The Bands of Mourning [and mourning we should]

While in Brussels last week, I happened to spot a W.H. Smith bookstore near where I stayed and a “new” book on the Mistborn series, namely one I had not yet read. It was actually published in 2016 and is the continuation of the (homely) Shadows of Self, itself a sequel to Alloy of Law. Sounds like endless regress?! This time and this volume, it truly feels like it…

“But that is the sort of statistical anomaly that plagues my life, so I’ll plan for it nonetheless.”

The characters in the Bands of Mourning are pretty much the same as in Shadows of Self, the story being a continuation in another corner of the Mistborn universe. (Truly at a corner of the map printed at the beginning of the book.) Except for a few ones that in my opinion completely ruin the plot and the appeal of the story.

“The proof,” Marasi said, “will be in the numbers.” She leaned forward. “Do you know how many crimes can be proven by statistics?”

The link to statistics is continued as well, although pretty shallow when considering that almost every situation is dealt with by superpowers that get increasingly boring and predictable. When characters can [spoiler?!] resuscitate from about every possible form of death, one starts looking for another story and another book. But definitely not the next one in the series, The Lost Metal, not yet advertised for sale…

Shadows of Self [book review]

“He’d always found it odd that so many died when they were old, as logic said that was the point in their lives when they’d the most practice not dying.”

Now this is steampunk fantasy, definitely! With little novelty in the setting of the universe. If mixed with a Wild West feeling, though, just like the half-made World …

“Mirabell had been a statistician and psychologist in the third century who had studied why some people worked harder than others.”

Actually, this is the same universe as The Mistborn trilogy, but 300 years later,which allows for some self-referential jokes and satire. Including the notion that the current ruling class could be exactly what the heroes of The Mistborn had fought against!

“Not guns,” Wayne said with a grin. “A different kind of weapon. Math.”

More precisely, this is the (a?) sequel to the Alloy of Law, which I had almost completely forgotten, unlike The Mistborn trilogy, which does not help with the reading as the book refers rather insistently to this Alloy of Law!

“Sir, you said you hired me in part because of my ability to read statistics.”

Nonetheless, it is an interesting plot, with a very nice ambiguity of the main characters, who (again) often feel they may be closer to the dictature that set The Mistborn revolution than to the revolutionaries themselves! And one of the heroes is a statistician (as obvious from the many quotes around!).

“Wayne felt a disturbance stir within him, like his stomach discovering  he’d just fed it a bunch of rotten apples. Religion worried him. It could ask men to do things they’d otherwise never do.”

In short, good story, nice style, entertaining dialogues: perfect [mind-candy] travel novel!

And the cover is…just as ugly!

The cover for the final volume of Robert Jordan’s and Brandon Sanderson‘s the Wheel of Time,  A Memory of Light, has just appeared. Although the artist has changed, from Darrell K. Sweet who passed away before completing his cover to Michael Whelan, I find the cover as appalling as the previous thirteen covers in the series… With the same frozen features and caricaturesque characters, unrealistic depictions (look at the way Rand holds this sword!) and women at the back. I know, I know, I should not expect highly creative covers for fantasy books, but other recent books have managed much better, from Sanderson’s Mistborns (other series of Sanderson do not succeed so well, incl. Elantris) to Abercrombie’s trilogy (and his The Heroes), admittedly the coolest covers so far, to Morgan’s The Steel Remains, to Karen Miller’s series of The prodigal mage … Even the alternative e-book covers for  the Wheel of Time are quite acceptable, so I really wonder why the publisher sticks at those ugly and outdated covers.  Anyway, this is now a sort of tradition! The final volume is planned for early January 2013, which is in tune with what Brandon Sanderson told us last year when giving a public lecture in Paris. There is much expectation about this book, the culmination of a series I started reading more than 20 years ago!

The Alloy of Law

When I saw that The Alloy of Law was half-price in the Cambridge Waterstones, I did not hesitate long in picking the latest Brandon Sanderson‘s book! It is set in the Mistborn universe, with the same chemical principles directing magical powers (allomancy and ferromancy). A terrific concept by the way! However, The Alloy of Law reads much more like a steampunk novel. With a serving of wild (or weird) West. And, in short, it does not read very well… (Even though it reads fast, I was done with it by Sunday evening.)

“Numbers, patterns, movements. People seem erratic, but they actually follow patterns. Find the deviations, isolate the reason why they deviated, and you’ll often learn something. Aluminum on the floor. It’s a deviation.” (p.178)

In a sense, the novel The Alloy of Law best compares with is Gilman’s The Half-made World, that I read about a year ago. Same steampunk basics, same wild wild West atmosphere, same central characters of a female academic chafing at the Victorian constraints imposed by the society, same major role of trains… However, I feel The Half-made World is a successful and convincing construction, while The Alloy of Law sounds like an unfinished attempt. I have been amazed at the number of books published by Sanderson over the past years, especially considering the pressure he is under for completing Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. I wish he had spent more time and care in polishing this book! Indeed, it greatly feels like it was rushed, with a neat idea for a backbone, but not enough meat to make the concept stand. There are too many dreary, repetitive, and overly precise descriptions of gun battles, the main male character is shallow (and only too well deserves his nickname of Wax!), the female character is more interesting but still caricaturesque, the overall plot does not make much sense, most of the dialogues are poor (e.g., when explaining “When you make an alloy, you don’t just mix two metals. You make a new one.“, p. 134), and the connection with the original trilogy is almost completely lost! (The fan-made trailer is actually quite well-made, by comparison. And covering about all main features of the book!)

