National Gallery of Ireland

During a short if profitable visit to Dublin for a SFI meeting on Tuesday/Friday, I had the opportunity to visit the National Gallery of Ireland in my sole hour of free time (as my classy hotel was very close). The building itself is quite nice, being well-inserted between brick houses from the outside, while providing impressive height, space, and light from the inside.

The masterpiece gallery is quite small (unless I missed a floor!), if filled with masterpieces like a painting by Caillebotte I did not know.

 

The modern art gallery was taken by a temporary (and poorly exposed) exhibit that includes live happenings (five persons wearing monkish outfits standing around a mommy floating in mid-air), tags (!), and two interesting pieces: one was made of several tables filed with piles of books glued together and sculpted, giving an output that looked like 2-D histograms, and reminding me of the fear histograms discussed on  Statisfaction by Julyan a few days ago. (Note the Mathematica book in the last picture!) While I love books very much, I am also quite interested in sculptures involving books, like the one I saw a few years ago where the artist had grown different cereals on opened books: although it may sound like an easy trick (food for thought and all that), the result was amazing and impressive!

The second piece was a beautiful board illuminated by diodes which felts very warm and comforting, maybe in reminiscence of the maternal womb, of candles, or of myriads of galaxies, but very powerful in any case. (I usually dislike constructs involving light, like the neon sculptures of the 80′s, so I started with an a priori against it.) I could have stayed there for hours…

density()

Following my earlier posts on the revision of Lack of confidence, here is an interesting outcome from the derivation of the exact marginal likelihood in the Laplace case. Computing the posterior probability of a normal model versus a Laplace model in the normal (gold) and the Laplace (chocolate) settings leads to the above histogram(s), which show(s) that the Bayesian solution is discriminating (in a frequentist sense), even for 21 observations. If instead I use R density() over the posterior probabilities, I get this weird and unmotivated flat density in the Laplace case. It looked as if the (frequentist) density of the posterior probability under the alternative was uniform, although there is no reason for this phenomenon!

Bad graph of the day

Another meaningless graph found in the November issue of La Recherche: a histogram of the predictions of the World population by 2005 attached to a brief discussion of the challenges of providing food for this population. No mention is made of the source(s) for this absurd agglomerate of predictions, (could I add mine as well?!) while the discussion picks the median prediction for its reference number: as if Science was run by majority rule… As an unflattering coincidence (for La Recherche!), the other French monthly popular science magazine Pour la Science has simultaneously published a rather well-argumented special issue on randomness (by Jaroslaw Strzalko, Juliusz Grabski and Tomasz Kapitaniak who are Polish physicists), refering to one recent paper by Persi Diaconis on the randomness of coin tosses. Being associated with Scientific American certainly helps in producing quality papers! (There is also a paper by Ivar Ekeland in the same issue, as well as the paper by Andrew Gelman already signaled.)