Poetry Fishbowl Update
Mar. 25th, 2026 04:14 pm"Become for Us a Highway"
"A Generous Impulse"
"A Darkness in the Sky"
…and other applications of non-linear dynamics. A press release from Northwestern University — "Bell-bottoms today, miniskirts tomorrow: Math reveals fashion's 20-year cycle":

Fashion insiders and beauty magazines have long cited the "20-year-rule"—the idea that clothing trends often resurface every two decades. According to Northwestern University scientists, that observation isn't just anecdotal. It's a mathematical reality.
In a new study, the Northwestern team developed a new mathematical model showing that fashion trends tend to cycle roughly every 20 years. By analyzing roughly 37,000 images of women's clothing spanning from 1869 to today, the team found that styles rise in popularity, fall out of favor and then eventually experience renewal. Along with supporting common perceptions about the life cycles of fads, the researchers say these results could help explain how new ideas spread in society.
The study's lead author, Emma Zajdela, will present these findings on Tuesday, March 17, at the American Physical Society (APS) Global Physics Summit in Denver. Her talk, "Back in Fashion: Modeling the Cyclical Dynamics of Trends," is part of the session "Statistical Physics of Networks and Complex Society Systems."
Many people have experienced firsthand the idea that "fashion comes back," from bell-bottom jeans to mini-skirts. Historically, a lack of quantitative data posed a barrier to explicit mathematical study of this system; however, newly digitized historical records now make such work possible. We constructed a new database quantifying tens of thousands of women's dresses from 1869 to present day. Our analysis indicates that fashion is cyclical and, remarkably, in line with common knowledge in the fashion industry, this cycle is approximately 20 years long. We developed a mathematical model to understand and predict the evolution of these trends inspired by a continuous-time version of bounded confidence interval models for opinion dynamics. This model includes the idea of "optimal distinctiveness," which has been shown to be present in other dynamics of human innovation and time-delay dynamics. This conceptually simple mechanistic model performs well at replicating the dynamics of the trends observed. Large-scale social phenomena such as fashion trends are of intrinsic interest themselves, but a better understanding of this fashion system will contribute to elucidating the interplay of creativity, differentiation, conformity, and diffusion of ideas in broader human systems.
In fashion (as in music, birdsong, and language), maximal appeal comes from the introduction of modest innovation into familiar patterns.
Zajdela's 2023 PhD dissertation — "Mathematical modeling of complex systems with applications to scientific collaboration at conferences and chimera states for coupled oscillators":
Complex systems exhibit the remarkable property that the behavior of the collective is greater than the sum of its parts. Mathematical modeling validated with data provides understanding of the underlying mechanisms that drive these emergent behaviors. Here, we present models of two types of complex systems using an applied dynamical systems framework: a social system and a system of coupled oscillators. The first model predicts how scientific collaborations form at in-person and virtual conferences. The second analyzes coupled oscillators with amplitude and proves the existence and stability of a new class of chimera states, the “phase chimera.”
And an application to conference dynamics — Zajdela, Emma R., Kimberly Huynh, Andrew L. Feig, Richard J. Wiener, and Daniel M. Abrams. "Face-to-face or face-to-screen: A quantitative comparison of conferences modalities." PNAS nexus 4, no. 1 (2025):
The COVID-19 pandemic forced a societal shift from in-person to virtual activities, including scientific conferences. As society navigates a “new normal,” the question arises as to the advantages and disadvantages of these alternative modalities. We introduce two new comprehensive datasets enabling direct comparison between virtual and in-person conferences: the first, from a series of nine small conferences, encompasses over 12,000 pairs of potential scientific collaborators across five virtual and four in-person meetings on a range of scientific topics; the expressed goal of these conferences is to create novel collaborations. The second dataset, from a series of three large physics conferences, encompasses >250,000 possible pairs of scientific collaborators. Our study provides quantitative insight into benefits and drawbacks of virtual and in-person conferences for team formation, community building, and engagement. We demonstrate the causal role of formal interaction on team formation across both modalities. Our findings show that formal interaction impacted team formation significantly more in virtual settings, while informal interaction played a larger role at in-person conferences as compared with virtual. We show that a nonlinear memory model for predicting team formation based on interaction outperforms seven alternative models. The model suggests that prior knowledge and interaction time contribute to catalyzing collaborations in both settings. Our results underscore the critical responsibility of organizers for optimizing professional interactions, whether virtual or in-person.

