L’Armée Furieuse [book review]

“On dit que les Normands n’aiment pas beaucoup parler… Ce n’est pas qu’ils n’aiment pas parler, c’est qu’ils n’aiment pas répondre. Ce n’est pas la même chose.”

I picked this book by Fred Vargas at the airport mostly because the back cover mentioned Orbec a town near my hometown in rural Normandy. With a slight misspelling to avoid legal issues I presume. It made for a nice read in the long trip to Oaxaca even though it is filled with impossibilities and incoherences. The crux of the story is an interesting medieval myth called l’armée furieuse (the Wild Hunt) that tells of a spectral army crossing the North of France and picking dammed souls soon to die. The wild hunt is also called la mesnie or maisnie Hellequin, from the name of the Lord leading the spectral army. According to a English monk from a Norman monastery in the 1100’s. Myth that some in current era want to exploit to cover real crimes. As in the previous novels of Fred Vargas that I read there is an interesting undercurrent of exposing the machinery of a rural community, with highly unorthodox police officers. Not that I recognized much of my hometown atmosphere. And the Deus ex Machina represented by a local count [historically speaking, Orbec is only a barony] and the industrial plot were by far too implausible! (With a geographical inaccuracy of setting La Touques river nearby. And of mentioning a train station in Cernay, to end up on a very picky note.)

support for Remain comes first in latest YouGov survey

à la maison des mathématiciens [Jean Morlet chair, CIRM, Luminy]

Big Bayes goes South

At the Big [Data] Bayes conference this week [which I found quite exciting despite a few last minute cancellations by speakers] there were a lot of clustering talks including the ones by Amy Herring (Duke), using a notion of centering that should soon appear on arXiv. By Peter Müller (UT, Austin) towards handling large datasets. Based on a predictive recursion that takes one value at a time, unsurprisingly similar to the update of Dirichlet process mixtures. (Inspired by a 1998 paper by Michael Newton and co-authors.) The recursion doubles in size at each observation, requiring culling of negligible components. Order matters? Links with Malsiner-Walli et al. (2017) mixtures of mixtures. Also talks by Antonio Lijoi and Igor Pruenster (Boconni Milano) on completely random measures that are used in creating clusters. And by Sylvia Frühwirth-Schnatter (WU Wien) on creating clusters for the Austrian labor market of the impact of company closure. And by Gregor Kastner (WU Wien) on multivariate factor stochastic models, with a video of a large covariance matrix evolving over time and catching economic crises. And by David Dunson (Duke) on distance clustering. Reflecting like myself on the definitely ill-defined nature of the [clustering] object. As the sample size increases, spurious clusters appear. (Which reminded me of a disagreement I had had with David McKay at an ICMS conference on mixtures twenty years ago.) Making me realise I missed the recent JASA paper by Miller and Dunson on that perspective.

Some further snapshots (with short comments visible by hovering on the picture) of a very high quality meeting [says one of the organisers!]. Following suggestions from several participants, it would be great to hold another meeting at CIRM in a near future.

a la casa matemática de Oaxaca [reminiscence]

As this was my very first trip to the CMO part of CMO-BIRS, as opposed to many visits to BIRS, Banff, here are my impressions about this other mathematical haven, aka resort, aka retreat… First definitely a very loooong trip from Paris (especially when sitting next to three drunk women speaking loudly the whole trip, thankfully incomprehensibly in Russian!), with few connections between Mexico City [airport] and Oaxaca,  adding [for me] a five and a half hour stay over in the airport, where I experimented for the first time a coffin-like “sleep pod” hostel and some welcome rest. But presumably an easier access compared with Calgary for mathematicians from the South and East of the USA. And obviously for those Central and from South Americas.Then, contrary to Banff, the place for the Casa Matemàtica Oaxaca is for the time being essentially a permanently booked hotel, rather than a dedicated conference centre. Facilities are thus less attuned to visiting mathematicians, like missing real desks in bedrooms or working rooms. Still a nice with a very peaceful inner yard (and too small a pool to consider swimming). Actually facilitating interactions when compared with Banff: blackboards in the patios, tables outside, general quiet atmosphere (except for the endlessly barking dogs in the neighbourhood). Of course the huge difference in the weathers between both places does matter. Paradoxically (given the size of Oaxaca City), CMO is more isolated than BIRS, where downtown is a mere five minute walks, even in the middle of winter. Except for the occasional blizzard. But Oaxaca offers a fabulous food scene worth the longer trip!As for outdoors, there is also a swimming pool (Cina). And back streets to run on, even though the presence of stray dogs in about every road making running broken and haphazard (never run by a dog!, which is my rule since a tiny but angry dog bit my ankle in Caracas!). Running splits up hill a few times every morning was great training! There is furthermore the possibility of sport climbing in nearby San Sebastian de Tutla, as I experienced with Aventours, a local guiding company. And bouldering in an even closer gym.

sunset on Riou Island [jatp]

bonjour Marseille [jatp]