Today is the official publication date of Probably Overthinking It! You can get a 30% discount if you order from the publisher and use the code UCPNEW. You can also order from Amazon or, if you want to support independent bookstores, from Bookshop.org.

I celebrated launch day by giving a talk at PyData Global 2023 called “Extremes, outliers, and GOATs: On life in a lognormal world“. In my opinion, it went well! Here’s the abstract:

“The fastest runners are much faster than we expect from a Gaussian distribution, and the best chess players are much better. In almost every field of human endeavor, there are outliers who stand out even among the most talented people in the world. Where do they come from?

“In this talk, I present as possible explanations two data-generating processes that yield lognormal distributions, and show that these models describe many real-world scenarios in natural and social sciences, engineering, and business. And I suggest methods — using SciPy tools — for identifying these distributions, estimating their parameters, and generating predictions.”

• My slides are available here
• The Jupyter notebook with the examples from Chapter 4 is here
• And the notebook with the additional analysis for the talk is here

When the video is available, I will post it here.