Today’s Uncertainty Wednesday will be quite short as I am super swamped. Last week I showed some code and an initial graph for sample means of size 100 from a Cauchy distribution. Here is a plot (narrowed down to the -25 to +25 range again) for sample size 10:And here is one for sample size 1,000:Yup. They look essentially identical. As it turns out this is not an accident. The sample mean of the Cauchy distribution has itself a Cauchy distribution. And it has the same shape, independent of h...

In today’s Uncertainty Wednesday we are putting some of the ideas from the last few weeks together: we are looking at the behavior of the sample mean of a fat tailed distribution. To do this we will again use a bit of Python code. Unlike our first sample mean example where we looked at the roll of a die, we will need some help here to draw samples from a more complicated distribution. Thankfully the Python ecosystem has the wonderful SciPy libraries, which if you don’t know already you should...