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a journal of the Hugo year (post ultimum, flight mode)

Posted in Books, Travel, Wines with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 18, 2026 by xi'an

Still banking on the Hugo Award package, as I realised the Best series category also cames with most of the novels, I started reading th Goblin King series, by Katherine Addison, quickly realising I had already read (and enjoyed) the first volume. Thanks to being stuck in Sapporo airports for an unspecified duration, I went through two of the volumes, which are enticing enough if somewhat slow and focussing on very mundane aspects like the layering of the city where the action takes place and its tram lines. (And never omitting a single meal or tea type, the more annoyingly because these types are all made up!) Another shortlisted series is John Scalzi’s Old Man War, of which I already read four volumes and enjoyed very much, if not to the point of reading the seven of them. Maybe later! I also read the novelette Automatic Noodle, which features a group of abandoned robots starting a (Xi’an!) noodle company by making almost perfect biang biang pulled noodles. (With the intricate ideogram 𰻞𰻞麵) After almost a month in Japan eating soba at least once a day (!), it should have appealed to me but it did not, as the robotic aspects were very light while the whole story fell flat and stale, far from the expected dish! But it made me curious to attempt to try making the noodles..!

Watched (over the Arctic Ocean!) Au revoir là–haut (See you up there), a 2017 movie by Albert Dupontel about a couple of WW I trench veterans conceiving a heist by selling war memorials that never materialise. The story is told on the fantastic realism side, methinks too much!, but it vividly reminded me of a WW I museum in La Somme I visited a few years ago, where a whole section was dedicated to the (rough) treatment of disfigured soldiers with missing face parts… And of the birth of neuroplastic surgery.

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Round-robin (with Claude)

Posted in Books, Kids, R, Statistics, Wines with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 15, 2026 by xi'an

A few days ago I had a coffee in Paris with my long-time friend (and former Statistics & Computing editor) Gilles Celeux, and he mentioned me stopping solving and posting maths puzzles like those weekly published by Le Monde. They have indeed vanished with the retirement of the authors, but Gilles added that the arrival of LLMs would have made the exercise moot. I disagreed as (i) the fun of solving the puzzle on my own  has not gone away and (ii) the pedagogical appeal of the puzzle and its resolution remains. As the next Fiddler puzzle arrived in my mailbox, my resolution was put to the test (contrariwise to the previous entry, which did not require massive computations):

The Fiddler League consists of two teams. Over a season, they play each other 162 times. Each team has an equal chance of winning each game, and the results of games are independent. Over the season, on average, how many games would you expect the team with the better record to have won?

I started on the wrong foot with E[X|X≥81] when X is Bin(162,½), equal to 85.77 (either directly or with a Normal approximation), which differs from my second thought, E[max(X,162-X)]=86.07 (either directly or with a Normal approximation), which is larger because of the reflection produced by max. While the first computation was manageable, the second one seemed to involve simulation and I caved in prompting Claude, which provided the answer along with the connection

E[max(X,162−X)]=E[X∣X≥81](1+p81​)−81p81​

After some expansion, the League boasts 30 teams. Over a season, each team plays each other team five times. (Each team plays a total of 145 games.) Again, each team has an equal chance of winning each game, and the results of games are independent. Over the season, on average, how many games would you expect the team with the best record to have won?

The best record is max(Xi) with each of the 30 Xi‘s a sum of 29 Yij and the Yij=5-Yji distributed as Bin(5,½). The Xi‘s are thus Bin (145,½) but dependent. While I could not figure out a closed form answer for the expectation, a direct Monte Carlo resolution is obviously feasible, with Claude (rather than me) running it over 400 million repetitions, but a 30 dimensional Normal approximation exploiting the correlation of 1/29 between the components leads to roughly 85 as the expected value. (Again computed by a Claudicant simulation.)

While the conclusion that the Normal approximation is pretty accurate with so many terms in the Binomial variates is quite unsurprising, Claude saves me coding time without ruining the puzzle altogether. (And Gemini made me aware that the name of the café where Gilles and I regularly meet, L’Écir, is an Auvergne noun for a local, dangerous, mountain blizzard! Thus linking the place to the foundation of the café by Auvergne expatriates…)

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a journal of the Hugo year (quintum et ultimum)

Posted in Books, Kids, Mountains, pictures, Running, Travel, University life, Wines with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 2, 2026 by xi'an

Read a further and last Hugo best novel contender, Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky, already an Arthur Clarke Awardee 2016 for Children of Time (another first contact story). Of all the works I have read for the Hugos, this is by far the most intellectual and the most hard science book. There is a massive investment in constructing a coherent, ultimately alien, world with its own chemistry and biome. And in unwrapping the interactions between invasive if involuntary so humans and the intelligent species on the planet. This is the opposite of space opera, despite partly hibernating humans travelling in a gigantic spaceship towards securing mining planets. And slow-paced, following a pedestrian escape of an unlucky duo towards an unlikely rescue. What fails imho is the representation of the alien(s)’s train of thought, as it remains all too human. With, as a second, the ability of said aliens to incorporate and exploit human technology almost immediately. While the human technology does not seem to rely in the least on artificial intelligence, apart from autonomous drones. Hence, not ranking first in my list.

