a journal of the plague, sword, and famine year

Read over the last week of 2022 and in the plane to India, three books by Katherine Addison, The Goblin Emperor and both volumes of The Cemeteries of Amalo. While the steampunk side is very light, the universe is rather well-conceived and the stories compelling, esp. the duology that follows a priest able to connect with recently deceased people, towards seeking murderers or scone recipes. Too much introspection and self-pity, too many descriptions of itineraries in an imaginary city, unnecessarily complicated names, but pleasant nonetheless, with a fascination with (imaginary) teas and tea-houses. I also read All the Horses of Iceland, which turned out to be an historical novel on an early Icelander’s trip to Mongolia and his bringing home the ancestors of the famed horses of Iceland. Very well-written and full of historical tidbits.

While visiting Ivan Vautier’s restaurant in Caen with a scallop menu was a continuation of a family (almost) tradition, I cooked very little over the period except for making my own garam masala from spices I bought in India. Put to use in weekly fish curries. I also tried to bake dosa (ದೋಸೆ), this very thin rice-flour crêpe ubiquitous in South India, but it ended up closer to a galette!

Watched most of The Good Detective, a rather conventional Korean TV series (meaning the same police stations, endless shots of police stations from outside, post-work dinner parties, intricate blackmail situations, widespread corruption, massive conflicts of interest, as in series earlier watched). But enough originality to keep me interested. And second-watched Belfast in the plane to India, a black-and-white film by Kenneth Branagh, focusing on a Protestant family during “The Troubles” and sounding (!) rather engaging, if possibly soppy (as sound was off).

a journal of the plague, sword, and famine year

Read two successive books about seeking lost sisters, The Last House on Needless Street and Second Sister, after finishing the third book in a row involving a dead god, aptly named Three parts dead. This third one was rather enjoyable, thanks to the world construction, except for a blah ending. The first one, by Catriona Ward, is perplexing, complex and frankly a bit stretched in its gradual exposition of a multiple personality (disorder) patient. The “horror” side never really set for me, which is fine as it never does. Furthermore, this is the very first book I ever read where I saw a few words (correctly) written in Breton, as well as a thread with the Breton myth of ar Ankou, the local Death personification. Kudos for that! The second one, a physical book that I picked rather instinctively / hurriedly in a Barnes & Noble in Philadelphia is a thriller set in Hong Kong. Despite a bit too much of infodump on internet (in)security and hacking, and some caricaturesque sides, incl. the final coup de théâtre!, I enjoyed it as a page-turner. (But I now wonder if I am not getting prejudiced against Kindle books..!) Except for the anti-protest paragraph. Also read a nice BD, Les Animaux Dénaturés, borrowed from Andrew, which is an adaptation the 1952 book by Vercors, that I saw eons ago as a theatre play. The interrogation on what constitutes humanity (vs. simianity) is the driving force of the story, but it is somewhat marred by the killing of a newborn child that seems to negate the whole fight of the main characters.

Thanks to a short (train) visit to Coventry, I stayed overnight in the center of the city and enjoyed a fabulous dinner with friends at Jinseon Korean BBQ Restaurant, recently reviewed by Jay Rayner in The Guardian. Marinated thin slices of beef, pork, and lamb almost immediately cooked on the white hot (ring) coals, along rice and plenty of kimchi and hot sauce. And a sip of soju. Not an everyday fare, for sure, but quite delightful (and even more as my single true meal over two days!)

Watched a fraction of Swedish Black Crab, with Naomi Rapace playing the central character, but despite potential connections with the current survival war of Ukraine against the Russian terror, I quickly lost interest in the very shallow plot and in the accumulation of unrealistic scenes and heavily programmed eliminations of the characters (sorry for the spoiler!). For one thing, expert skaters skating 100km should not take days to cover the distance. For another, a military commando operating in the far North should wear appropriate clothes, not a sweater and a loose scarf!  Luckily enough, I have had no screen nearby [me] to distract me on my round trip flight to NYC from reviewing Biometrika submissions. (The flight back to Paris amazingly took less than 6 hours, thanks to extremely strong tail winds.)

ABC in Grenoble, 19-20 March 2020 [registration open]

Reminding readers that the next occurrence of the “ABC in…” workshops will very soon take place in Grenoble, France, on 19-20 March 2020. Confirmed speakers and sessions (with more to come) are

Misspecified models

• Guillaume Dehaene (EPFL, Switzerland) TBA
• Gael Martin (Monash University, Australia) Focused Bayesian Prediction
• Tommaso Rigon (Duke University, USA) TBA

Links with Machine Learning

• Flora Jay (Université d’Orsay, France) TBA
• Pierre-Alexandre Mattei (Inria Sophia Antipolis – Méditerranée, France) Partially Exchangeable Networks and Architectures for Learning Summary Statistics in Approximate Bayesian Computation
• Dennis Prangle (Newcastle University, UK) Scalable approximate inference for state space models with normalising flows

As in most earlier versions of the “ABC in…”workshops (ABC in Paris, London, Roma, &tc.), we are aiming at a workshop atmosphere and, thanks to local sponsors, the registration fees are null, but registration is compulsory. And now open!

I also remind ‘Og’s readers that Grenoble can be easily reached by fast trains from Paris, Roissy, Geneva and Lyon. (There are also flights to Grenoble airport from Warwick, as well as Bristol, Edinburgh, London, Manchester, Rotterdam, Stockholm, Warsaw, but this is less convenient than flying to Lyon Saint-Exupery airport and then catching a direct train at the airport.) To add to the appeal of the place, the workshop occurs during the skiing season, with three mountain ranges in the close vicinity. Making ABski a genuine possibility for the weekend after!

ABC in Grenoble, 19-20 March 2020

The next occurrence of the “ABC in…” workshops will take place in Grenoble, France, on 19-20 March 2020. Both local organising and international scientific committees have been constituted and the program should soon be constructed, along with calls to contributions launched at the same time. As in most earlier versions of the workshops (ABC in Paris, London, Roma, &tc.), we are aiming at a workshop atmosphere and, thanks to local sponsors, the registration fees if any will be low.

Grenoble can be easily reached by fast trains from Paris, Roissy, Geneva and Lyon. (There are also flights to Grenoble airport from Warwick, as well as Bristol, Edinburgh, London, Manchester, Rotterdam, Stockholm, Warsaw, but this is less convenient than flying to Lyon Saint-Exupery airport and catching a fast train at the airport.) To add to the appeal of the place, the workshop occurs during the skiing season, with three mountain ranges in the close vicinity. Making ABski a genuine possibility for the weekend after!

ABC intro for Astrophysics

Today I received in the mail a copy of the short book published by edp sciences after the courses we gave last year at the astrophysics summer school, in Autrans. Which contains a quick introduction to ABC extracted from my notes (which I still hope to turn into a book!). As well as a longer coverage of Bayesian foundations and computations by David Stenning and David van Dyk.