November 15, 2003

Zipf and the general theory of wrinkling

This enjoyable and informative article has no obvious connections to language, but the link to it at A.L.D. is entitled "Don't botox the universe", which at least provides a good example of a clearly denominal verb, as well as a clue about the world that the A.L.D. headline writer lives in :-).

A few years ago, when I was researching Zipf's Law and similar power-law phenomena for a lecture, I stumbled over the wonderful Chicago crumpling group's web site, where you can find things like the Universal Power Law in the Noise from a Crumpled Elastic Sheet. Music of the (crumpled mylar) spheres...

Posted by Mark Liberman at November 15, 2003 06:02 AM