My dissertation committee had to be reshuffled on short notice because my outside-the-department member became inside-the-department. Luckily for me, Prof. David Blackwell kindly agreed to serve on my committee. I had a meeting with him two weeks ago, wrote up a pseudo-précis of my dissertation, and had a short chat about it and Bayesianism today. Forty-eight years ago, he wrote the first paper on the arbitrarily varying channel [1], and today he gave me an actual reprint of the article!

The staples are a little bit oxidized from time. I guess people couldn’t get rid of their reprints back then, even. QUESTA sent me reprints of my paper there and they’re just occupying space in my filing drawer. The worst part was, there was no option I could click for “no reprints — save the trees.” Of course, given my feelings about commercial publishing, I’m less likely to send a paper there in the future.

[1] D. Blackwell, L. Breiman, and A.J. Thomasian, The Capacities of Certain Channel Classes Under Random Coding, Annals of Mathematical statistics Stat. 31 (3), Sept. 1960, p.558-567.