a journal of the plague year [more deconfined reviews]

Took a copy of Room 10 by Åke Edwardson yet again on the book sharing shelves at Dauphine. And read it within a few days, with limited enthusiasm as the story proceeds quite sluggishly, every single clue is driven to its very end, e.g. detailing the examination of security recordings for pages!, the Swedish background is mostly missing, the personal stories of the policemen prove frankly boring, and the final explanations stand way beyond a mere suspension of belief. The book is back on the shelves.

Watched the beginning of the Salvation series and quickly gave up. Because I soon realised it had nothing to do with the Peter Hamilton’s trilogy. And because the story did not seem to get anywhere, despite the impending destruction of Earth by a massive asteroid, turning into an East versus West spy story. And because the scientific aspects and characters were plain ridiculous. And also because the secondary plot about whom should be saved in case of a destruction was quite distasteful in its primitive eugenism.

Read an Indriðason I had not yet read, Sons of dust [Synir duftsins], the first book he wrote, but ironically rather repetitive on the themes of missing fathers, child abuse, social consequences of the second World War allied occupation, found in the subsequent volumes. And a rather unconvincing plot, especially from a genetic engineering perspective. (The book is not currently available in English. I read it in French.)

Eventually came to watch There will be blood, the 2007 masterpiece by Paul Anderson, with Daniel Day-Lewis rendering so impressively the descent into madness of the oil tycoon and his thirst for absolute control, loosing his adopted son in the process. And unable to stop at exposing the duplicity of the preacher whom he fought the entire film. The ending is somewhat less impressive than the rest, maybe because all is finished, but it does not diminish the raw power of this tale. And the music track is perfect, with Brahms’ Violin Concerto as a leitmotiv. A journey into oily darkness…

Stein’s method in machine learning [workshop]

There will be an ICML workshop on Stein’s method in machine learning & statistics, next July 14 or 15, located in Long Beach, CA. Organised by François-Xavier Briol (formerly Warwick), Lester Mckey, Chris Oates (formerly Warwick), Qiang Liu, and Larry Golstein. To quote from the webpage of the workshop

Stein’s method is a technique from probability theory for bounding the distance between probability measures using differential and difference operators. Although the method was initially designed as a technique for proving central limit theorems, it has recently caught the attention of the machine learning (ML) community and has been used for a variety of practical tasks. Recent applications include goodness-of-fit testing, generative modeling, global non-convex optimisation, variational inference, de novo sampling, constructing powerful control variates for Monte Carlo variance reduction, and measuring the quality of Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms.

Speakers include Anima Anandkumar, Lawrence Carin, Louis Chen, Andrew Duncan, Arthur Gretton, and Susan Holmes. I am quite sorry to miss two workshops dedicated to Stein’s work in a row, the other one being at NUS, Singapore, around the Stein paradox.

California fires

“Imagine a leader who defies science, saying these solutions shouldn’t be part of his decision-making on our behalf. Imagine a leader who cares more for his own, convenient option than he does for the people he leads. Imagine an unfit leader. Now imagine a fit one.” Neil Young

Among the many fires that raged and rage throughout the West coast of both US and Canada this year the terrible one that took place in Paradise, near Chico, a few days ago was made much more personal by being the area where we had spent a week on holidays in Lassen National Park. While I think the place escaped the fire, it would be great to hear from the people who hosted us that they are safe… [The quote from Neil Young is related to another fire in Malibu.]

Alex Honnold free solos Freeride (5.13a/7c+)

male masters

Yesterday, I received this wood plaque from the organisers of the San Francisco Marathon! Nice, as I had not expected them to deliver abroad. And with this surprising title of second place in the male masters. After checking on Google (and avoiding a long list of SM sites), it appears that this means the above 40 category, which I had never heard of before. (I would have preferred an above 50 category, obviously! Which appears to exist in some races as the Grand Master category, even better!) Looking further at some of the (running) links, it also appears that categories by weight have been introduced in some races… Not that I can expect to benefit from that further division!