Covid and EVT

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…

“A very bad recipe”

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…

Poor Icarus

Turning away from Auden’s Icarus, if only for a moment. What follows is my approximate prose rendering, line by line, of a poem written in Russian in 1984 or a little earlier. Its  author, Dmitry Shagin, is a major figure…

Everything falls into place

Philip Kennicott writes in The Washington Post: There is [a?] painting called “Landscape With the Fall of Icarus,” once thought to be by Pieter Bruegel, now believed to be a high-level copy of a missing original by the same artist.…

A simple asymmetry

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…

Kleist’s Kohlhaas

Here’s Christine Smallwood in Harper’s Magazine on Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas in a new English translation by Michael Hofmann (use the Wayback Machine if inaccessible): Here is how Kohlhaas ends: We learn, more or less out of nowhere, that the horse-dealer…

Schumann’s Piano Quintet in “The Favourite”

Impressed by Eileen Jones’ review – even after making adjustments for her bias/angle – I probably expected too much of Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest work. What grated in particular was his use of Schumann’s Piano Quintet as musical background for more…

From Voltaire to Lanthimos

Even before I saw The Favourite, I knew from an outline of the plot that I had heard some of the characters’ names at an early age – thanks to a performance of Le Verre d’eau by Eugène Scribe. Neither…

“Regular blood exchanges”

Here’s Sophie Pinkham for The Nation, reviewing The Future of Immortality: Remaking Life and Death in Contemporary Russia by Anya Bernstein: Aleksandr Bogdanov, a prominent early Bolshevik and science fiction writer, investigated the rejuvenating properties of blood transfusions in the…

Limonov

When Eduard Limonov died, five days ago, obituaries appeared the world over. The New York Times, The Los Angeles TImes, Le Monde, La Repubblica, El País, O Público. Limonov was a uniquely talented, original poet, a gifted fiction writer, and…

The totem of the English

One more look at Philip Hensher’s letter to the LRB comparing the personal attacks on Corbyn and Thatcher: Alice Thomas Ellis called her [Thatcher] ‘a mean little mouse bred on cheese rind and broken biscuit and the nutritionless, platitudinous parings…