bridge sampling [jatp]

bye, sempé…

Tierras Centro Americanas [journal of the NYC weekend]

Upon my arrival at JFK, Queens, Andrew took me to have unbelievable tortillas in this Guatemaltec restaurant, soft and yummy, almost like pancakes! Along with great food altogether. We also had a pleasant stroll walking through Queens’ lively Jamaica district. Including coming upon a just extinguished fire in a row of shops! On the opposite, I did not see much of New Brunswick, apart from walking by the Harvest Moon brewery where I got a beer (and a tee-shirt) on my earlier visit there.

Read Truthwitch, another disappointment in the series (of recent books), as the universe building could have been great (despite being heavily inspired from Western Europe geography and culture, and in particular of Venezia. Again, I presume I was missing the YA label when I first picked this book! Scenario is rather terrible, full of last second rescues, new and convenient forms of magical powers, while interactions about characters are artificial and predictable, definitely not recommended. (And there are five books in the series!)

Watched The Silent Sea a short Korean TV serie taking place mostly in a Korean infected base on the Moon. While trying to solve the water crisis on a drying Earth (looking red from the Moon). The ending is quite disappointing while the original idea was most appealing. The science (fiction) behind the story is however terrible. (E.g., never use guns in space! And why would astronauts rely on cheap, handheld, lamplights to explore dark tunnels?! And how can you hide stealthy visits to a Moon basis from Earth?! &tc.)

Bill’s 80th birthday

David Cox (1924-2022)

It is with much sadness that I heard from Oxford yesterday night that David Cox had passed away. Hither goes a giant of the field, whose contributions to theoretical and methodological statistics are enormous and whose impact on society is truly exceptional. He was the first recipient of the International Prize in Statistics in 2016 (aka the “Nobel of Statistics”) among many awards and a Fellow of the Royal Society among many other recognitions. He was also the editor of Biometrika for 25 years (!) and was still submitting papers to the journal a few month ago. Statistical Science published a conversation between Nancy Reid and him that tells a lot about the man and his amazing modesty. While I had met him in 1989, when he was visiting Cornell University as a distinguished visitor (and when I drove him to the house of Anne and George Casella for dinner once), then again in the 1990s when he came on a two-day visit to CREST,  we only really had a significant conversation in 2011 (!), when David and I attended the colloquium in honour of Mike Titterington in Glasgow and he proved to be most interested in the ABC algorithm. He published a connected paper in Biometrika the year after, with Christiana Katsonaki. We met a few more times later, always in Oxford, to again discuss ABC. In each occasion, he was incredibly kind and considerate.