hospital series

While I usually never find enough time to watch series (or even less telly!), I took advantage of those three weeks at the hospital to catch up with Game of Thrones and discovered Sherlock, thanks to Judith. As I have been reading George Martin’s epics, A Song of Ice and Fire, from the very beginning in 1991, I was of course interested to see how those massive books with their intricate politics and complex family trees could be made into 50 minutes episodes. Glimpses caught from my son’s computer had had me looking forward to it. After watching the entire second season and the earlier episodes of the third season, I am quite impressed by both the rendering of the essentials of the book and the quality of the movies. It is indeed amazing that HBO invested so much into the series, with large scale battles and medieval cities and thousands of characters. The filming locations were also well-chosen: while I thought most of the northern scenes had been shot in Scotland, it actually appears that they mostly came from Ireland and Iceland (with incredible scenery like the one above beyond the Wall!).  The cast is not completely perfect, obviously, with both Jon Snow (Kit Harington) and Rob Stark (Richard Madden) being too shallow in my opinion and Daenerys (Emilia Clarke) lacking charisma, but most characters are well-rendered and the Lannisters are terrific, Tyrion (Peter Dinklage) being the top actor in my opinion (and Arya (Maisie Williams) coming second). I was also surprised by the popularity of the series at the hospital, as several nurses and doctors started discussing it with me…

Sherlock Holmes is a British series, set in contemporary London, and transposing some of Sherlock Holmes’ adventures in contemporary Britain. While I had not heard about this series previously, I was quite taken by it. It is quite innovative both in its scenario and its filming, it does not try to stick to the books, the dialogues are witty and the variety of accents quite pleasant (if hard to catch at times), and… Watson has a blog! It is also a pleasure to catch glimpses of London (Baker Street is actually Gower Street, near UCL) and the Hound of Baskerville takes place on Dartmoor.  I do not think I will continue watching those series once out of the hospital, but they were a pleasing distraction taking me far, far away from my hospital room for a few hours!

Bayes 2013

Among the many Bayes.250 meetings this year—including one at the Royal Statistical Society on June 19 and 20 I am co-organising with Chris Holmes—I just became aware of another Bayes 2013 meeting organised in Rotterdam by Emmanuel Lesaffre (I was going to write the ISBA Section on Biostatistics and Pharmaceutical Statistics but could not find a link on the webpage to a sponsorship of the section). Nice visual too! This could be an interesting start to a European tour of meetings in May and June, followed with the French statistical meeting in Toulouse, ABC in Rome, the Bayesian young statistician meeting in Milano, the 9th Conference on Bayesian Nonparametrics in Amsterdam, and then Bayes.250 at the RSS on June 19-20!

over London

Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson

visit at Gatsby

Today I took the Eurostar to London to give a seminar at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, UCL. (Just a few blocks from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Diseases, where I gave an ABC talk last year.) I had great fun, thanks to an uninterrupted sequence of meetings: I got a crash course on RKHS (reproducible kernel Hilbert spaces) by Arthur Gretton, discussed about estimating the number of species, dealing with unknown functions of the parameter in the likelihood, using tests as ABC statistics, and explained how to use empirical likelihoods in non-iid settings. After this full day, we had a superb dinner at St. John, a Michelin starred restaurant with highly enjoyable English cuisine, offering game and offal dishes that reminded me of Le Petit Marguery in Paris…  (Not a place for vegetarians, obviously.)