I am certainly not looking forward the second volume in the series…., if any. In fact, the book is presented as a stand-alone novel, but the ending has all the loose threads (main villain still at large, love relations still unresolved, final appearance of a mythical figure, …) to proceed quickly (too quickly!) to a sequel of The Alloy of Law.

1500th, 3000th, &tc

As the ‘Og reached its 1500th post and 3000th comment at exactly the same time, a wee and only mildly interesting Sunday morning foray in what was posted so far and attracted the most attention (using the statistics provided by wordpress). The most visited posts:

Title	Views
Home page	203,727
In{s}a(ne)!!	7,422
“simply start over and build something better”	6,264
Julien on R shortcomings	2,676
Sudoku via simulated annealing	2,402
About	1,876
Of black swans and bleak prospects	1,768
Solution manual to Bayesian Core on-line	1,628
Parallel processing of independent Metropolis-Hastings algorithms	1,625
Bayesian p-values	1,595
Bayes’ Theorem	1,537
#2 blog for the statistics geek?!	1,526
Do we need an integrated Bayesian/likelihood inference?	1,501
Coincidence in lotteries	1,396
Solution manual for Introducing Monte Carlo Methods with R	1,340
Julian Besag 1945-2010	1,293
Tornado in Central Park	1,093
The Search for Certainty	1,016

Hence, three R posts (incl. one by Julien and one by Ross Ihaka), three (critical) book reviews, two solution manuals, two general Bayesian posts, two computational entries, one paper (with Pierre Jacob and Murray Smith), one obituary, and one photograph news report… Altogether in line with the main purpose of the ‘Og. The most commented posts:

Post	Comments
In{s}a(ne)!!	31
“simply start over and build something better”	30
That the likelihood principle does not hold…	23
Incoherent inference	23
Lack of confidence in ABC model choice	20
Parallel processing of independent Metropolis-Hastings algorithms	19
ABC model choice not to be trusted	17
MCMC with errors	16
Coincidence in lotteries	16
Bessel integral	14
Numerical analysis for statisticians	14

Not exactly the same as above! In particular, the posts about ABC model choice and our PNAS paper got into the list. At last, the top search terms:

Search	Views
surfers paradise	1,050
benidorm	914
introducing monte carlo methods with r	514
andrew wyeth	398
mistborn	352
abele blanc	350
nested sampling	269
particle mcmc	269
bayesian p-value	263
julian besag	257
rites of love and math	249
millenium	237
bayesian p value	222
marie curie	221
bonsai	200

(out of which I removed the dozens of variations on xian’s blog). I find it rather sad that both top entries are beach towns that are completely unrelated to my lifestyle and to my vacation places. Overall, more than a  half of those entries do not strongly relate to the contents of the ‘Og (even though I did post at length about Saunderson’s Mistborn and Larsson’s Millenium trilogies). At last, the most popular clicks are

URL	Clicks
amazon.com/gp/product/1441915753?ie=UTF8&tag=chrprobboo-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1441915753	1,243
stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/mlm	1,039
terrytao.wordpress.com	583
amazon.com/gp/product/0387389792?ie=UTF8&tag=chrprobboo-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0387389792	575
arxiv.org/abs/1012.2184	531
radfordneal.wordpress.com/2010/08/15/two-surpising-things-about-r	529
romainfrancois.blog.free.fr	505
statisfaction.wordpress.com	404
ceremade.dauphine.fr/~xian/basudo.R	395
stackoverflow.com/questions/3706990/is-r-that-bad-that-it-should-be-rewritten-from-scratch	372
amazon.com/gp/product/0387212396?ie=UTF8&tag=chrprobboo-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0387212396	298
radfordneal.wordpress.com/2010/09/03/fourteen-patches-to-speed-up-r	298
cs.ubc.ca/~cornebis	288
statisticsforum.wordpress.com	282
arxiv.org/abs/1001.2906	279
arxiv.org/abs/1010.1595	257
amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http://www.amazon.com/gp/entity/-/B001H6GSKC&tag=chrprobboo-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=390957	256
ceremade.dauphine.fr/~xian/BCS/solutions.pdf	253
rss.org.uk/main.asp?page=3005	243
www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/119424936/PDFSTART	216
stat.auckland.ac.nz/~ihaka/downloads/Compstat-2008.pdf	203

which include links to my books on Amazon, Andrew Gelman’s, Terry Tao’s, Radford Neal’s and Romain François’s blogs, the CREST stat students collective blog, and a few arXiv papers of mine’s…