Bill’s 80th!!!

“It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times”
[Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities (which plays a role in my friendship with Bill!)]

My flight to NYC last week was uneventful and rather fast and I worked rather well, even though the seat in front of me was inclined to the max for the entire flight! (Still got glimpses of Aline and of Deepwater Horizon from my neighbours.) Taking a very early flight from Paris was great making a full day once in NYC,  but “forcing” me to take a taxi, which almost ended up in disaster since the Über driver did not show up. At all. And never replied to my message. Fortunately trains were running, I was also running despite the broken rib, and I arrived at the airport some time before access was closed, grateful for the low activity that day. I also had another bit of a worrying moment at the US border control in JFK as I ended up in a back-office of the Border Police after the machine could not catch my fingerprints. And another stop at the luggage control as my lack of luggage sounded suspicious!The conference was delightful in celebrating Bill’s carreer and kindness (tinted with the most gentle irony!). Among stories told at the banquet, I was surprised to learn of Bill’s jazz career side, as I had never heard him play the piano or the clarinet! Even though we had chatted about music and literature on many occasions. Since our meeting in 1989… The (scientific side of the) conference included many talks around shrinkage, from loss estimation to predictive estimation, reminding me of the roaring 70’s and 80’s [James-Stein wise]. And demonstrating the impact of Bill’s wor throughout this era (incl. on my own PhD thesis). I started wondering at the (Bayesian) use of the loss estimate, though, as I set myself facing two point estimators attached with two estimators of their loss: it did not seem a particularly good idea to systematically pick the one with the smallest estimate (and Jim Berger confirmed this feeling on a later discussion). Among the talks on less familiar topics (of mine), I discovered work of Genevera Allen‘s on inferring massive network for neuron connections under sparse information. And of Emma Jingfei Zhang, equally centred on network inference, with applications to brain connectivity.

In a somewhat remote connection with Bill’s work (and our joint and hilarious assessment of Pitman closeness), I presented part of our joint and current work with Adrien Hairault and Judith Rousseau on inferring the number of components in a mixture by Bayes factors when the alternative is an infinite mixture (i.e., a Dirichlet process mixture). Of which Ruobin Gong gave a terrific discussion. (With a connection to her current work on Sense and Sensitivity.)

I was most sorry to miss Larry Wasserman’s and Rob Strawderman’s talk to rush back to the airport, the more because I am sure Larry’s talk would have brought a new light on causality (possibly equating it with tequila and mixtures!). The flight back was uneventfull, the plane rather empty and I slept most of the time. Overall,  it was most wonderful to re-connect with so many friends. Most of whom I had not seen for ages, even before the pandemic. And to meet new friends. (Nothing original in the reported feeling, just telling that the break in conferences and workshops was primarily a hatchet job on social relations and friendships.)

more, please!

As The Riddler proposed for several weeks in a row a CrossProduct™ puzzle where 3 x n one-digit integers have to be deduced from their rowwise and columnwise products, I attempted writing an R solver by applying a few basic rules repeatedly, which worked for the first two puzzles, if not for the earlier one I solved by paper & pen (mostly) a few weeks ago, and again worked for the final one. The rules I used were to spot unique entries, forced entries by saturation, and forced digits (from the prime factor decomposition) again by saturation. Any further rule to add to the solver? (The R code is currently rather ugly!) Please, some more!

it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair

reading highlights

A reading questionnaire I picked somewhere I cannot remember, a while ago, and filled in the lazy days after X’mas… Could have substituted each entry with dozens of others.

1. Your first memorable reading experience : La Panthère Blanche (a pre-1960 children book about an albinos jaguar in the Amazonia I kept reading as a kid, and then I switched to compulsive bi-yearly reads of David Copperfield…)
2.  Your hidden masterpiece : Kent’s Burial Rites
3. An official masterpiece you could not complete : Melville’s Moby Dick (too much technical jargon)
4. A writer you would dream to meet : Patrick Rothfuss (so that I could hear the end of the trilogy!), Karen Blixen, Victor Hugo, many others
5. A favourite writer you would rather not meet : Louis Céline (definitely not a favourite person!)
6. A book you would like to be the main character : Zeno in Yourcenar’s L’Œuvre au Noir (The Abyss)
7. A book you offer by default : Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day
8. A book that makes you laugh out loud : Paasilina’s The Year of the Hare
9. A book you would rather read in the vernacular : every book not written in French or English

it was the best of times, it was the worst of times