a journal of the plaid [shirt] year

Read The priory of the orange tree, bought in one of the many Montréal bookstores [where I could have purchased many more books!] This fantasy novel was a Goodread fantasy recommended read, plus a NYT best-seller and nominated for some fantasy award, but I am quite surprised by the enthusiastic support. Indeed, I found the book had a very shallow and predictable scenario, with most of the tropes of the genre (e.g., ninja-like fighters, heroes uncovering long-lost magical artefacts, , super-evil entity about to return to life/power, a few predestined characters saving the Universe). Unrealistic events, all-too-convenient coincidences, with little efforts put in the construction of the world, of the magical rules, or of the political structure there. The second half was particularly bad.

Enjoyed very much my week in the Plateau part of Montréal, with the green spots in from of every house, the density of shops (and not only restaurants), and the fantastic network of BiXi stations that made travelling around so easy and essentially free! (Glad I brought my 661 helmet from home, even though it attracted many questions during the conference!). And lived essentially on (Saint-Viateur) bagels and (Kinton) ramens. With a funny linguistic incident when I ordered a bagel [which I pronounced bah-gael in the Parisian way] in a bakery and was offered a baguette!

Watched The Chase, an improbable but funny Korean film about a grumpy old man uncovering a serial killer, helped by a former cop escaped from a psychiatric facility. Given that the heroes were mostly senior citizens, this made for a welcome major change from the series I usually watched. Also came by chance upon the 2003 Japanese anime Tokyo Godfathers, which I found amazing, despite my rare foray into anime! A most unconventional Christmas movie, to watch in July or any other month.

a [delayed] journal of the plague and pestilence year

Read a short story, An Unatural Life, which I found a highly original take on the legal rights of humanoid robots, when a robot on the mining moon Europa stands accused of murder. His (its?) case is taken by a young lawyer, despite her misgivings, and she gradually builds a case. The ending is not fully satisfactory but the fundamental questions behind the story are deep enough for me to recommend the story. And finally gave up on Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, as I could not proceed through the artificiality of the universe construct. (Some friends reported similar defeats!)

Made numerous raspberry purées, as the bushes in our garden deliver non-stop! And further clafoutis and Sonoran tortillas, as well. Also enjoyed an Afghan dinner in Paris, with an incredibly tasty rice dish. (Maybe made better by a week of quasi fasting, following a much less enjoyable experience in a Noirmoutier restaurant..!)

Watched some episodes of Tomorrow, yet another Korean TV drama merging the current era and the afterlife, with an unexciting general thread but some interesting digs into the 1950-1953 Korean War and into the fate of the comfort women enslaved during WW II (in the sense of them being the first occurrences in TV series for me). And Lucid Dream, a Japanese SF movie about entering others’ dreams, à la Interception, but quite poor in its scenario and its acting.

day one at ISBA 22

Started the day with a much appreciated swimming practice in the [alas warm⁺⁺⁺] outdoor 50m pool on the Island with no one but me in the slooow lane. And had my first ride with the biXi system, surprised at having to queue behind other bikes at red lights! More significantly, it was a great feeling to reunite at last with so many friends I had not met for more than two years!!!

My friend Adrian Raftery gave the very first plenary lecture on his work on the Bayesian approach to long-term population projections, which was recently  a work censored by some US States, then counter-censored by the Supreme Court [too busy to kill Roe v. Wade!]. Great to see the use of Bayesian methods validated by the UN Population Division [with at least one branch of the UN

Stephen Lauritzen returning to de Finetti notion of a model as something not real or true at all, back to exchangeability. Making me wonder when exchangeability is more than a convenient assumption leading to the Hewitt-Savage theorem. And sufficiency. I mean, without falling into a Keynesian fallacy, each point of the sample has unique specificities that cannot be taken into account in an exchangeable model. Nice to hear some measure theory, though!!! Plus a comment on the median never being sufficient, recouping an older (and presumably not original) point of mine. Stephen’s (or Fisher’s?) argument being that the median cannot be recursively computed!

Antonietta Mira and I had our ABC session this afternoon with Cecilia Viscardi, Sirio Legramanti, and Massimiliano Tamborino (Warwick) as speakers. Cecilia linked ABC with normalising flows, in collaboration with Dennis Prangle (whose earlier paper on this connection was presented as the first One World ABC seminar). Thus using past simulations to approximate the posterior by a neural network, possibly with a significant increase in computing time when compared with more rudimentary SMC-ABC methods in larger dimensions. Sirio considered summary-free ABC based on discrepancies like Rademacher complexity. Which more or less contains MMD, Kullback-Leibler, Wasserstein and more, although it seems to be dependent on the parameterisation of the observations. An interesting opening at the end was that this approach could apply to non iid settings. Massi presented a paper coauthored with Umberto that had just been arXived. On sequential ABC with a dependence on the summary statistic (hence guided). Further bringing copulas into the game, although this forces another choice [for the marginals] in the method.

Tamara Broderick talked about a puzzling leverage effect of some observations in economic studies where a tiny portion of individuals may modify the significance or the sign of a coefficient, for which I cannot tell whether the data or the reliance on statistical significance are to blame. Robert Kohn presented mixture-of-Gaussian copulas [not to be confused with mixture of Gaussian-copulas!] and Nancy Reid concluded my first [and somewhat exhausting!] day at ISBA with a BFF talk on the different statistical paradigms take on confidence (for which the notion of calibration seems to remain frequentist).

Side comments: First, most people in the conference are wearing masks, which is great! Also, I find it hard to read slides from the screen, which I presume is an age issue (?!) Even more aside, I had Korean lunch in a place that refused to serve me a glass of water, which I find amazing.

Insane craving for food

Within a couple of weeks, I read two related US stories about ordering food from an insanely far destination, like hand-made frozen pizza from Napoli, Italia, or like one startup called Goldbelly ships frozen food made by some restaurants nationwide. (With a motto of Whatever [food] they dream of, wherever they are.) While I am not consistent in consuming non-local food and drinks, like my mass orderings of Italian wines and Darjeeling teas, and while I’d love to get a new taste of Toukoul’s Ethiopian dishes, a creamy sepia risotto from Da Franz, an okonomiyaki from any street stall in Osaka, and many many other dishes from all over the World, it sounds to me rather debatable to have a special single meal prepared on the other side of the World and delivered immediately to one’s table… Furthermore, one of the perks of dining at fine restaurants is exactly to dine at fine restaurants, not in one’s own room, and having starred chefs’ dishes ending up in reheated frozen plastic containers is certainly killing a major share of the experience.

the true meaning of ABC