Log–log (base 10) comparison of DC, WWW, CF, and FF data (symbols) with PLR models (solid lines) (for β = 0, 0.9, 0.9, 1.85, or α = 1/β = ∞, 1.1,1.1, 0.054, respectively) and the SOC FF model (α = 0.15, dashed). Reference lines of α = 0.5, 1 (dashed) are included. The cumulative distributions of frequencies (l ≥ li) vs. li describe the areas burned in the largest 4,284 fires from 1986 to 1995 on all of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Lands (FF) (17), the >10,000 largest California brushfires from 1878 to 1999 (CF) (18), 130,000 web file transfers at Boston University during 1994 and 1995 (WWW) (19), and code words from DC. The size units [1,000 km2 (FF and CF), megabytes (WWW), and bytes (DC)] and the logarithmic decimation of the data are chosen for visualization.