The Gong Show

It's been ages since I lasted posted to my blog. I've been busy and been procrastinating. It's more of the latter than the former. There's so much to add. My friend Ray came to visit for two weeks and we, along with Margee and Sandra, hiked the Milford Track. I'll get to these stories later. I'll have a lot of time this weekend with Christmas and no plans except to watch a lot of movies with my sister.

We had a statistics seminar this morning titled, "A Likelihood-Based Analysis for Relaxing the Exclusion Restriction in Randomized Experiments with Imperfect Compliance." I wanted to leave after the first fifteen minutes but I like the guy who organizes the seminars and I didn't want to offend him. Plus, the speaker went over by 15 minutes. If I ever run the seminars again, like I did one year at the University of Washington, I will install a gong. Anytime someone wants to end the seminar, we can put it out of misery.

As to what the title of the seminar meant, I sort of understood it. I always found this quote by Einstein pompous,

Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.

I'm sure that he could do mathematics faster than all of us.