silly little thing.

On Ravelry, Vicky Gorton has a few patterns for amigurumi of statistical distributions.

Yes, you read that right - 3-D representations of probability distributions. She has one for the uniform distribution, one of Student's t, one of skewed (both right and left), and one of the Normal distribution.

Which is the one I made first.

So, this is "Norm:"



This amuses me a lot. Not just because it's a toy of a normal distribution, but because I can imagine the other distributions, when this one walks in the room, saying"NOOOOORRRMMMM!" like on "Cheers."

 

The original pattern called for 4-ply (fingering weight). I scaled it up to worsted (using a 4 mm hook rather than 2.5). I was hoping it would come out larger - I was wanting a Norm that would be sofa pillow sized, but as you can see, this one is about 3" tall. Maybe if I tried a superbulky, I don't know.

I want to make Stu (The Student's t) next. Partly because it's what I will be teaching next, but there's also a pretty interesting story behind it - the distribution was originally figured out by W. S. Gosset, who worked at the Guinness brewery. He figured it out (though apparently someone else had worked on something similar but called it a different name) and wanted to publish. Guinness didn't want him to, apparently because they feared some kind of industrial espionage - that if their competitors found out they were using the quality-control methods they were, they would lose their edge. So Gosset published, but used the pseudonym "Student." Which is what the t-distribution, at least for single-sample situations, has been called since.