Take a 9 inch long metal spike.

Sharpen one edge to a fine point.

Add some plastic fins to the other end.

You've just invented the most ill-advised and dangerous backyard

pastime I'm aware of. That's right, Jarts. Jarts! A game where dad would stand at one end and 60 feet away the kids would stand next to a hula hoop on the ground.

And dad and his friends would hurl the jart underhand in a giant arc, hopefully landing inside the

hula hoop, hopefully not impaling one of the kids.

Hey, it's Ben Skoda, and this is a special archived episode of a Kimbo. I don't want to talk about jarts, not really.

I want to talk about what happens when the jarts land.

Many of the jarts, particularly if you're playing with the will land

inside the hula hoop,

clustered around the target, clustered around the target.

But some, some will land short, some will go far, some will go left, some

will go right. You can't have a center without having edges.

And it turns out if enough people play enough charts,

you will see a normal distribution.

A distribution of the charts landing, 80% or so near the center, 20% or so around the edges.

It turns out this normal distribution shows up in lots of places. If we go to the bookstore

and count the length of 400 different randomly chosen novels for adults will find the very same

distribution. For every novel that's 800 pages long we'll find one that's 100 pages

long and most of them will be clustered around the center.

If I line up 300 kids in gym class, we will find that many of them cluster around the same height, and some are taller than the others, and some are shorter.

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