Snow Nose

The Washington, DC area was spared from the worst of the big snow storm this week. At home we got only about 4 inches of snow. The video is of the window that our cat frequents. She walks back and forth along the narrow window sill and touches her nose on the window panes. This is likely cage behavior of her indoor life. She leaves behind a grease spot on the panes with each nose touch. The marks are faint and hard to see, with fewer marks on the left-most pane, many more on the center pane, and fewer on the right-most pane. This is a pattern we have seen often. If this was one complete pane of glass, rather than three individual panes, we could see the continuous frequency distribution of her nose touches, likely following a bell-shaped frequency distribution curve. As it is, we see this continuous distribution divided up into three disjoint regions. The individual touches have been placed into the three bins of a histogram of this continuous distribution of nose touches. Overall, if she touched the panes n times, the counts of the touches that fall on the three panes would have a multinomial distribution, with a higher probability of touching in the middle and lower probabilities on either side.