Goldilocks and the Three Bears

    Caption: Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

      ... the Little Bear piped: Somebody has been tumbling my bed, and here she is!
            At that, Silver-Hair woke in a fright, and jumped out of the window and ran away as fast as her legs could carry her, and never went near the Three Bears' snug little house again.

        ---The Three Bears (1837) by Robert Southey (1774--1843), updated by a later hand. This version is probably that of Joseph Cundall (1818-1895) who turned the old woman protagonist into a young girl one. The protagonist's name eventually got fixed as Goldilocks in the early 20th century (see Wikipedia: Goldilocks and the Three Bears: Origins).

    Goldilocks and the Three Bears gave rise to the Goldilocks principle: In a REPRESENTATVIVE statistical sample of a statistical population, there will be entities belonging to extremes and entities close to the average---which could be "just right."

    Among other things, see Rampino, M. R. & Caldiera, K. 1994, ARAA, 32, 83-114, The Goldilocks Problem: Climatic Evolution and Long-Term Habitability of Terrestrial Planets and Wikipedia: Future of the Earth.

    Credit/Permission: Leonard Leslie Brooke (1862--1940), 1900 (uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by User:Theornamentalist, 2013) / Public domain.
    Image link: Wikimedia Commons.
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