The random selection of words by volunteers often resulted in themchoosing the same words with similar dates, and produced gaps in thequotation paragraphs, which Murray and his assistants had to fill by their ownmanual searching. This must have been like trying to find a needle in ahaystack. It was remarkable how successful Murray’s small team was at fillingthose gaps and finding earliest or latest quotations. Murray told thePhilological Society that this manual trawling for words had to be done forthe majority of words: ‘For more than five-sixths of the words we have tosearch out and find additional quotations in order to complete their historyand illustrate the senses; for every word we have to make a general search todiscover whether any earlier or later quotations, or quotations in other senses,exist.’

As I’d mentioned, the problem is not with the first printing, when our usual press run ranges from 7,000 to 15,000 copies, but with subsequent printings of a many of our titles. In many cases, a few years after a title’s initial publication, a three- to five-year supply can be as low as 500 copies. The cost to set up the book (called “make-ready” in the industry) is so high that the printing/binding cost per book is far more than most readers would be willing to pay. To “break even” on some of these titles, we’d have to charge $100 or more in bookstores, which would decrease sales even further. As it is, we subsidize those volumes with donations and with sales of other books.

What it means to be a member of this or that class is a complex, interpretative matter; but tracking how many times a person has been to the opera is not. You can count the latter, and (the bargain goes) facts about those numbers may illuminate facts about the deeper concepts. For example, counting opera-going might be used to measure how immigrants move up the social class ladder across generations. Crucially, operationalization is not definition. A good operationalization does not redefine the concept of interest (it does not say "to be a member of the Russian intelligentsia is just to have gone to the opera at least once"). Rather, it makes an argument for why the concept, as best understood, may lead to certain measurable consequences, and why those measurements might provide a signal of the underlying concept.

Signal relationships are (usually) symmetric: if knowledge of X tells you about Y, then knowledge of Y tells you about X.

Running this simulation over many time steps, Lilian Weng of OSoMe found that as agents' attention became increasingly limited, the propagation of memes came to reflect the power-law distribution of actual social media: the probability that a meme would be shared a given number of times was roughly an inverse power of that number. For example, the likelihood of a meme being shared three times was approximately nine times less than that of its being shared once.

Special Complexity Zoo Exhibit: Classes of Quantum States and Probability Distributions 24 classes and counting! A whole new phylum of the Complexity kingdom has recently been identified. This phylum consists of classes, not of problems or languages, but of quantum states and probability distributions. Well, actually, infinite families of states and distributions, one for each number of bits n. Admittedly, computer scientists have been talking about the complexity of sampling from probability distributions for years, but they haven't tended to organize those distributions into classes designated by inscrutable sequences of capital letters. This needs to change.