The year of the babies

After having two posts never leave the "draft" stage, here I am trying to write now something "lighter"... Hopefully I'll be able to finish this one quickly.

So, yesterday I got news that a 6th person within my close circle of friends/co-workers is pregnant! My first reaction was to think that this is normal, because I'm just getting in the age that people tend to start to develop their families, so my friends that should have about the same age as I have are starting to have babies. But this is not really true. Only 3 out of the 6 are actually in the same age range as I am. Some of the others are actually not even on their first kid.

It is so odd... There must be some sort of overarching psychological component to this change. Something about world politics/economics that hinted people that maybe it's a good time to start spreading. I went around to search for people observing this phenomena with better ideas than me, but I'm still unable to find evidence. Oh, well, maybe not enough people blog about this - maybe I should start.

Alive

Yes, yes, I'm still alive. With a lot to say, but not much time to say a lot. Life has been quite busy lately mostly with work-related things. Last weekend I spent a whole lot of time doing a procedure to make sure that people can correctly sell Jewelry on Amazon (whatever you want to make out of it). And I still can't say I have slept enough to compensate.

I've been looking around for things I should know that I don't have many books about. My latest thing was "Categorical Statistics", so I went and bought two books on it:

Categorical Data Analysis (Wiley Series in Probability and Statistics): A book that has a good coverage of the basics about categorical statistics. Seems straight-forward and not too difficult to read.

Bayesian Models for Categorical Data (Wiley Series in Probability and Statistics): As all my experience with Bayesian statistics, this book is much denser. Not that easy to read, but also seems quite interesting. I'm still trying to go through it to extract the core of its teachings, but I keep having flashbacks of my Bayesian Decision Theory class that used Box & Tiao's book. Hard class, quite a good instructor. A little too focused on Linear Models, as the professor had written a book about them, but very good.

Anyway, that's my life lately. I've been trying to do some fun things from time to time too, but most of them have been to play random computer games and getting tired for them after an hour or so. Oh, well...