Senior colleague: "So basically its stuff that's not in the model?"
Job candidate: "There are logit errors in the model."
Addendum:
Same senior colleague, basically the same question
Different job candidate: "There are always the logit shocks."
"Having a superscript on a subscript is aggressive, but I kind of like it."
One of my Wisconsin colleagues at a student seminar.
O'Farrell, Maggie. Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague. Vintage.
Let there be no mistake that this is a novel for English majors! It offers a fictional filling in of the life and times of Shakespeare's son Hamnet.
But I enjoyed it too, and so might you. The writing is beautiful, the characters are full and rich, and the author has done her work, as best I can tell, to understand and accurately describe the historical setting within which the novel takes place.
Recommended to those who think they might value such a literary enterprise.
Hat tip: Tyler Cowen
"We conduct the decennial Census every ten years."
From one of the six (!) annual trainings required to maintain Special Sworn Status at the Census Bureau.
Mandel, Emily St. John. 2022. Sea of Tranquility. Knopf.
Wow! Time travel. Plague. A few stragglers from earlier books. A complex, recursive plot. Canadian content. Big philosophical questions. What more could one want?
I was reminded of the Robert Silverberg time travel stories that I read in high school, and the paradoxes that they highlighted. Those paradoxes are here as well, but in the background, with the characters, as usual, in the foreground.
One subplot concerns a famous female author doing a book tour. It seemed particularly heartfelt, as do the descriptions of lockdown during the book's plague. I have a theory as to why that covers both.
I enjoyed this tremendously. Highly recommended if you like what one might call, and I will call, literary science fiction.
I purchased a "signed" edition from Barnes and Noble when it first came out.
