – things would have been very different around here if Rita made landfall at Galveston or a bit to the West of Galveston.

And these images of a barrier island that migrates landward as hurricanes go over it make you wonder how much of the geologic record of barrier islands (and beaches in general) actually consist of fairweather deposits. Everything seems to be moving and redepositing during these storms.