Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
My impression, admittedly superficial, from the ongoing debate on the severity of the Covid-19 pandemic is that statisticians with a professional interest in the distribution of extrema (“extreme value distributions”) understand the downside risks well and, as a result, support…
Prof. John Ioannidis of Stanford says the early estimates of the coronavirus’s deadlines were greatly exaggerated. It would be good news if demonstrably true, which it neither is nor can be, as the professor admits: “I love models… I do…
Suppose the number of people infected grows exponentially with time as . Consider two cases: in the first, the true rate is less than r by δ percent; in the second, it is greater than r by δ percent. The…
How deep has the drop in oil demand been so far? How much deeper can it sink? When and how fast is it expected to recover? Bloomberg quotes various authorities on this: “This global pandemic is something the world hasn’t…
OK, if you insist that COVID-19 is just like the flu, I could agree if you dropped “just.” It’s like the flu, sort of – but much deadlier and, in all likelihood, more contagious. I’ve seen the COVID-19 mortality rate…
It was a black Friday for the oil market: OPEC and non-OPEC allies failed on Friday to agree on how much oil production to cut amid the coronavirus outbreak, with Russia reportedly refusing to give the green light to the…
One more thought about Putin’s hasty edits to the constitution. Let’s say under the current constitution the president may do A but not B. (Either B strictly belongs in the legislative domain, or it is out of reach of any…
Dominic Green writes in The Critic: No one seems to have noticed, but the fortieth anniversary of Rock’s death is upon us. You can pick a personal “day the music died”… Sentimentalists might pick the release of the Ramones’ collaboration…
Phil Christman writes in The Hedgehog Review: Some bad movies… reveal through sheer lack of self-awareness the incoherencies and solecisms of the culture that produces them. These sorts of movies fascinate me in the way a too-honest idiot does, after…
In the London Review of Books, John Lanchester reviews The Great Firewall of China: How to Build and Control an Alternative Version of the Internet by James Griffiths and We Have Been Harmonised: Life in China’s Surveillance State by Kai…
The Moscow Times reports on the latest developments in the Shiyes protests: Opponents of a controversial landfill in northwestern Russia have asked Sweden, Norway and Finland for help in averting an environmental crisis… Five regional environmental groups have asked the…
In January 2018, the Argumentative Old Git wrote about Goya’s Self-portrait with Dr. Arrieta: It is a striking image, but what fascinates me most are the other faces on the canvas – shadowy faces, as if vaguely glimpsed, behind the…