The Major League Baseball Season is Delayed

Major League Baseball has suspended Spring Training and delayed the start of the season by at least 2 weeks. And I am sure that it's going to be a lot more than 2 weeks.

This is perhaps the first time in my life that I have ever been strongly in favor of baseball being cancelled. Simply, it's the right thing to do.

Baseball is one of my coping mechanisms, but I will find others.

Glora Gayner Demonstrating Thorough Hand-Washing by Singing "I Will Survive"

This video is pretty fantastic because it's wonderfully meta.

Children to be Named Later (Best. Erratum. Ever.)

The excellent new book by Kiss, Miller, and Simon on epidemics and networks also has an erratum that is one of my all-time favorites. (See their website of errata.)

In fact, I think this error is a feature of the book, rather than a bug (especially given that I automatically think of Paul Erdős). By the way, the book itself is awesome, so go take a look at it. Here is a screenshot of the erratum.

(Tip of the cap to my Ph.D. student Yacoub Kureh for pointing this out to me in our meeting today. This erratum is an instant classic.)

Early Warning Signs for this Year's Epidemic

And so it begins... pic.twitter.com/9nwjb2mSes

— I❤80s (@IL0VEthe80s) October 26, 2017

Front-Page Editorial in The New York Times

Today, The New York Times ran a front-page editorial for the first time since 1920. I'm very glad they've done this, and obviously it takes a lot for them to do this when the last one was almost 100 years ago. I hope it has an impact.

(Tip of the cap to Ernie Barreto and George Takei.)

Official Congratulations to Drs. Sofia Piltz and Marta Sarzynska!

My doctoral students Sofia Piltz (co-supervised with Philip Maini), who started a postdoc in ecology at DTU in June 2014, and Marta Sarzynska, who will be working at Bain & Company starting next month, both have gotten the revised versions of their doctoral theses approved in final form. Thus, they are now both officially done! Sofia's thesis is called "Models for Adaptive Feeding and Population Dynamics in Plankton", and some of her thesis work (with a couple more papers on the way) was published in SIADS. Marta's thesis is about "Spatial Community Structure and Epidemics", and you can read about some of it in this paper (whose sequel is on the way).