{"id":42940,"date":"2011-08-03T23:57:45","date_gmt":"2011-08-04T07:57:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=13374"},"modified":"2011-08-03T23:57:45","modified_gmt":"2011-08-04T07:57:45","slug":"the-fall-of-empires-as-an-exponential-distribution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2011\/08\/03\/the-fall-of-empires-as-an-exponential-distribution\/","title":{"rendered":"The fall of empires as an exponential distribution"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/files\/2011\/08\/expo.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-13377\" title=\"expo\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/files\/2011\/08\/expo.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"296\" height=\"268\" \/><\/a>I was alerted to Samuel&#8217;s Arbesman&#8217;s new paper, <a href=\"http:\/\/dx.doi.org\/10.1080\/01615440.2011.577733\">The Life-Spans of Empires<\/a>, by the fact that he pointed to his research  <a href=\"http:\/\/arbesman.net\/blog\/2011\/08\/02\/the-life-spans-of-empires\/\">on his weblog<\/a>.  Interestingly I&#8217;m not the only one who was interested, as after I pointed to it on my link round up a few people asked if they could get a copy of the paper (yes, I almost always send papers if I have access). Luckily it&#8217;s a nicely elegant piece of work, basically quantifying what we&#8217;ve already probably known qualitatively. There isn&#8217;t that great of a value-add to quantification as such, <strong>but with a mathematical understanding of a topic one can engage in an algebra of mental manipulations so as to construct models with which one can project other facts.<\/strong> Quantitative information is often an excellent way to generate &#8220;free information&#8221; from theoretical models. The figure above is the primary result of the paper. Basically Arbesman took a data set which was laying around which measured the lengths of various empires (N = 41), and showed that the rise and fall of these political entities tends to follow an <a>exponential distribution<\/a>: e\u2212\u03bbt . &#8230;<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/GeneExpressionBlog\/~4\/xjB9Wcpnvbo\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was alerted to Samuel&#8217;s Arbesman&#8217;s new paper, The Life-Spans of Empires, by the fact that he pointed to his research  on his weblog.  Interestingly I&#8217;m not the only one who was interested, as after I pointed to it on my link round u&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,25,22,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42940","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthroplogy","category-cliodynamics","category-geography","category-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42940"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42940\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42973,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42940\/revisions\/42973"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}