Archive for Savoie
Les Drus [jatp]
Posted in Statistics with tags Chamonix, Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, French Alps, jatp, Les Drus, Mont Blanc, Savoie, Savoy, ski resorts, snow, the mountains are calling, winter on February 21, 2020 by xi'an
MHC2020
Posted in pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags clustering, conference, France, French Alps, hidden Markov models, Institut de Mathématique d'Orsay, mixtures of distributions, Orsay, Paris suburbs, Savoie, Yvette on October 15, 2019 by xi'an
There is a conference on mixtures (M) and hidden Markov models (H) and clustering (C) taking place in Orsay on June 17-19, next year. Registration is free if compulsory. With about twenty confirmed speakers. (Irrelevant as the following remark is, this is the opportunity to recall the conference on mixtures I organised in Aussois 25 years before! Which website is amazingly still alive at Duke, thanks to Mike West, my co-organiser along with Kathryn Roeder and Gilles Celeux. When checking the abstracts, I found only two presenters common to both conferences, Christophe Biernaki and Jiahua Chen. And alas several names of departed friends.)
Chamonix snapshot #3 [jatp]
Posted in Kids, Mountains, pictures, Running, Travel with tags Alps, Chamonix, Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, dusk, France, jatp, mist, Savoie, Savoy, ski, smoke, vacations on March 10, 2018 by xi'an
Chamonix snapshot [jatp]
Posted in Mountains, pictures, Running, Travel with tags Aiguille du Midi, Chamonix, jatp, Mont Blanc, raven, Savoie, winter sports on March 9, 2018 by xi'an
Forte di Bard
Posted in Kids, Mountains, pictures, Travel, University life, Wines with tags Aussois, Bard, Elliot Erwitt, Forte di Bard, Italian Alps, Italian unification, Italy, Marc Chagall, MCMSki, Napoléon Bonaparte, O'Bayes, Savoie, Vale d'Aosta on August 4, 2016 by xi'an
After our aborted attempt at Monte Rosa, Abele Blanc treated us to a quick visit to Forte di Bard, a 19th Century military fortress in the Valley of Aosta [a first version of which was razed by Napoleon’s troops in 1800] on top the medieval village of Bard. Ironically, the current fortress never saw action as Napoleon’s siege was the last invasion of the kingdom of Savoy by French troops.
The buildings are impressive, so seamlessly connected to the rock spur that supports them that they appear to have grown out of it. They 
reminded me of Vauban’s fortresses, with the feeling that they were already outdated when they got built. (On the French Savoy side, there is a series of fortresses that similarly faced no battle as they were designed to keep the French out, becoming overnight useless when this part of Savoy was ceded to France in exchange for its support of the unification of Italy. For instance, there is such a fort in Aussois, which now houses an hostel, a gastronomical restaurant [we enjoyed at O’Bayes 03], and a via ferrata…)
The fortress 
has been recently and beautifully renovated with the help of the Italian State and of the European Union. It houses conferences and art exhibits. Like those on Marc Chagall and Elliot Erwitt that we briefly saw, missing the massive museum of the Alps… A few dozen kilometers from Torino, it would be a perfect location for a small workshop, albeit not large enough for a future MCMski.
