Domaine de Mortiès [in the New York Times]

“I’m not sure how we found Domaine de Mortiès, an organic winery at the foothills of Pic St. Loup, but it was the kind of unplanned, delightful discovery our previous trips to Montpellier never allowed.”

Last year,  I had the opportunity to visit and sample (!) from Domaine de Mortiès, an organic Pic Saint-Loup vineyard and winemaker. I have not yet opened the bottle of Jamais Content I bought then. Today I spotted in The New York Times a travel article on A visit to the in-laws in Montpellier that takes the author to Domaine de Mortiès, Pic Saint-Loup, Saint-Guilhem-du-Désert and other nice places, away from the overcrowded centre of town and the rather bland beach-town of Carnon, where she usually stays when visiting. And where we almost finished our Bayesian Essentials with R! To quote from the article, “Montpellier, France’s eighth-largest city, is blessed with a Mediterranean sun and a beautiful, walkable historic centre, a tourist destination in its own right, but because it is my husband’s home city, a trip there never felt like a vacation to me.” And when the author mentions the owner of Domaine de Mortiès, she states that “Mme. Moustiés looked about as enthused as a teenager working the checkout at Rite Aid”, which is not how I remember her from last year. Anyway, it is fun to see that visitors from New York City can unexpectedly come upon this excellent vineyard!

packed off!!!

Deliverance!!! We have at last completed our book! Bayesian Essentials with R is off my desk! In a final nitty-gritty day of compiling and recompiling the R package bayess and the LaTeX file, we have reached versions that were in par with our expectations. The package has been submitted to CRAN (it has gone back and forth a few times, with requests to lower the computing time in the examples: each example should take less than 10s, then 5s…), then accepted by CRAN, incl. a Windows version, and the book has be sent to Springer-Verlag. This truly is a deliverance for me as this book project has been on my work horizon almost constantly for more than the past two years, led to exciting times in Luminy, Carnon and Berlin, has taken an heavy toll on my collaborations and research activities, and was slowly turning into a unsavoury chore! I am thus delighted Jean-Michel and I managed to close the door before any disastrous consequence on either the book or our friendship could develop. Bayesian Essentials with R is certainly an improvement compared with Bayesian Core, primarily by providing a direct access to the R code. We dearly hope it will attract a wider readership by reducing the mathematical requirements (even though some parts are still too involved for most undergraduates) and we will keep testing it with our own students in Montpellier and Paris over the coming months. In the meanwhile, I just enjoy this feeling of renewed freedom!!!

Core [still] minus one…

Another full day spent working with Jean-Michel Marin on the new edition of Bayesian Core (soon to be Bayesian Essentials with R!) and the remaining hierarchical Bayes chapter… I have reread and completed the regression and GLM chapters, sent to very friendly colleagues for a last round of comments. Now, I am essentially idle, waiting for Jean-Michel to finish his part on the hierarchical Bayes chapter, so that I can do the final editing.round. Jean-Michel had a very long day on that chapter, leaving Montpellier at 5am to return only at half past midnight, due to massive delays in the train schedule (which is why I always fly to Montpellier…)

Core minus one!

Jean-Michel Marin visited me in Paris last week and, besides taking part in Pierre’s PhD defence, we made enough progress to close two more chapters of the new edition of Bayesian Core (soon to be Bayesian Essentials with R!) This follows the good work session we had in Carnon where we also completed two chapters (although it was hard to convince anyone that renting a flat by the Mediterranean sea was at all connected with…work! While it was: the only breaks I took were my morning runs…). There just remains one single chapter to complete, now, the one on hierarchical Bayes models. By all means, I dearly want to see it done by November 1!!!

Étang du Grec, Carnon