Waco, indeed… [my body, your choice]

Just read a terrible story in The New York Time Magazine about a pregnant Texan teenager with absentee parents being denied abortion (in the Roe vs. Wade past era) by a Waco judge on the basis that “she was not mature enough to make that decision”… Leading to the irrational conclusion that she was deemed to be mature enough to raise children since she was to continue her pregnancy till delivery. Unsurprisingly, the story does not end up well.

“The question of “maturity” is open to wildly different interpretations, particularly when assessed by a judge who answers to voters (…)The maturity test was not about a teenager’s ability to weigh the benefits and risks of her medical choice.”

 

the latest Significance: Astrostats, black swans, and pregnant drivers [and zombies]

Reading Significance is always an enjoyable moment, when I can find time to skim through the articles (before my wife gets hold of it!). This time, I lost my copy between my office and home, and borrowed it from Tom Nichols at Warwick with four mornings to read it during breakfast. This December issue is definitely interesting, as it contains several introduction articles on astro- and cosmo-statistics! One thing I had not noticed before is how a large fraction of the papers is written by authors of books, giving a quick entry or interview about their book. For instance, I found out that Roberto Trotta had written a general public book called the Edge of the Sky (All You Need to Know About the All-There-Is) which exposes the fundamentals of cosmology through the 1000 most common words in the English Language.. So Universe is replaced with All-There-Is! I can understand and to some extent applaud the intention, but it nonetheless makes for a painful read, judging from the excerpt, when researcher and telescope are not part of the accepted vocabulary. Reading the corresponding article in Significance let me a bit bemused at the reason provided for the existence of a multiverse, i.e., of multiple replicas of our universe, all with different conditions: multiplying the universes makes our more likely, while it sounds almost impossible on its own! This sounds like a very frequentist argument… and I am not even certain it would convince a frequentist. The other articles in this special astrostatistics section were of a more statistical nature, from estimating the number of galaxies to the chances of a big asteroid impact. Even though I found the graphical representation of the meteorite impacts in the past century because of the impact drawing in the background. However, when I checked the link to Carlo Zapponi’s website, I found the picture was a still of a neat animation of meteorites falling since the first report.