A headline appears on my screen: “Ancient and Modern People Followed Same Mathematical Rule To Build Cities”, on Slashdot.
Ooh, I get to break out my “holy power law, Batman” image again! Yippee!
Ctrl+F “power law” – no hits. That’s odd.
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Log-log! Who’s there? Not a power law!
This is a story about a particularly awful bit of science reporting. It’s taken me a while to sort out what’s going on. First I thought it was bad maths, then I thought it was bad science, and now I think it might be bad journalism. But it might be none, all, some, or a superset of those. I didn’t really want to write this post because crowing about other people’s apparent failures isn’t great, but we took a team decision to cover it because of entertainment reasons. ((Unlike the BBC, we are not funded in a unique way, so we have no public service remit. I think that’s right.)) I’m going to make an attempt to tell you what I’ve found, a little bit of what I think, and then we can rejoin Team Positive Mental Attitude when it’s all over.