Bozos

In a comment to the previous post, Rich talks about bozos.  I’ll have to think about the bozo phenomenon a little bit, but it seems eminently mathematizable.  In particular it seems the concepts of homophily and preferential attachment might come into play.

On a totally separate note, I went to a talk today in Yorktown that mentioned the distribution, which is a mixture of a delta function at zero and an exponential distribution.  I didn’t know that there was a name for this distribution, but as noted by Whitt in a paper on queuing theory:

Because the special service-time distribution is an extremal distribution among the class of hyperexponential  (, mixtures of two exponentials) distributions, we denote this class by .

I’ve seen this distribution before as the capacity-achieving input distribution for an additive exponential noise channel.  In a paper with Mitya and Jesper, this distributions is also the predicted distribution of synaptic volumes in the mammalian brain.  I’ve been thinking about both of these facts recently, so watch out for that.

And of course, I’ll soon be moving to Yorktown, so watch out for a bozo like me cruising the hall.