just like clockwork

In hindsight Switzerland was actually a rather appropriate setting in which to conduct a course in Bayesian statistics. Bayesian statistics requires orderly thinking, thorough attention to detail, perfect craftsmanship (of your code), an even temperament and a very healthy amount of patience (none of which I excel at, I found out last week!). However, all these attributes do quite accurately describe Switzerland and its people. Pretty, clean, organised and orderly to a fault, the Swiss have certainly carved for themselves one very highly functional (if slightly expensive) society. In fact at the risk of sounding cliché, things really do run like clockwork in Switzerland. Trains, buses, boats, cable cars – everything runs exactly to schedule (so much so that if you ask about schedules and times you will get told things like “we will get there at 6.22pm” or “it leaves in 11 minutes”) and so too did our Bayesian statistics course – which was very different to the delightful post lunch tardiness that transpired during my previous course in France. And speaking of clockwork, every single one of the 20+ public clocks I saw in the three cities I visited during the week showed the correct time (which is really quite a remarkable achievement considering how few of them tell the right time in other countries).

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