Young Americans

I heard this song from David Bowie’s 1975 album on the [national public] radio the other day and it reminded me this was one of the first LPs I bought… and played till it was no longer audible.

the last argument of drivers

When vaguely listening to the national public radio France Inter last night, while cooking dinner, I heard Patrick Septiers, president of le conseil départemental de Seine et Marne, express his (electorate catering) opposition to the new 80km/h speed limit on national and departmental roads on the most rational (!) argument that delivery trucks drove at that speed already and hence that the speed limit would “force” car drivers to break the law to pass trucks. Along with similarly rational claims to have each department regulate its speed limits on the basis it was financing most roads. (I had another illustration of the rationality above when walking by a big SUV this morning, with a large sticker against wind farms.)

Johnnysteria

La déraisonnable efficacité des mathématiques

Although it went completely out of my mind, thanks to a rather heavy travel schedule, I gave last week a short interview about the notion of mathematical models, which got broadcast this week on France Culture, one of the French public radio channels. Within the daily La Méthode Scientifique show, which is a one-hour emission on scientific issues, always a [rare] pleasure to listen to. (Including the day they invited Claire Voisin.) The theme of the show that day was about the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics, with the [classical] questioning of whether it is an efficient tool towards solving scientific (and inference?) problems because the mathematical objects pre-existed their use or we are (pre-)conditioned to use mathematics to solve problems. I somewhat sounded like a dog in a game of skittles, but it was interesting to listen to the philosopher discussing my relativistic perspective [provided you understand French!]. And I appreciated very much the way Céline Loozen the journalist who interviewed me sorted the chaff from the wheat in the original interview to make me sound mostly coherent! (A coincidence: Jean-Michel Marin got interviewed this morning on France Inter, the major public radio, about the Grothendieck papers.)

major confUSion

In a recent evening talk-show on France Inter, the French national public radio, the debate was about the [bad] surprise election of the donald and the fact that the media had missed the result, (self-)blaming a disconnection with the “real” country. One of the discussants, Julia Cagé, Professor of Economics at Science Po’, started the discussion with the amazing confusion [at 5’55”] between the probability that Hillary Clinton would win [evaluated at 84% on the last day] and the percentage of votes in her favour [which was around that figure in Manhattan]…

On a related if minor theme, my post on Flaxman et al.’s early [if preliminary] analysis of the said election got so many views that it became the most popular post for 2016! (If not competing with Ross Ihaka’s call to simply start over with R!)

And yet another related entry today in Libération, blaming the disastrous result partly on the social media and their algorithms (again!) that favour items of information (or dis-information) from the same perspective and do not rank those items by their reliability… The author of the tribune is an econometrician at Essec, but there is no methodological content in this ideological entry that seems to call for a super-monitor which would impose (how?) diversity and (which?) ranking on social media. A post-truth era, for sure! Shifting the blame from the deplorable voters themselves to anything else…

life and death along the RER B, minus approximations

While cooking for a late Sunday lunch today [sweet-potatoes röstis], I was listening as usual to the French Public Radio (France Inter) and at some point heard the short [10mn] Périphéries that gives every weekend an insight on the suburbs [on the “other side’ of the Parisian Périphérique boulevard]. The idea proposed by a geographer from Montpellier, Emmanuel Vigneron, was to point out the health inequalities between the wealthy 5th arrondissement of Paris and the not-so-far-away suburbs, by following the RER B train line from Luxembourg to La Plaine-Stade de France…

The disparities between the heart of Paris and some suburbs are numerous and massive, actually the more one gets away from the lifeline represented by the RER A and RER B train lines, so far from me the idea of negating this opposition, but the presentation made during those 10 minutes of Périphéries was quite approximative in statistical terms. For instance, the mortality rate in La Plaine is 30% higher than the mortality rate in Luxembourg and this was translated into the chances for a given individual from La Plaine to die in the coming year are 30% higher than if he [or she] lives in Luxembourg. Then a few minutes later the chances for a given individual from Luxembourg to die are 30% lower than he [or she] lives in La Plaine…. Reading from the above map, it appears that the reference is the mortality rate for the Greater Paris. (Those are 2010 figures.) This opposition that Vigneron attributes to a different access to health facilities, like the number of medical general practitioners per inhabitant, does not account for the huge socio-demographic differences between both places, for instance the much younger and maybe larger population in suburbs like La Plaine. And for other confounding factors: see, e.g., the equally large difference between the neighbouring stations of Luxembourg and Saint-Michel. There is no socio-demographic difference and the accessibility of health services is about the same. Or the similar opposition between the southern suburban stops of Bagneux and [my local] Bourg-la-Reine, with the same access to health services… Or yet again the massive decrease in the Yvette valley near Orsay. The analysis is thus statistically poor and somewhat ideologically biased in that I am unsure the data discussed during this radio show tells us much more than the sad fact that suburbs with less favoured populations show a higher mortality rate.

another ultimate argument

Yet another astounding argument by Gérard Longuet, who showed on France Inter last night on a debate about the Minsk agreement  that his perspective on history was as unusual as his views on genetics:

“En fait, il y a deux pays qui ont envahi la Russie, c’est la France et l’Allemagne…”

[Translation: In fact, there are only two countries that invaded Russia, France and Germany]. Missing the Polish-Moscovite War of 1605-1618 and the Swedish invasion of Russia in 1708-1709…