By the end of May, in Toronto, we had that great talk at the SSC by Jeff Rosenthal, on monte carlo techniques, and Jeff mention the name of “the Goldilocks principle” (it was in the contect of MCMC, and I did mention it in my talk in London on MCMC, when I discussed the value of the rejection rate of the Hastings Metropolis algorithm, which should be not to large, and not too small…). In the story, Goldilocks, there are always three alternative, one is always too much in one extreme (too hot – for the soup – or too large – for the bed, or the chaiir), one is too much in the opposite extreme (too cold, or too small), and one is “just right“.