Cooked more of the same (soba, tuna, vegs) while in Japan. And visited a wasabi farm!, dating from 1915, cleverly made into a tourist trap. (Where we made fresh wasabi paste from the (local) wasabi root to mix with rice and condiment. And had a wasabi ice cream, in a clash between creamy sweetness and strong pungency! Much more a successful clash than the lavender ice cream the day after….) Also tasted oyaki dumplings filled with pumpkin, daikon, and nozawana, a local delicacy of Nagano.

Travel-wise, the trip through Japan has been mostly seamless (with no bear sighting so far), except for a rental car reservation cancelled for bringing the wrong translation of our licences. I had not realised only official Japanese services by the Japanese Automobile Federation can deliver said translations. This constraint makes sense on one level, as nobody knows the translation was made by a dog on the Internet,  but is also past its shelf-life in the era of LLMs and automated translation engines. (The issue got solved within two days, inducing a big saving on the rental!)

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a journal of the Hugo year (quatro)

Posted in Books, Kids, Mountains, pictures, Running, Travel, University life, Wines with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 27, 2026 by xi'an

Read not a further Hugo best novel contender, but a true (i.e., printed on paper!) book for a novel unconcerned by the Hugo Awards, Yellowface by Rebecca F. Kuang, Who earlier wrote Babel, which I rather enjoyed. This book is not set into a fantasy universe, but deals with a stolen document and the ensuing consequences, mostly in relation with different racial and racist reactions. And accusations of cultural appropriation. This is a very US-centred book, with publishers banking on minorities markets and social media pouring oil on inter-community tensions, and as such not very appealing! Here is yet another infinite-mirror story where an author writes about an author and then more, with too many entries from social media, and an inconsistent, not particularly enticing, main character. In connection with the Hugos, I also read The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar, already a Nebula Award Winner, 2025, and a nice, short, tale of an enchanted land bordering a Victorian England. If nothing like Johnatan Stranger & Mr Norrell (Hugo and Locus awards 2005). The first pages are annoying but then the true story quicks in, more poetical than usual and of a fairy tale quality. And now one more Hugo to go! (Or less!)

Cooked my own okomiyaki in a small restaurant in Omachi, near Nagano, where each table had a hot plate set for this purpose and a detailed set of instructions in Japanese, with pictures. (As well as for the less solid monjayaki.)  I had cooked some earlier and it proved as easy this time, with the realisation that many ingredients could be added. Kimchi octopus and black inked squid for ours. And we had cold soba on the menu for most HM meals since buckwheat was grown in the region. (But no luck with soba or raimogi breads on that week!)

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a journal of the Hugo year (ter)

Posted in Books, Kids, Mountains, pictures, Running, Travel, University life, Wines with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 21, 2026 by xi'an

Read part of another Hugo best novel contender, Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor, which is about a writer getting suddenly famous for an original novel of (voluntarily) rusty robots, but this was too much of an infinite mirror (and too little speculative fiction) that I gave up a third of the way, before anything speculative happened…. And the Hugo (hopeful) novella The Summer War by Naomi Novik, nice tale à la Grimm if not particularly deep. And another Hugo nominated novel The Incandescent by Emily Tesh, a magical boarding school à la Harry Potter, enjoyable enough if missing in villeins besides demons! However, the constant whine of the head teacher about her duties, the glorification of the English boarding school model, and the fixation on the A levels and on getting to Oxford are weighting down my vote… And the Hugo novelette The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For by Cameron Reed, with little appeal. Lots of books, thanks to this long-lasting spell of jetlag!

Cooked cold soba noodles for the week in Nagoya, And (alas!) enjoyed eels in the local histumabashi format. Alas because I discovered afterwards that eels are dramatically threatened to extinction. Given that the fisheries rely on wild eels for the most part.

Watched the whole season of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms in the plane to Tokyo, set in the Game of Thrones universe and quite engaging, even though the (edge) knight’s naïvety is exaggerated, while the scenario shifts suspend belief way too much and too often. The absurd brutality of medieval jousts and tournaments is rendered in strongest terms (but I did not faint!). Reminding me of Scott’s Last Duel.

 

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