More on Empires

One clarification on this post: The model we referenced is based on exponential distribution that says an empire’s life (time spent) does not effect the probability of its continued existence. Notice tho the model only takes into consideration one kind of variable – time. If you stand on a street corner and record arrival times of all the cars passing that corner, and prepare an histogram for these arrival times, you would see an exponential distribution. But, if you followed that one car, tried to understand it in terms of variables other than just time, than maybe you could predict its complete journey, i.e. when it would pass your street corner, when or if it would get stuck in dead-end, crash, etc. IOW better models can provide better results. The article we referenced was interesting, sure, it used a concept from industrial engineering and it went one step beyond taking an average, which is truly the simplest thing you can do. But the model is just that – one step beyond a simple average.