If big blackouts were just a random, unlucky confluence of many small failures, as grid planners and operators believed, a major grid collapse would occur only once in a thousand years or so, showing up as the slim
tail on a bell curve.
Not exact matches
And those sitting firmly
on the right
tail of the
bell curve know that everyone to their left are utterly and hopelessly stupid.
Imagine, say, a
bell - shaped
curve based
on the null hypothesis that climate change is not happening (and not having an impact
on increasing extreme weather events), and there is this really long
tail out to infinity; and supposing we get an off - the - charts category 7 hurricane in January, we still can not attribute it or its extra intensity or unusual seasonality to climate change, even if there is only a one in kazillion chance it might occur without climate change having an effect — that is, it is way out there in the very tiny
tail of this null hypothesis
curve that fades out into infinity — the
tail that says, afterall, anything's possible.
It seems that human survival now depends
on a struggle between the two
tails of the intelligence
bell curve.
Unfortunately, what we determined that the supposed «normal» distribution of weather data using long period data like 50 and 100 year thermometer measurements produced what is known as a FAT
TAIL distribution... Imagine the classical
bell curve sitting
on top of a rectangle laying
on its side.
In my experience as a family law lawyer, however, it has seemed to me that the
bell curve modeling the impact of legislation
on my clients has perhaps a higher standard of deviation than the norm, giving the
bell curve a greater population at the extremes and thus fatter
tails than suggested by the normal distribution; in other words, my impression is that quite a bit more than 5 % of separating couples experience an unfair or very unfair result from the application of family law legislation.
However, if you think of all possible deals, they probably follow a
bell shaped distribution
curve and this is probably in the
tail end of the
curve (
on the profitable side).