Econometrics & Statistics in Pills:

• Statistics & Photography: Econometrics is not my only interest. I am also (at least pretend to be) an amateur landscape photographer. But, in the end, it is always a matter of statistics. Did you know, for instance, that when taking astrophotography, you could get a noisy signal in your picture depending on how powerful your camera (specifically the sensor) is? What you, as a photographer, hope is that this noise is random (is a white noise, i.i.d. process with 0 mean) and, therefore, what astrophotographers usually do is to take, rather than one shot, multiple shots of the same landscape and then merge them. The idea is that if the noise is purely random, by averaging across multiple frames, it should (asymptotically) disappear. For instance, the photo on the left panel was obtained by merging 10 different frames.

• Granger Causality: Every time I fly back home, my parents and my brothers "complain" that, systematically, after I land, bad weather arrives. Is it by randomness (bad luck) or because my arrival truly causes a variation in the rainfall? I've always hoped (at least in my heart) that it is by chance that it happens. From an econometric point of view, my arrival is not causing bad weather (in the econometrics jargon, we would call this association between two - hopefully - random events a spurious correlation),  but my arrival Granger causes bad weather.

• Example of two stochastically independent events: me and physics. You could ask any of my high-school physics professors how I and physics have always been orthogonal.