squid games

Following my son’s prodding, I watched the Korean series Squid Games a few weeks ago, before it became a worldwide phenomenon, as illustrated by the French national public radio, France Inter, hosting a talk show with a philosopher and a psychiatrist on the layers of the game! And the French Ministry of Education warning primary and secondary school headmasters of the dangers of copycats in the playgrounds… My overall impression was one of originality with comparison with other K drama series I had watched, even though the realistic early scenes of a deeply indebted and failed father reminded me of several of them, not to mention the beginning of Parasite. The switch to the game playground was much less convincing, with the military organisation of the guards rather caricaturesque, growing worse with the appearance of the fromt row (?) evilmaster, and hitting ludicrous levels with the depraved male clients from all over the World. It seems to me that the series was trying to mix too many layers in its motivations, from the Korean debt culture, to organ trafficking, to keeping family structures, which made the result unconclusive and unsatisfactory. It sounded too artificial to be really dystopic. And knowing most of the characters were going to die (sorry for the spoiler!) did not help in relating to them. But overall I fail to see why this easy twist of children games is such a danger for humanity. Or carrying any deep message to the World. After all, The Most Dangerous Game did not change the course of history!

approximate lasso

Here is a representation of the precision of a kernel density estimate (second axis) against the true value of the density (first axis), which looks like a lasso of sorts, hence the title. I am not sure this tells much, except that the estimated values are close to the true values and that a given value of f(x) is associated with two different estimates, predictably…

R brut