734
Moon Dust
(mander.xyz)
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
What do the bar represent in 3d space?
What do they represent in 3d space?!? (aggressiveduck.jpg)
Gaussian distributions.
Not every error bar represents a Gaussian, if for no other reason that most error bars aren't symmetric.
The error bars for small sample size relative to population size are Gaussian.
Error due to a non-representative sample can have a variety of shapes, but their distribution might also be unknown. We do frequently, almost implicitly, assume unknown distributions to be Gaussian, but we should recognize that's not necessarily a true fact about the universe.