Simple Monte Carlo

I worked in the morning to build a custom (Simple Monte Carlo) sampler that samples the posterior pdf for the true parallax given a noisy parallax measurement and a sensible but interim distance prior. The problem is very ill-behaved; for many (most, even) TGAS stars, there is almost no support for the likelihood under the prior and vice versa. In related news, in the evening, I worked on Adrian Price-Whelan and my paper on a custom (Simple Monte Carlo) sampler that samples orbital parameters for single-line binary-star systems. I raised many issues and edited the text directly.