Medellin

My nephew Paul and a fellow student made this nice mute video as a final project of his cinema degree in Rennes:

journal of the [second] plague year [away]

Read Fred Vargas’s Seeking Whom He May Devour (L’Homme à l’envers), which I found on a bookshelf of our vacation rental in Annecy. And got more quickly bored by the story as it is plagued with the same defects as the ones I read before, from a definitive issue with Canadians (!), to an attempt to bring supernatural causes in the story and reveal them as fake by the end of the book, to a collection of implausible and caricaturesque characters surrounded by the usual backcountry morons that would rather fit a Paasilinna novel, and to the incomprehensible intuitions of Inspector Adamsberg. I also went through the sequel to Infomocracy, Null states, albeit this was a real chore as it lacked substance and novelty (the title by itself should have been a warning!).

Watched Night in Paradise (낙원의 밤), another Korean gangster movie, which seems to repeat the trope of bad-guy-on-the-run-meets-lost-girl found in my previously watched Korean Jo-Phil: The Dawning Rage, where the main character, a crooked police officer is radically impacted after failing to save a lost teenager.  (And also in the fascinating The Wild Goose Lake.) The current film is stronger however in creating the bond between the few-words gangster on the run and the reluctant guest Jae-yeon who is on a run of a different magnitude. While the battle scenes are still grand-guignolesque (if very violent) in a Kill Bill spirit, and the gang leaders always caricaturesque, the interplay between the main characters makes Night in Paradise a pretty good film (and explains why it got selected for the Venice Film Festival of 2020). Also went through the appalling Yamakasi by Luc Besson, a macho, demagogical, sexist, simplist, non-story…

inf R ! [book review]

Thanks to my answering a (basic) question on X validated involving an R code, R mistakes and some misunderstanding about Bayesian hierarchical modelling, I got pointed out to Patrick Burns’ The R inferno. This is not a recent book as the second edition is of 2012, with a 2011 version still available on-line. Which is the version I read. As hinted by the cover, the book plays on Dante’s Inferno and each chapter is associated with a circle of Hell… Including drawings by Botticelli. The style is thus most enjoyable and sometimes hilarious. Like hell!

The first circle (reserved for virtuous pagans) is about treating integral reals as if they were integers, the second circle (attributed to gluttons, although Dante’s is for the lustful) is about allocating more space along the way, as in the question I answered and in most of my students’ codes! The third circle (allocated here to blasphemous sinners, destined for Dante’s seven circle, when Dante’s third circle is to the gluttons) points out the consequences of not vectorising, with for instance the impressive capacities of the ifelse() function [exploited to the max in R codecolfing!].  And the fourth circle (made for the lustfuls rather than Dante’s avaricious and prodigals) is a short warning about the opposite over-vectorising. Circle five (destined for the treasoners, and not Dante’s wrathfuls) pushes for and advises about writing R functions. Circle six recovers Dante’s classification, welcoming (!) heretics, and prohibiting global assignments, in another short chapter. Circle seven (alloted to the simoniacs—who should be sharing the eight circle with many other sinners—rather than the violents as in Dante’s seventh) discusses object attributes, with the distinction between S3 and S4 methods somewhat lost on me. Circle eight (targeting the fraudulents, as in Dante’s original) is massive as it covers “a large number of ghosts, chimeras and devils”, a collection of difficulties and dangers and freak occurences, with the initial warning that “It is a sin to assume that code does what is intended”. A lot of these came as surprises to me and I was rarely able to spot the difficulty without the guidance of the book. Plenty to learn from these examples and counter-examples. Reaching Circle nine (where live (!) the thieves, rather than Dante’s traitors). A “special place for those who feel compelled to drag the rest of us into hell.” Discussing the proper ways to get help on fori. Like Stack Exchange. Concluding with the tongue-in-cheek comment that “there seems to be positive correlation between a person’s level of annoyance at [being asked several times the same question] and ability to answer questions.” This being a hidden test, right?!, as the correlation should be negative.

genuine Latinsquare rectangle

PRIMA grants in Lugano

Forwarding a call from my friend Antonietta Mira for young female scientists to join her at USI, Lugano, Svizzera, for projects in Data Science, funded by a PRIMA PhD grant. Deadline is 1 September 2021.

Prima grants are aimed at young female researchers who wish to conduct, manage and lead an independent project at a Swiss higher education institution. It awards five-years grants to female researchers who fulfill the following criteria:

• They match the SNSF requirements for Prima concerning academic age (mobility is not needed):  At least 2 years of research experience after the doctorate; Maximum 10 years from the doctorate.

• They have an excellent academic track record, especially in terms of publications, and firm ambitions to pursue an academic career.

• They demonstrate interest in scientific domains represented at USI.