Archive for Charles de Gaulle
a day in London
Posted in pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags Appeal of 18 June, Bayesian Adversarial Privacy, Charles de Gaulle, day trip, Department of Mathematics, Eurostar, Kings College London, London, privacy, seminar, statistics seminar, Strand, UK on June 18, 2026 by xi'an
la lutte capitale [cover]
Posted in Books, Kids, pictures with tags Allied troops, Arc de Triomphe, Champs-Elysées, Charles de Gaulle, commemoration, cover, editorial, French history, FTP-MOI, Libé, liberation of Paris, Madeleine Riffaud, national narrative, Paris, Pétain, Résistance on August 24, 2024 by xi'an
“It is clearly the most spectacular transfer operation in our national history: on August 25, 1944, the French Résistance offered its heroïsm and its dead to the entire Paris population and the whole Nation, thus allowing all French people to find solace and absolution in the mythology of a capital that had liberated itself, a military triumph of a unanimously resisting France. The relegation of American soldiers and other foreigners who had fought in the streets of Paris, the collective erasure of the triumphant welcome of Maréchal Pétain on the Champs-Elysées a mere four months earlier, and the hurried sanctification of a mostly unknown de Gaulle would participate in making such a massive mystification possible. There is not doubt that it was necessary in the context of a wounded nation and its traumatized capital city; after all, what national narrative is more compelling than one of a population that sets itself free?” Dov Alfon, Libération, 24 Aug 2024
BNP13
Posted in Mountains, pictures, Running, Statistics, Travel with tags Bayesian non-parametrics, Bernstein-von Mises theorem, Biometrika, BNP13, Bruno de Finetti, Charles de Gaulle, Chile, conference, ISBA, jetlag, label switching, Lago Llanquihue, optimal coupling, optimal transport, parallel MCMC, Patagonia, Puerto Varas on October 28, 2022 by xi'an
BNP13 is set in this incredible location on a massive lake (almost as large as Lac Saint Jean!) facing several tantalizing snow-capped volcanoes… My trip from Paris to Puerto Varas was quite smooth if relatively longish (but I slept close to 8 hours on the first leg and busied myself with Biometrika submissions the rest of the way). Leaving from Paris at midnight proved a double advantage as this was one of the last flights leaving, with hardly anyone in the airport. On Sunday, I arrived early enough to take a quick dip in Lake Llanquihue which was fairly cold and choppy!
Overall the conference is quite exhilarating as all talks are of interest and often covering on-going research. This may be one of the most engaging meetings I have attended in the past years! Plus a refreshing variety of topics and seniority in the speakers.
To start with a bang!, Sonia Petrone (Bocconi) gave a very nice plenary lecture in the most auspicious manner, covering her recent works on Bayesian prediction as an alternative way to run Bayesian inference (in connection with the incoming Read Paper by Fong et al.). She covered so much ground that I got lost before long (jetlag did not help!). However, an interesting feature underlying her talk is that, under exchangeability, the sequence of predictives converges to a random probability measure, a de Finetti way to construct the prior that is based on predictives. Avoiding in a sense the model and the prior on the parameters of that process. (The parameter is derived from the infinite exchangeable [or conditionally iid] sequence, but the sequence of predictives need be defined.) The drawback is that this approach involves infinite sequences, with practical truncation to a finite horizon being an approximation whose precision / error may prove elusive to characterise. The predictive approach also allows to recover a limiting Normal distribution (not a Bernstein-von Mises type!) and hence credible intervals on parameters and distributions.
