Tag Archives: Probabilities

The Probability of Roman Emperors

In my previous post I discussed how I came to be interested in probabilities, after having spent about a decade (which refers to a period of time of 10 years, and is not in any way associated with decadence… O_O (12’20”) ) making use of tools that assumed or did some calculations with probabilities. I mentioned it because it was interesting for me to realise what had made me care about it and seek out to learn more and because it might be interesting for other people. Who knows, may be you are struggling to find the motivation or interest in the topic necessary to really dig down into it, like I did. In that case may be going through those same things will help you find the focus you need.

If you’ve been one of the 150 or so people who make daily visits to my other website, Place du Luxembourg, you’ll also  have heard me go on about the Roman Empire. You’ll have noticed that I posted something about the evolution of the Roman Republic towards the Empire. You may have also read in other posts that I have not been writing because I’m trying to figure out some things about the fall of the Roman Empire. I’m still working (sporadically) on a final draft of that post, which after this much time cannot possibly measure up to my expectations, but anyway, I digress…

Nevertheless, I came across some interesting facts about autocrats and their regime. As it turns out it’s a pretty accidental lifestyle, characterised by an exponential distribution. But more importantly: Why and to what effect?

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Becoming interested in Probabilities

Recently, someone taught me some interesting concepts about pdfs and CDFs, namely regarding how to match the data to different theoretical distributions and test whether they are a match. This was interesting because while I’ve been quite familiar with those aspects of statistics, I’ve never really spent much time studying or researching them or through them. It’s always been in the background, informing the Confidence Tests and I remember looking at it in more detail when I did the pre-sessional statistics course prior to starting my masters, but really, it’s never something I spent much time thinking about.

That was until recently, when probabilities kind of .crawled their way to the forefront of my interest. As it turns out 5 things conspired to bring this about:

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