Archive for Bernese Alps
Bernese trilogy [15h30]
Posted in Books, Mountains, pictures, Running, Travel with tags alpine climbing, Bernese Alps, Bernese Oberland, Bernese trilogy, Eiger, Heckmair, Jungfrau, Münch, Nicolas Hojac, Nordwand, north faces, Philipp Brugger, record, Schweiz, speed climbing, Stephan Siegrist, Switzerland, Ueli Steck on April 27, 2025 by xi'an
flying static
Posted in Mountains, pictures, Travel with tags Alps, Bernese Alps, clouds, La Fenice, métro static, Venezia on April 11, 2023 by xi'an
[While flying to Venezia, two art professionals were sitting in front of me, talking the entirety of the flight in a rather affected way.]
“La Fenice, j’ai pas du tout envie d’aller là. C’est pas intéressant, j’irais beaucoup plus vers le cinéma italien classique des années 60, avec une vision beaucoup plus sophistiquée…”
over the Bernese Alps [jatp]
Posted in Mountains, pictures, Travel with tags Bernese Alps, Bormio, flight, Graubünden, Italian Alps, jatp, Muveran, Swiss Alps, Switzerland, Ticino on November 4, 2017 by xi'an
Great views of the Bernese and Grisonese Alps on both legs of my trip to and from Venezia. Flying over Les Diablerets, Bormio and many other places I visited over the years..
Ueli Steck dies on Nupse [Ueli Steck tödlich verunglückt]
Posted in Books, Mountains, Running with tags Bernese Alps, Eiger, Everest, Himalayas, mountaineering, Nupse, Switzerland, Ueli Steck on April 30, 2017 by xi'an
Ueli Steck was a Swiss climber renowned for breaking speed records on the hardest routes of the Alps. Including the legendary Eigerwand. And having been evacuated under death threats from the Everest base camp two years ago. I have been following on Instagram his preparation for another speed attempt at Everest the past weeks and it is a hug shock to learn he fell to his death on Nupse yesterday. Total respect to this immense Extrembergsteiger, who has now joined the sad cenacle of top climbers who did not make it back…
R/Rmetrics in Paris [alas!]
Posted in Mountains, pictures, R, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags ABC, andouille de Vire, Bayesian econometrics, Bayesian model choice, Bernese Alps, cmpfun(), Collège des Bernardins, compiler, Eiger, importance sampling, Interlaken, Meielisalp, Mittelegi ridge, Paris, R, Rmetrics, San Antonio, Switzerland, system.time, Thun Lake on June 30, 2014 by xi'an
Today I gave a talk on Bayesian model choice in a fabulous 13th Century former monastery in the Latin Quarter of Paris… It is the Collège des Bernardins, close to Jussieu and Collège de France, unbelievably hidden to the point I was not aware of its existence despite having studied and worked in Jussieu since 1982… I mixed my earlier San Antonio survey on importance sampling approximations to Bayes factors with an entry to our most recent work on ABC with random forests. This was the first talk of the 8th R/Rmetrics workshop taking place in Paris this year. (Rmetrics is aiming at aggregating R packages with econometrics and finance applications.) And I had a full hour and a half to deliver my lecture to the workshop audience. Nice place, nice people, new faces and topics (and even andouille de Vire for lunch!): why should I complain with an alas in the title?!
What happened is that the R/Rmetrics meetings have been till this year organised in Meielisalp, Switzerland. Which stands on top of Thuner See and… just next to the most famous peaks of the Bernese Alps! And that I had been invited last year but could not make it… Meaning I lost a genuine opportunity to climb one of my five dream routes, the Mittelegi ridge of the Eiger. As the future R/Rmetrics meetings will not take place there.
A lunch discussion at the workshop led me to experiment the compiler library in R, library that I was unaware of. The impact on the running time is obvious: recycling the fowler function from the last Le Monde puzzle,
[sourcecode language=”r” gutter=”false”]
> bowler=cmpfun(fowler)
> N=20;n=10;system.time(fowler(pred=N))
user system elapsed
52.647 0.076 56.332
> N=20;n=10;system.time(bowler(pred=N))
user system elapsed
51.631 0.004 51.768
> N=20;n=15;system.time(bowler(pred=N))
user system elapsed
51.924 0.024 52.429
> N=20;n=15;system.time(fowler(pred=N))
user system elapsed
52.919 0.200 61.960
[/sourcecode]
shows a ten- to twenty-fold gain in system time, if not in elapsed time (re-alas!).
