March 4, 2014

Moonrise Over Normal Bozeman, Montana 2014

The blizzard we had the other day formed this interesting snowdrift on the fence behind our neighbor’s satellite dish. Being the statistician that I am, it reminded me immediately of a normal probability distribution (a.k.a. Gaussian distribution or the proverbial “bell-shaped” curve). On closer inspection though, it’s not as symmetrical as it first looked. It’s actually skewed to the right, which would make it a better candidate for a log-normal distribution. (Not that anyone cares about that last point–I just added it to head off the couple of people I thought might actually call me on that point.)]]>