OK, returns are dwindling. I think I’ve blended the splotches out of the cranial branches. If I keep going I’m going to end up chasing my shadows away. Not that I’m in a rush to start the OSL and potentially fuck everything up, but he doesn’t do anybody any good sitting on the shelf. First, peer review – not going to get any better if I don’t get feedback.
The deeper question, though, is not about whether Zipfian distributions are “really there”—but rather why it is so many observations graph to Zipf’s characteristic logarithmic slope of negative one. We know that occurrences of Zipf’s law almost always involve distributions across orders of magnitude in size and over broad ranges of frequencies, but the law also suggests something beyond just those characteristics. Empirical observations of Zipf’s law are important because these observations almost always point to the existence of some latent variable structure that is yet to be discovered.
Howard V Hendrix, “Zipf’s Lottery and Big Rocks from Space”, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, May/June 2024.