SlasHeaven, a Spanish-language slash fanfiction and fanart archive, is being imported to the Archive of Our Own (AO3).
In this post:
SlasHeaven was founded on May 19, 2004, by the programmer and main promoter of the archive, Ayesha, and two collaborators, Maryam and Aura. This began after a massive deletion of fanfiction slash written in Spanish at a popular platform and with the conviction that we needed a place where we could publish in our language without restrictions. And so this website was born, a place dedicated exclusively to slash fanfiction written in Spanish.
SlasHeaven’s archivist made the decision to move the archive to AO3 after web configuration issues made it untenable to continue maintaining the archive themselves.
The purpose of the Open Doors Committee’s Online Archive Rescue Project is to assist moderators of archives to incorporate the fanworks from those archives into the Archive of Our Own. Open Doors works with moderators to import their archives when the moderators lack the funds, time, or other resources to continue to maintain their archives independently. It is extremely important to Open Doors that we work in collaboration with moderators who want to import their archives and that we fully credit creators, giving them as much control as possible over their fanworks. Open Doors will be working with Maryam and Aura to import SlasHeaven into a separate, searchable collection on the Archive of Our Own. As part of preserving the archive in its entirety, any fanart currently hosted by SlasHeaven will be hosted on the OTW's servers, and embedded in their own AO3 work pages.
We will begin importing works from SlasHeaven to AO3 after March. However, the import may not take place for several months or even years, depending on the size and complexity of the archive. Creators are always welcome to import their own works and add them to the collection in the meantime.
We will send an import notification to the email address we have for each creator. We'll do our best to check for an existing copy of any works before importing. If we find a copy already on AO3, we will add it to the collection instead of importing it. All works archived on behalf of a creator will include their name in the byline or the summary of the work.
All imported works will be set to be viewable only by logged-in AO3 users. Once you claim your works, you can make them publicly-viewable if you choose. After 30 days, all unclaimed imported works will be made visible to all visitors.
Please contact Open Doors with your SlasHeaven pseud(s) and email address(es), if:
Please include the name of the archive in the subject heading of your email. If you no longer have access to the email account associated with your SlasHeaven account, please contact Open Doors and we'll help you out. (If you've posted the works elsewhere, or have an easy way to verify that they're yours, that's great; if not, we will work with the SlasHeaven mods to confirm your claims.)
Please see the Open Doors Website for instructions on:
If you have further questions, visit the Open Doors FAQ, or contact the Open Doors committee.
We'd also love it if fans could help us preserve the story of SlasHeaven on Fanlore. If you're new to wiki editing, no worries! Check out the new visitor portal, or ask the Fanlore Gardeners for tips.
We're excited to be able to help preserve SlasHeaven!
- The Open Doors team and Maryam and Aura
Commenting on this post will be disabled in 14 days, on April 8, 2026. If you have any questions, concerns, or comments regarding this import after that date, please contact Open Doors.
What I read
Finished High Stakes. I previously noted a pattern in Dick Francis of the conditional rather than utter win.
Antonia Hodgson, The Raven Scholar (Eternal Path Trilogy, #1) (2025) - think I picked this up as a Kobo deal, because people were mentioning it? I realise that I am no longer in the habit of reading fat multi-volume fantasies of this ilk. I found it all a bit much, really.
Then did some nibbling (what do Tiggers eat?) and then settled into a re-read of Barbara Hambly, The Nubian's Curse, not one of the top Benjamin Januarys perhaps but still pretty good. Possibly when I am in that sort of phase I should just go Hambly/Haddam/Paretsky/Cross?
Currently Reading
Dorothy Richardson, Honeycomb (Pilgrimage, #3) (1917) for online reading group.
Up next
Today's Kobo Deal was the latest Jonathan Kellerman Alex Delaware thriller, Jigsaw, so probably that.
Then possibly more Hambly.
At some point must read Adania Shibli, Minor Detail (2017) for the in-person reading group.
