prior probability

Birthday blessings to my beautiful wife Sydjia! The picture on the left was taken on a chilly Thanksgiving weekend day in Florida in 2010, shortly after we started dating. The one on the right was taken earlier this year on a warm summer’s day in Jamaica after 10 years of marriage.

Update (12/31): To supplement the original music video (posted above) of the catchy K-pop ballad “We Go” by the South Korean girl group fromis_9, the video below presents a color-coded guide showing which girl is singing which part of the song in real time.

Feliz Navidad! Listed below are some of the works that I am reading this holiday season, in alphabetical order by title:

1. A book I bought at “Books & Books” in Key West, Florida: Adios Hemingway by Leonardo Padura Fuentes (Canongate 2005).

2. A used book I found at a “little free library” at the old Gato Cigar Factory in Key West: Closely Watched Trains by Bohumil Hrabal (Penguin 1981) [1968]. (Both the book cover and the old cigar factory are pictured below.)

3. A new book about an unusual murder case that I have been following since 2014: Extreme Punishment: The Chilling True Story of Acclaimed Law Professor Dan Markel’s Murder by Steven B. Epstein (Black Lyon 2022).

4. Research for my family vacation in the Florida Keys: the second edition of Hemingway’s Key West by Stuart B. McIver (Pineapple Press 2012).

5. My “beach reading”: a history of the South Sea bubble of 1720 with the annoyingly long and misleading title of Money for Nothing: The Scientists, Fraudsters, and Corrupt Politicians Who Reinvented Money, Panicked a Nation, and Made the World Rich by Thomas Levenson (Random House 2020).

6. And last but not least (for now): Space Invaders: Property Rights on the Moon by Rebecca Lowe (Adam Smith Institute 2022).

To celebrate Christmas Eve or Nochebuena, below is a reproduction of a painting by El Greco (the Nativity).

On this day (22 December) in 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus was wrongly convicted of treason by a military court-martial in France. In the words of one commentator (see here), “The Dreyfus affair is an extraordinary tale of injustice, deceit, and coverup.” Captain Dreyfus, who was accused of communicating military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris, was eventually exonerated 12 years later.

On this day (21 December) in 1913, the now-defunct New York World published the first “word-cross” puzzle. That particular puzzle, which is pictured below, was created by one Arthur Wynne (see here and here), and according to Wikipedia, an illustrator later reversed the “word-cross” label to “cross-word.” The New York World closed down in 1931, but the crossword puzzle lives on!

Would the world be a better place without the Internet? Or at the very least, what if we all voluntarily refrained from using the Internet during the holidays?