This should be quite an end to the year. My wife has just announced that she has gone into labour (at 90% confidence level for all you physics/stats aficionados out there). The odds are that we will have our second child before 2006 starts.
I should have been more prepared than I currently am... The due date for our child was January 6, 2006. I was told that the one standard deviation uncertainty on a predicted due date is 6 days. Since I use statistics on a day-to-day basis, I knew this meant that there was a 2% chance that the baby could have been born before Christmas Day. Also there was a 16% chance that the baby could be born in 2005.
Despite these non-negligible probabilities, I managed to convince myself that there was "no chance" that the baby would be born before New Year's Eve. Who was I fooling? Myself, obviously. (This is a clear case of Bayesian inference being totally unreliable. ;) )
I suddenly feel very pressed for time. My wife's contractions are about 10 minutes apart so while the birth is not going to happen in the next hour, there is a good chance it will happen in the happen 12 hours.
Now that the possibility has sunk in that I might have only 12 hours left of being a parent of only one child, I think I had better get some sleep right away. It might be my last decent sleep for many months! Sleep?!?! Who am I kidding? Myself. Again.
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