Dean BrooksDean Brooks is Canadian. He holds a B.A.Sc. in Engineering Physics, and has worked as a technical writer explaining complex subjects to busy people for three decades.

In the late 1990s he first came upon a remarkably simple set of curves hat can model how long a political dynasty (or a comic book series) will last, how fast a religion (or an epidemic) will spread, how many new stores WalMart or Burger King will open in the next decade, the growth of the human fetus, the distribution of competing species in an ecosystem, and countless other phenomena.

It turned out that these curves had already been observed and given dozens of names in different fields. But how could such simple patterns apply to such a fantastic diversity of phenomena? And why had no one else written about the similarities until now? The search for a unifying explanation led the author to a new view of basic probability, using multiple overlapping Bayesian reference frames and the maximum entropy principle.

Based on concepts from physicist Edwin Jaynes, and the mathematician George Spencer-Brown, Dean Brooks has produced a scientific and philosophical manifesto -- a radically new way of looking at the world. Read More Read Less