Archive for Cambodia
horsy new year!
Posted in pictures, Travel with tags ⾺, Cambodia, China, Chinese zodiac, Fire Horse, horse, Japan, Lunar New Year, lunisolar calendar, North Korea, Singapore, South Korea, Year of the Horse on February 17, 2026 by xi'an
a journal of the [end of the] chaos year
Posted in Books, Kids, Mountains, pictures, Running, Travel, Wines with tags Agatha Christie, BBC Radio n4, Berlin, Black Plague, book reviews, California, Cambodia, COVID-19, crow, cuisine, Daniel Defoe, detective stories, fantasy, Frankenstein, horror, horror story, Indian food, Japan, Japanese cinema, Jotunheimen, Journal of the Plague Year, King Olaf, Kumano Kodō, Lancashire, Lenin, melodrama, North Korea, Norway, NSF, olive tree, restaurant, Russian invasion, Scandinavian Mountains, short stories, South Korea, Tokyo, Trondheim, Ukraine, Yatagarasu, Yorkshire on December 31, 2025 by xi'an 
Read the delightful Barrowbreck by Andrew M Hurley, a great collection of short stories is made coherent by its unity of place, a lost, dark, valley between Lancashire and Yorkshire. The stories unfold from the Bronze ages till a near and disastrous future. While the book is often presented as horror fiction, I rather see it as an exploration of an alternate reality, a fantasy just outside our own world. Not inducing dread or unease in the reader. The author demonstrates great skill in setting substantial characters and situations within a few pages, in translating the inner feelings of highly diverse people and, above all, in refraining from providing a definite conclusion to his stories. Some of them are striking enough to remain in my memories for a while!
Apart from an Indian-style vegetable six dishes feast, did not experiment much in the kitchen, in part due to my travelling one week out of two between November and December. But harvested and prepared my olives after collecting about 3 litters of them. (I also tasted a Banh Chhev (in Petit Cambodge, Paris but it failed short from my expectation, neither crispy nor sizzling. And cold.)
Watched As You Stood By, a Korean drama about domestic violence. And then Last Samurai Standing. Adapted from the novel of the same name written by Shogo Imamura. And the rather hilarious movie Good News, a South Korean disaster black comedy film playing a similar trick to Good bye Lenin. Gave up watching an unlucky series of terrible films and TV series. From the cheezy A Man on the Inside (which surely makes Agatha Christie cringe in her grave), to Ichikei’s Crow (a highly unrealistic sequence of near-judicial errors in a Tokyo tribunal, with the redeeming feature of a three-leg crow logo, Yatagarasu, also a guardian on the Kumanokodo), to the pretentious Frankenstein by Guillermo del Toro (where over-prefect Victorian tableaux and crepuscular lighting games kill the scenario even before it is brought to life by Dr. Frankenstein’s steampunk apparatus, aka, the mélo chokes the drama!), to Troll 2, even worse than Troll, pulling on the very same strings as the first film, with the very same house eviscerated again by another strolling troll!, as well as a complete disregard for archaeological dig rules and with the ultimate lame resort to holy water! Catching a few views of the Jotunheimen peaks, though (which we hiked 35 years ago).
Angkor beer
Posted in pictures, Travel, Wines with tags Angkor beer, beer, Cambodia, lager, Sianoukville, Siem Reap on July 20, 2019 by xi'an
La peste et la vigne [book review]
Posted in Books, Kids, Travel with tags book review, Cambodia, fantasy, French book, Joe Abercrombie, mercenary company, plague, Robin Hobb on March 17, 2019 by xi'an
During my trip to Cambodia, I read the second volume of this fantasy cycle in French. Which I liked almost as much as the first volume since the author continues to explore the mystery of the central character Syffe and its relations with some magical forces at play in his universe. As in most stories uniquely centred on a single character point of view the recurring ponderings of Syffe about his role in life, the existence of supernatural forces, and his own sanity may tend to get annoying at time. But the escape from the mines and the subsequent stay in a mountain kingdom are well-paced, especially the description of the plague that allows such an escape. The last section is more connected with the first volume and sees more warfare, again with sudden reversals of fortune (no further spoiler!). The final chapters see a lot explained about many aspects of the story and the raison d’être of the character, even though the very last surprise is somewhat predictable. But opening new vistas for the future volumes. There are still many threads I could have pulled to point some potential influences of earlier cycles, from Stephen Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant chronicles, which I simply hated!, to Robin Hobb’s Soldier’s son. Since both stories convey the feeling of a magical force at the level of the whole land (or universe), with the unprepared and imperfect “hero” able to impact this land in dramatic ways. And again Elizabeth Moon’s Deeds of Paksenarion for the depiction of mercenary companies…
optimal choice among MCMC kernels
Posted in Statistics with tags Angkor Wat, Cambodia, delayed acceptance, filamentary distribution, invariance, invariant measure, Markov kernel, Normandie, population Monte Carlo, Siem Reap, sparsity on March 14, 2019 by xi'an
Last week in Siem Reap, Florian Maire [who I discovered originates from a Norman town less than 10km from my hometown!] presented an arXived joint work with Pierre Vandekerkhove at the Data Science & Finance conference in Cambodia that considers the following problem: Given a large collection of MCMC kernels, how to pick the best one and how to define what best means. Going by mixtures is a default exploration of the collection, as shown in (Tierney) 1994 for instance since this improves on both kernels (esp. when each kernel is not irreducible on its own!). This paper considers a move to local weights in the mixture, weights that are not estimated from earlier simulations, contrary to what I first understood.
As made clearer in the paper the focus is on filamentary distributions that are concentrated nearby lower-dimension sets or manifolds Since then the components of the kernel collections can be restricted to directions of these manifolds… Including an interesting case of a 2-D highly peaked target where converging means mostly simulating in x¹ and covering the target means mostly simulating in x². Exhibiting a schizophrenic tension between the two goals. Weight locally dependent means correction by Metropolis step, with cost O(n). What of Rao-Blackwellisation of these mixture weights, from weight x transition to full mixture, as in our PMC paper? Unclear to me as well [during the talk] is the use in the mixture of basic Metropolis kernels, which are not absolutely continuous, because of the Dirac mass component. But this is clarified by Section 5 in the paper. A surprising result from the paper (Corollary 1) is that the use of local weights ω(i,x) that depend on the current value of the chain does jeopardize the stationary measure π(.) of the mixture chain. Which may be due to the fact that all components of the mixture are already π-invariant. Or that the index of the kernel constitutes an auxiliary (if ancillary) variate. (Algorithm 1 in the paper reminds me of delayed acceptance. Making me wonder if computing time should be accounted for.) A final question I briefly discussed with Florian is the extension to weights that are automatically constructed from the simulations and the target.
