[WebHubbleTelescope]

Here:
http://mobjectivist.blogspot.com/2008/1 ... rbole.html

I have posts from the last two weeks showing a method to evaluate Field Size distributions:
http://mobjectivist.blogspot.com/2008/1 ... field.html

[jerry_mcmanus]

Not sure if this is relevant, and I didn't get very far into your posts before my eyes glazed over (MEGO) so you may have already discussed this, but I found this reference in the book "Environment, Power, and Society for The Twenty First Century: The Hierarchy of Energy" by Howard T. Odum:

Rich deposits of minerals historically were found scattered over the earth's crust as if a creator were scattering jewels. Each discovery produced a moment of economic bonanza, a boom town, and then a bust. Many publications have dealt with the typical pattern of mineral distribution and concentration of many deposits of low concentration and few deposits of high concentration. Economic geologists found that the distribution of mineral concentrations was highly skewed, a pattern often fit by a lognormal distribution equation.

Odum included this footnote:

There are many papers on the skewed distribution of materials with concentration which have included many theories (Ahrens 1954; Miller and Goldberg 1955; Wetzel 1984) Kriging is a statistical method of representing patchy distribution of mineral concentrations.

Kriging? A quick lookup on everyone's favorite online encyclopedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriging

Yum, lot's more MEGO.

I'm certainly no expert, but it seems to me someone should do a lognormal distribution for world oil discovery. Surely we have enough samples by now?

Cheers,
Jerry

[WebHubbleTelescope]

Jerry,
Those are good references, thanks.

I haven't studied the log-normal in depth because that is a nail in search of a hammer. What I have read though is that the log-normal has less heavy tails, which makes it not as suitable for field size distribution, which exhibits more of a 1/size dependence.