Last Uncertainty Wednesday I introduced a definition of climate as the probability distribution over weather states. That post ended with a question about how historically observed statistics relate to this distribution. I am in Vienna Austria for a conference and the temperature yesterday got up to 70 degrees (Fahrenheit). Intellicast shows historic average high temperature for September 27 to be 65 degrees (unfortunately not saying how many years of data are averaged which is something I wi...

Last Uncertainty Wednesday I introduced a definition of climate as the probability distribution over weather states. That post ended with a question about how historically observed statistics relate to this distribution. I am in Vienna Austria for a conference and the temperature yesterday got up to 70 degrees (Fahrenheit). Intellicast shows historic average high temperature for September 27 to be 65 degrees (unfortunately not saying how many years of data are averaged which is something I wi...

So last Uncertainty Wednesday we encountered a random variable that does not have an expected value. Now if you read that post you might ask, was this just an artificially constructed example or do random variables like that actually occur? Well the example I gave was an extreme form of a power law, which are distributions increasingly found in the economy as we transition to a digital world. Due to network effects, the winning company in a space has many times the size of the runner-up and t...

So last Uncertainty Wednesday we encountered a random variable that does not have an expected value. Now if you read that post you might ask, was this just an artificially constructed example or do random variables like that actually occur? Well the example I gave was an extreme form of a power law, which are distributions increasingly found in the economy as we transition to a digital world. Due to network effects, the winning company in a space has many times the size of the runner-up and t...