@whuber Thank you very much for pointing out the now obvious flaw in the plotting on my post today. It made a huge difference! I had always assumed that the asymmetry was due to plotting "imperfections", but it ended up diminishing the illustration of the point. I hope you didn't mind my asking you to check on the code - at the time I wasn't sure I was going to be able to fix it, and I figured it was best to capture your attention while the issue was recent. Best wishes, and thank you!

I see Frank Harrell has a blog ... fharrell.com

Thanks for mentioning that @Glen_b. I like Frank's work but I didn't know about his blog.

Only been going a very short time

Yay

38.5 hours of self-studying statistics got me there.

So does Xi'an - xianblog.wordpress.com - for anyone who hasn't seen it yet.

I wish I understood something from this comment

Am I just grumpy or is question quality declining? stats.stackexchange.com/questions/256527/… and stats.stackexchange.com/questions/256495/technique-and-model and stats.stackexchange.com/questions/256453/… seem to indicate that today is a bad day for question quality -- is it part of a trend?

@Sycorax average question quality has been declining for a long while. Those are typical low-quality questions, but we get more of them as Stackexchange becomes more popular (it shows up in a lot of google searches now for example, which brings in a lot of new people every day)

@CowperKettle An actually correct answer to that question you post above is "It's impossible to tell from the information given".

There's no basis there to justify using a normal distribution

The mere fact that the sample mean is calculated on a sample of size 25 is certainly not enough.

No doubt the text has made a false claim somewhere, or you wouldn't have been able to pick the answer it thought was correct

@CowperKettle Well, I found Michael's comment confusing too. Hopefully fcop's following comment made more sense to you

Yes, it made more sense. I'll be translating some pharmaceutical stuff for several days probably, I hope some statistics stays in my head. O_O At least today I read some and did some simple problems.

@Sycorax It's you. :-) I've been growing steadily grumpier for several years, too... .

Seriously, though, the number of closed questions as a proportion of the total has been rising exponentially for a long time. The number of closed questions has increased 48% per year for over six years, while the number of questions asked has increased only 33% per year. During the last three years the rates have been 45% and 25%, respectively.

That means that in another 7.5 years, all questions will be closed!

@whuber Well, at least then the mods will get some well-deserved rest (because we can just script to auto-close all questions)