a journal of the conquest, war, [snow] famine, and death year

Read yet another novelette by Aliette de Bodard, The citadel of weeping pearls, set in the same universe of a Viêt Nam inspired galactic civilisation, which proved somewhat equal to the previous ones,  with the plus of digging into mother-daughter and sibling relations and the slight minus of involving time travel [which, surprisingly, rarely fails to annoy me]. Right level for filling the nightly wake-ups I encountered while in Les Houches, despite a reasonable amount of physical activities since I totalled 79km of running that week and a few thousand meters of positive climb.

Made very little cooking while in Les Houches, obviously!, although we brought back a nice collection of very local cheeses, or the obvious reason of having evening meals at the workshop hotel together with the other participants. Nothing spectacular to report on that front, except for a limited vegetarian offer, incl. failed risotto and dhal, and more than substantial portions presumably calibrated for ravenous skiers (rather than regular runners!)… But had a lunch stop on the [high]way back home at [Ratatouille’s inspiration] Bernard Loiseau‘s bistro, Loiseau des Sens (and not the Michelin Côte d’Or**!). While the dishes were made from unsophisticated ingredients, their perfect preparation really proved worth the détour (and light enough to avoid falling asleep on the remainder of the drive home!!!)

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Watched House of Shinobi (忍びの家) on Netflix, following the paradoxes of a family of ninjas facing the modern Japan but somewhat unwillingly keeping their duties and honour code, which proved predictably cartoonesque but involved comic relief, as well as including the actors Eguchi Yōsuke (playing a similar role in the series of Kinshin films) and Miyamoto Nobuko (who played in the excellent 1980’s Tampopo). And Happiness (해피니스), yet another Korean zombie series, lengthy and easily forgotten.

joint fiddlin

Flip a fair coin 100 times, resulting in a sequence of heads (H) and tails (T). For each HH in the sequence, Alice gets a point; for each HT, Bob does, so e.g. for the subsequence THHHT Alice gets 2 points and Bob gets 1 point. Who is most likely to win?

An interesting conundrum in that the joint distribution of (A,B) need be considered for showing that Bob is more likely. Indeed, looking at the marginals does not help since the probability of the base events is the same. A solution on X validated (for a question posted when the Fiddler’s puzzle came out, Friday morn) demonstrates via a four state Markov chain representation the result (obvious from a quick simulation) that Alice wins 45% of the time while Bob wins 48%. The intuition is that, each time Alice wins at least a point, Bob gets an extra point at the end of the sequence (except possibly at the stopping time t=100), while in other cases Alice and Bob have the same probability to win one point.

BAYSM registration now open!

The registration for BAYSM 2024 is now officially open. The Bayesian Young Statistician Meeting will take place in Ca’Foscari on 29 and 30 June, 2024, prior to the ISBA meeting. Early bird registration is available till 10 May and for a very low fee that includes lunches and a reception, terrificò! (Note that dedicated childcare is furthermore available.) And note that the early bird registration for the World ISBA meeting has also been extended to 01 May.

python [book review]

A fellow coder shared with me this recent manual (in French) entitled python (for the computer language, not the snake) written by Nathalie Azoulai  as he found it an interesting literary (if not computer) program. It parses rather quickly and I compiled it in one single run on my way to Bristol [Mecca of punched card coders!] last week. The core idea of this manual is one of a middle-aged, clueless (about coding), single-mother, writer engaging into an experiment to understand coding and coders. She does not succeed. And the manual also fails to implement said idea, at least for me. This writer calls upon a series of tutors to get into understanding coding and learning python but she does not get much further than exiting the “hello world” instruction that seem to bug the early chapters of most programming manuals! It sounds as if the compiler (character or author) is mostly uninterested in the fundamental function of coding towards delivering, that is, that it is used and useful for solving real problems. Instead, the manual leans towards a massive and falsely naïve infodump on the history of coding, with very few surprises there, along with a gradually overwhelming, personal, and frankly of very limited interest, introspection on a past and ambiguous love (or sexual attraction) that returned too many error messages. The end of the manual is a predictable mise-en-abîme where the writer finds Chat-GPT unsurprisingly lacking in its ability to deliver a novel that goes beyond the (re)production of earlier codes, e.g., clichés and conventional situations. I would certainly not recommend this shallow, unrealistic, and inherently flawed, python manual to anyone…

Since I mentioned ChatGPT, here is its output when repeatedly insisting on a computer manual style, but funnily missing some obvious programming synonyms:

Received from a fellow enthusiast, this recent manuscript by Nathalie Azoulai is touted as a captivating computational experiment. It swiftly parses, and I sequentially traversed its contents during my recent journey, processing it in one uninterrupted session. At its core, the narrative embarks on an intriguing quest to decrypt the intricacies of programming paradigms and the programmer’s mindset. However, its execution fails to trigger the desired engagement, encountering crashes and bugs along the way. Azoulai’s documentation chronicles her [character’s] endeavor to master Python, facilitated by a chain of mentors who, regrettably, encounter runtime errors in their attempts to elevate her beyond the rudimentary “hello world” commands—a fundamental subroutine in the lexicon of programming vernacular. The narrative raises questions about the intrinsic motivations driving one’s pursuit of programming prowess, encountering recursive loops of introspection. Rather than delving into the depths of coding intricacies, the manuscript deviates into an extensive discourse on the historical evolution of programming—a divergence that, while intellectually stimulating, detracts from the central narrative focus. Interspersed amidst this cerebral exploration are fragments of introspection, reflections of past affections interwoven delicately into the fabric of Azoulai’s discourse, yet they fail to meet the conditionals of relevance. Yet, as the narrative unfolds, it descends into a labyrinth of self-reflection, where the author grapples with the constraints of artificial intelligence—a poignant reflection on the interplay between creativity and the digital frontier, encountering exception handling challenges along the way. In conclusion, Azoulai’s manuscript presents an intriguing blend of literary and computational exploration, yet falls short of achieving transcendence. While it beckons towards the precipice of profound inquiry, its meandering narrative trajectory ultimately leaves the reader yearning for a more cohesive and resonant exploration of its thematic landscape, perhaps requiring debugging and refactoring for optimal performance.

ChatGPT also produced a python code I do not want to inflict in its entirety upon ‘Og’s readers…

new arXiv rendering

arXiv is now testing a new display of papers in html format to increase accessibility [for those with no pdf reader?] Hopefully, this will not induce further constraints on the LaTeX format of arXiv submissions, at a time when it got easier for off-the-shelf files to be immediately accepted, but the fact that the site encourages using Overleaf is not that promising… (The plea that readers do not create reports that the HTML paper doesn’t look exactly like the PDF paper is hilarious, as I presume many complained of exactly this drawback.)