Since today, 19 Sept is talk like a pirate day, I would like to relate a story about stats and pirates. While driving, my wife was in the back seat with our young child asked me how to draw a pirate hat. Since I was driving I could not show her how to do it, so I had to figure out a way to describe it that both of us could understand. My reply, “Draw a normal distribution curve.”

She looked at me kind of weird, then drew it, half laughing to her self, and it worked. A simple pirate hat kind of looks like a normal distribution. My child was happy, my wife and I were kind of giggling our selves, because some how I was able to bring stats into a child’s drawing. We both were amused. Below is the R code and very crude picture.

x<-rnorm(n=10000, mean=1, sd=.25)
plot(density(x), type='l', main='', ylab='', xlab='')