jj > Recent Status Updates

Dearest Clarence: "Nevertheless, his mind was in a whirl, the only thought in it that could possibly be called coherent being a wild regret that he had ever been misguided enough to believe in any statement made by his brother-in-law Clarence."

“The dirty swine at his age.” HAHA

Wodehouse-like characters, international political intrigue, impossible romps and obvious red herrings, did I mention ridiculous characters? Biscuits in the night, such random infatuations and that marriage proposal. What is happening in this story. This is hilarious.

This is the oddest, most chaotic Christie I’ve read. Not “subtle” at all.

“Where have you been vegetating” 😂

“Send it to him”

“Don’t be afraid”

Other than wrongly saying Buddhism and Hinduism don't have gods and defining them as basically "spirituality" to mean nature and some supposedly inherent moral compass for "good" (which, honestly, was super annoying to see), but nevertheless it's an interesting plot so far.

Beautiful: "There appears to be a member of the gardening staff of Blandings Castle who has a partiality for the “Bonny Bonny Banks of Loch Lomond”, and he whistles and sings it outside the Duke’s window, with the result that the latter has for some time been lying in wait for him with a basket of eggs."

Wodehouse's strength: ringing out every shred and sliver absurdity and hilarity from a scene/situation, often at the expense of one of the characters

"Horace watched him with a dazed eye as he dived with boyish animation into a studded shirt. The grey head, popping out a moment later at shirt’s end, gave him a renewed sense of shock, so intensely Ickenhamian was it in every respect."

How absolutely hilarious. Easily becoming one of my top 3 fave Wodehouse novels. Uncle Fred is unhinged and so very fun.

‘Very possibly. I can see now why that girl broke off the engagement. She must have realized that he had got this — whatever it was you said, and decided it wasn’t good enough. No girl wants a potty husband, though it’s dashed hard not to get one nowadays.

Separate but tangentially-related thoughts:
- this is now dubber the "Summer I Discovered Bayesianism"
and
- I am enjoying myself immensely

Oh dear, Chivers is quite convincing in giving evidence of his main theses (ie I am becoming convinced): "It meant that Turing and his team had to use priors—to assume that some combinations of letters were more likely than others. So the three-letter sequence E-I-N, ein, German for “a” or “one,” would be more likely—he reasoned—than the sequence J-X-Q. Words like “WIND” or “CONVOY” would be more likely than “ITCH”..

When I first heard about the "stats wars" I laughed it off as silly. Yo there was blood drawn: "Fisher, who called Bayes’ theorem a “staggering falsity,”93 “perhaps the only mistake to which the mathematical world has so deeply committed itself,”94 which “must be wholly rejected,”95 had won."

What have I gotten myself into...
"motivations—he admits there’s a war between frequentists and Bayesians, and says in his book, “Consider this [book] a piece of wartime propaganda, ... My goal with this book is not to broker a peace treaty; my goal is to win the war.” It would certainly help win the war if it turned out that frequentists were racist."

What a name drop: "John Maynard Keynes, the great economist and liberal (and my great-great-uncle, so I ought to declare an interest here when I try to downplay the awfulness of it all), was another."

Lol: "Quetelet made various mistakes—he hadn’t realized that there are other ways for a quantity to be normally distributed, for instance, and also went around gleefully applying the normal curve to everything he saw. A later statistician would diagnose the condition of “Quetelismus,” of seeing the normal distribution everywhere you look."

Lol

"‘But, dash it, why does everybody come trying to touch me?’
‘Because you’ve got the stuff, my boy. It is the penalty you pay for having an ancestress who couldn’t say No to Charles the Second.’"

"So I jabbed him again, and then things hotted up still further. And what really led to my getting arrested was that he managed to edge past the assegai and land me a juicy one on the jaw.’
Lord Ickenham found himself unable to reconcile cause and effect.
‘But surely no policeman, however flat-footed, would take a man into custody for being landed a juicy one on the jaw. You have probably got your facts twisted..."

"Some little time ago, your aunt unfortunately decided to take over the family finances and administer them herself, leaving me with just that bit of spending money which a man requires for tobacco, self-respect, golf balls and what not. My limit is a tenner.’"

Realized why this book is 'reading weird to me'. "Remember: Bayesian inference is distinguished by a broad view of probability, not by the use of Bayes' theorem." (McElreath)

Chivers is making his claims based on Bayes theorem (fair, he gets to decide objective of his book). But Bayes theorem is, at simplest and broadly, a mathematical notation of probability theory; Bayes was just the first to write it down as is.

"Remember: Bayesian inference is distinguished by a broad view of probability, not by the use of Bayes' theorem. Since all of the probabilities I provided reference frequencies of events, rather than theoretical parameters, all major statistical philosophies would agree to use Bayes' theorem in this case."

1.5h for 12pgs

“Inference under any probability concept will eventually make use of Bayes’ theorem.”

“…Bayesian approaches get to use Bayes’ theorem more generally, to quantify uncertainty about theoretical entities that cannot be observed, like parameters and models.”

“Powerful inferences can be produced under Bayes and non-Bayesian… but different justifications and sacrifices are necessary.”

Chivers is drinking the Bayesian kool-aid (the title is a big clue) but not a bad entry-level book on probability theory and Bayes. Amusing math history and anecdotes but missing papa Gauss??

This is so much funner than I thought from reading the synopsis