fractalnavel

Tucking in the Friar

While stumbling along the dimly lit aisles of the cellar, you encounter a fat little man wearing a brown, hooded cloak. "Hey," you say, "are you lost? Do you need some help?"

The little man holds up a handful of grain. "This is grain," he says. "which any fool can eat, but for which the Lord intended a more divine means of consumption. Let us give praise to our maker and glory to his bounty by learning about... beer!" He says, swaying back and forth and almost falling over.

"I think you've learned enough about beer today," you say.

"Nonshense. I can contemplate the majesty of beer all day long! I'm a member of an ancient order, the Deep Fat Friars. I could table you under the... drink you table the... you... I..." The friar collapses on the ground and starts snoring. You cover him with a nearby blanket, grab one of his leftover beers, and continue on.

KoL

of course, knowing my perverse tendencies, you'll realize that this is much lighter in nature than the title would otherwise indicate.  if i were really writing about "the cruel face of addiction", it would have been a light-hearted title.

gotta tell ya, i'm dissappointed with this windows live writer thing - it uses "font" tags !  etc.  stupid shit.

oh, yeah, to the point:  i'm talking about KoL crap here.  what does it take to accumulate 100 different items, if the chance of their occurence is uniformly distributed ?  well, without getting into enabling MathML here, like i did in the .Text installation, see the chart to the right.  fuzzy, it's a bmp copy from mathematica.

it's essentially a logarithmic function.  it tells a sad story.  to get the last 5 items, for example, of a 100 unique item set , would take an additional 200 chances - !  more or less.  50% of one's effort is spent on 10% of the result.

odd - why does this sound familiar ?  you kow, the old 80-20 rule.  also, the distribution of wealth or other "privileged" position.  if the chances are all equal, what is the result ?

it begins to occur to me that evolution is a reactionto statistical reality.  well, of course.  but the programming is inherent to the numbers.  and so go the anti-entropic forces.

and all the armies thereof.