Rock’n’roll stars

We’re spending a few days in the Tuscan seaside. But both Marta and I seem to have lost the Italian genes in us and can barely tolerate the hot weather \(-\) XY is not too keen on swimming or even being in the sea, but he does enjoy rolling around in the sand, at the beach. In fact, the thing he does enjoy the most (and for the life of me I can’t quite understand why) is eating the sand, which he does every 10 seconds…

Anyway: in order to cool off, we decided to spend the afternoon out up the hills and narrow streets of Castagneto Carducci, our favourite town around here. And who should we run into if not Sir Michael Philip? For some reason, both Marta and I concentrated on his friend, as we were walking towards them, and only realised at the very last moment it was him. XY was busy waving hi to the other passers-by and didn’t seem to take notice.

Just around the corner, we caught the owner of the trattoria where he ate telling off her husband, saying: “well, you should have taken his picture while he was here!”, to which he replied: “don’t worry, we’ll do it when he comes back next time… that is If he doesn’t die first!” In all this, XY was more interested in my ice cream than anything else.

Speaking of rock’n’roll stars, the RSShas made Tony O’Hagan interview with Dennis Lindley publicly available. The interview was recorded earlier this year to mark Lindley’s 90th birthday as well as the 250th anniversary of the publication of Bayes’s paper. The video is available here. When I watched it at the RSS meeting last June, I found it quite interesting and amusing \(-\) in my opinion, definitely one to watch; just like vintage MTV for (Bayesian) nerds…