"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."