[extropy-chat] the structure of randomness

[Damien Broderick]

At 11:19 AM 12/30/2005 -0800, Avant wrote:

> > can be deceiving, and the distributions do look
> > roughly bell-shaped.
>
>They do look roughly bell-shaped.

Not the point. The claim is that the internal structure of the bell curve 
is non-monotonic. It's rather like a square sawtooth pushed upward by a 
normal distribution. The truly interesting aspect is that the teeth fall on 
top of each other, pretty much, in different sets of data.

What baffles me is that this work was completed nearly 20 years ago, but 
nothing seems to have come of it, even though access to excellent 
computation is now cheap and readily available. A friend of mine who is a 
solid-state physics professor tells me she arranged a fractal analysis of 
an ongoing data collection project, designed to test Shnoll's idea, was 
being done by a PhD student about five years ago, but the student 
apparently dropped out before completing the doctorate. The world is full 
of frustrations.

Damien Broderick