EGAD
or, (de)mythologizing the fetish of placewherein our unlikely hero composes a series of
empirical geo-anthrospatial dispatches, aimed at establishing just where
he is, and perhaps even why it matters
I ran across this New Yorker article from a while back: when attacking an unknown data set, Gaussian versus power law is the sort of basic distinction that turns out to make all the difference in the world when applied to social policy, and turns the usual intuition of social services on its head. (Because apparently they only discuss the former distribution in social science class, I guess.)