Jane Austen was a Bayesian

... well, no, she wasn't, actually (as far as I'm aware), although the quirkily named paper Prior and Prejudice [PDF] in August's issue of Nature Neuroscience introduces Bayesian inference by appeal to her work. It's an interesting overview of two studies which appeared in the August and July issues of Nat. Neuroscience, and "create convincing links between psychophysical performance and neuronal representations using the formalism of Bayesian inference"; Fischer and Pena's Owl's Behavior and Neural Representation Predicted by Bayesian inference and Girschick et al.'s Cardinal rules: visual orientation perception reflects knowledge of environmental statistics.