"Now, I relish the schadenfreude-laden flavors of a mega-disaster scenario as much as the next misanthropic, science-fiction-loving geek, especially when it's paired with some "The fools! Can't they follow simple math?" on the side. Truly, I do. But squeezing that savory, juicy DOOM out of (for instance) the distribution of solar flares relies on the shape of the tail, i.e., whether it's a pure power law or not. The weak support, in the data, for such powers law means you don't really have empirical evidence for your scenarios, and in some cases what evidence there is tells against them. It's a free country, so you can go on telling those stories, but don't pretend that they owe more to confronting hard truths than to literary traditions."

"In my next several blog posts I want to talk about scaling, especially about the very recent controversies surrounding claims of power-law scaling of particular phenomena [...] All this is going to require some forays into the wild and unruly land of statistics and data analysis. My goal in the next series of posts is to make sense of the following quite important papers in complex systems, which, taken together, form a kind of mini-course on scaling. Understanding ideas from these papers is essential in one’s education as a complex-systems scientist or informed “consumer” of this field."