Profound

In one of the more profound articles that I've read recently, Nature published an article called "The Scaling Laws of Human Travel". What the authors (some badass physicists) studied was data from Where's George, the website that tracks american dollar bills, and assumed that money is a good indication of how people move (i.e the movement of cash implies that people have moved it). They modeled over a million pieces of data and came across some interesting conclusions. Namely the movement of people is much like a Random Walk, rather than the dispersion equation (the traditional way of thinking about it), amongst other things. This type of work, they hope, will give better insight into how pandemics travel and spread.

Aside from that, it's just very cool to know how people move through space in a large way. It's also just an incredibly creative way of using existing data sets.

*SOME* people dismiss the whole study, saying that data from wheresgeorge.com does not constitute a reasonable sample of people. To that, I say "psh".

Here's a news article from my brethren at the CBC.