Tag Archives: allometry
The new and large fly the farthest
British Airways and Air France mutually retired the Concorde supersonic jet in 2003. Both companies cited rising maintenance costs as being the reason, which in turn were compounded by falling demand after the Paris crash in 2000 and a general downturn in civil aviation after 9/11. Now, American and French scientists have found that Concorde was in fact an allometric outlier that stood out design-wise at the cost of its feasibility and, presumably, its maintenance. Continue reading
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Tagged aerodynamics, allometry, aviation, commercial airplanes, Concorde, constructal laws, correlation, mechanical engineering
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How big is your language?
This blog post first appeared, as written by me, on The Copernican science blog on December 20, 2012. — It all starts with Zipf’s law. Ever heard of it? It’s a devious little thing, especially when you apply it to … Continue reading
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Tagged allometry, cultural evolution, Heaps-Herdan law, statistical linguistics, Zipf's law
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