While this is indeed a BNP conference (!), I was surprised to see lot of talks paying attention to clustering and even to mixtures, with again a recurrent imprecision on the meaning of a cluster. (Maybe this was already the case for BNP11 in Paris but I may have been too busy helping with catering to notice!) For instance, Brian Trippe (MIT) gave a quick intro on his (AISTATS 2022) work on parallel MCMC with coupling. As unbiased MCMC strongly improving upon naïve parallel MCMC relative to the computing cost. With an interesting example where coupling is agnostic to the labeling of random partitions in clustering problems, involving optimal transport, manageable in O(K³log(K)) time when K is the number of clusters.
a journal of the plague year [long weekend reviews]
Posted in Books, Kids, pictures with tags amazon associates, Arnaldur Indriðason, Athèe sur Cher, Bléré, book reviews, Charles de Gaulle, chayotte, Daniel Defoe, De Gaulle airport, Denmark, films, Goussainville, Halldór Laxness, homecooking, homegrown vegetables, Iceland, Journal of the Plague Year, lockdown, MIchelin starred restaurant, Morocco, on the Internet nobody knows you're a dog, Roissy, Shannara chronicles, TV series on August 15, 2020 by xi'an
Read Thinblade, ordered by mistake as I confused the author David Wells for another more famous one! An absolute disaster, from the poor quality of the printed-on-order self-published amazon-made copy to the abyssal style of the author (or of his dog). The story has no depth and no originality [a teenager discovers he must save the World against an evil entity released from captivity and gathers a team of un.be.lie.va.ble followers], the characters are uni-dimensional, either unbelievably good or complete evil and a colour comes with them to tell the hero which is which. The style (or lack thereof!) is massively indigest, with numerous repetitions about the feelings and questionings of the central characters, plus an hilarious focus on food, all menus being included in the text!, same endless drones about the incredible beauty of the visited castles a few days of ride from the hero’s farm. The plot is, again, laughably simplistic, making the Shannara books I read a few months ago sounding like an elaborate literary construct, and completely predictable. I cannot imagine myself or anyone else’s dog reading further books in the series…
Watched The Old Guard after an exhausting day, including a (physical) trip to a dreaded DIY st
ore!, after reading a somewhat lukewarm review in The New Yorker… I found out later that the film is based on a comics series with the same title. And it shows from the lack of real plot (need to get quickly to Afghanistan? just drop out from a freight train in the middle of Sudan…) to the predictability of the story (set-up heroes fight bad guys and at the end, guess what, …), to the massive amount of stale gun fights with the addition of archaic weapons (to make sure everyone understands the old guard is really old!). The funniest part is actually taking place in Goussainville, France, in the ghost section of this town located on the path of De Gaulle airport planes (and thus evacuated, but not demolished), and in its Roman church (listed, hence intact!). The lack of moral imperative or of higher being driving such immortal killers, who mostly seem tired of said immortality, and the absence of connection with the locals (as e.g. in the scenes taking place in Morocco) do not make this B movie any better. (And the French character definitely has an English accent!)
Had a chance lunch in a Michelin recommended restaurant, on the road to Chenonceau and a family vacation, as we were looking for an open restaurant. The haddock appetizer was fantastic (and enough!), while the trout was not so great, presumably frozen, even though the vegetables were original (incl. chayotte) and yummy.
Read Konungsbók (The King’s Book) by Arnaldur Indriðason, found on my mother’s bookshelves, which is a stand-alone book more of the “involuntary spy” type found in Eric Ambler‘s stories than the usual social theme detective story favoured by Indriðason. While the two involuntary spies in the story are indeed two archeolinguists blundering their way through implausible situations, against hidding Nazis and East German police, as Ambler’s The Dark Frontier, the appeal of the book is in the quest for the ultimate Icelandic saga that would close the nation’s history, The King’s Book, towards recovering other foundational and historical documents hoarded by Denmark. At some point, Halldór Guðjónsson Laxness gets the Nobel Prize in Literature, which first stuns the characters into stupefied pride and second helps them into making another unlikely escape. What I enjoyed in the novel is the feeling of ultimate importance attached to the sagas and their role in cementing Iceland as a genuine nation (again connecting with Laxness, whose books described the social desagregation produced by the American occupation).
appel du 18 juin
Posted in Statistics with tags 18 juin 1940, appel du 18 juin, BBC, Charles de Gaulle, comics, De Gaulle à la plage, French resistance, Jean-Yves Ferri, satire, Winston Churchill, WW II on June 18, 2020 by xi'an
