Statistics Help?

[swestrup]

I've been wondering what sort of statistical distribution governs things like the ranking of countries by population. I've spend a bunch of hours trying to figure out if you get a well-known distribution curve by plotting these values on a bar graph, but so far I've not had any luck.

And naturally all of the statistical mathematics I've found on the subject assume far more knowledge of the subject than I have, and uses non-standard mathematical terminology to boot (statistics historically uses its own bizarre set of mathematical terms which don't mean the same as their counterparts in the rest of math.)

Does anyone on my f-list know enough to lend a hand?  What I'm basically trying to do here is to figure out how to generate this sort of table for a random world given a set population and a number of other (to be determined) input parameters.

Comments

[swestrup]

My problem seems to be that I always run out of population long before I have anywhere near a reasonable number of countries. Still, I think I'm making progress.