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By eltonioni
#1906419
I'm a bit baffled but will admit to only having skimmed the precis. Cities, or any human settlement, don't rise and fall through entropy, quite the opposite. They are meticulously planned (micro level) to take advantage of any number of resources.

Grids (macro level) are irrelevant really but they seem to be giving weighting to that (see the formulae) in spite of recognising the obvious evidence that some of the worlds most successful and longstanding cities have anything but, as per the graphic. No doubt that London, Barcelona and Rome will be thriving long after Las Vegas returns to dust.

There seems to be a bias for seeking order, or perhaps I have completely missed the point or simply don't understand entropy - does anyone really? :D

But my biggest question is just what and who is this paper actually for! :scratch: Come on @stevelup help me out here, I feel a bit thick.
By TopCat
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1906421
I wonder why Charlotte (presumably the one in North Carolina) is so different from most of the other cities in the USA?

And why Mogadishu is so similar.
Last edited by TopCat on Mon Apr 04, 2022 11:15 am, edited 1 time in total.
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By lobstaboy
#1906422
There's a definite feeling of 'so what?' here too.
And use of the word entropy in this context is complete bo99ocks - its use here seems like an attempt to make the paper have a scientific credibility that's completely bogus.
Pretty and funthough :)
By TopCat
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1906423
lobstaboy wrote:And use of the word entropy in this context is complete bo99ocks

I think that's a bit harsh.

It's obviously not referring to thermodynamic entropy, but it's not unreasonable to apply the Boltzmann equation (S = k lnW) to other things if it turns out to give a model of their behaviour. I say 'k', but obviously it would be a different constant.

Whether it actually does have any predictive value I don't know - I've only skim-read the abstract.
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By lobstaboy
#1906438
Yeah well if you take an ancient city, London would do, and plot it in polar coordinates instead of rectilinear ones as this study does, you'd find it was very ordered - it's like a spiders web with radial spokes. It grew that way. It's organic.
By TopCat
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1906442
lobstaboy wrote:Yeah well if you take an ancient city, London would do, and plot it in polar coordinates instead of rectilinear ones as this study does, you'd find it was very ordered - it's like a spiders web with radial spokes. It grew that way. It's organic.

It's a good point... it would be interesting to see if doing it that way gave a different value for orderedness. Though they do measure a lot of things other than grid conformity.

Sadly, I'm not going to live long enough for doing that to work its way far enough up my to-do list.

Actually, Charlotte is very griddy right in the middle, and quite radial outside.

<waves arms furiously> I wonder if that accounts for its difference from the other US cities.
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By eltonioni
#1906449
Bear in mind that London, like most (all?) larger UK/European cities, is an agglomeration of smaller settlements that have grown together, not a single habitation that grew outwards.

Everything on the bottom row is an old city, except Charlotte and Sau Paulo (I assume SP isn't a simple continuation of a pre-European settlement). Charlotte looks like an outlier which I suppose makes the study look even weirder.
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By lobstaboy
#1906455
I'll confess that papers like this do annoy me. I was plagued by them during my working life - they describe something in a neat way but they don't explain anything. That doesn't help you to improve what you're doing because they lack the ability to predict what will happen if you change parameters outside the range studied.
Hey ho...
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By VRB_20kt
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1906456
…as opposed to many American cities which are very much ordered on grid fashion. Hence the degree of randomness exhibited by London is substantially higher than similarly sized U.S. counterparts.
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By eltonioni
#1906459
... and another thing! Why do coastal cities get four nodes? :scratch:
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By FlightDek
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1906474
eltonioni wrote:... and another thing! Why do coastal cities get four nodes? :scratch:


Perhaps because there will be a tendency to have roads either parallel to, or perpendicular to the coast?