Insane craving for food

Within a couple of weeks, I read two related US stories about ordering food from an insanely far destination, like hand-made frozen pizza from Napoli, Italia, or like one startup called Goldbelly ships frozen food made by some restaurants nationwide. (With a motto of Whatever [food] they dream of, wherever they are.) While I am not consistent in consuming non-local food and drinks, like my mass orderings of Italian wines and Darjeeling teas, and while I’d love to get a new taste of Toukoul’s Ethiopian dishes, a creamy sepia risotto from Da Franz, an okonomiyaki from any street stall in Osaka, and many many other dishes from all over the World, it sounds to me rather debatable to have a special single meal prepared on the other side of the World and delivered immediately to one’s table… Furthermore, one of the perks of dining at fine restaurants is exactly to dine at fine restaurants, not in one’s own room, and having starred chefs’ dishes ending up in reheated frozen plastic containers is certainly killing a major share of the experience.

going blonde

In case you are currently visiting Edinburgh, e.g. for ISBA 2018, and wondering where to have lunch or dinner, there is a wee restaurant a bit out of the [tourist] way called Blonde, where I ate several times during ICMS workshops. It is located on St. Leonards Street, next to Rebus‘ former offices!, and serves original and tasty cuisine, with a friendly and unassuming service and vegetarian options. It is but a few blocks away [south] from the conference location, towards Arthur’s Seat as an iconic background. And at a fairly reasonable price. Including the wine list.

Bayes-250, Edinburgh

       

On September 5-7, I am attending Bayes-250 at the University of Edinburgh. I arrived under a blazing sun that showed Arthur’s Seat in full glory! (I realised I had never seen it in the sun before!)

My talk is a short version of the ABC in London talk about ABC model choice, in connection with the recently published PNAS paper.

On Monday afternoon, David Dunson gave a plenary talk on the use of tensors in Bayesian non-parametric modeling and the possibilities offered by this highly malleable tool that made me look forward reading his 2009 JASA paper with Xing. In the evening, David Spiegelhalter delivered a great (and well-attended) public lecture on the Bayesian nature of risk that made me think further about the de Finetti‘s “probability does not exist”, a declaration that had irked me until then. (And on which I will expand in a later comment on Error and Inference.) We ended up the day in Blonde, a nice restaurant we had already enjoyed during the mixture meeting in 2009.