Archive for Eurostar
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
Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine [not a book review]
Posted in Books, Statistics, Travel with tags Advances in Computers, AI, artificial intelligence, Bayesians, Bletchley Park, book review, Britain, doomsday argument, Eurostar, high speed train, I.J. Good, New Statesman, not a book review, Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine on November 6, 2023 by xi'an
eurostar static
Posted in Kids, pictures, Running, Travel with tags child abuse, Eurostar, Gare du Nord, métro static, Nord, Paris, train travel on December 10, 2022 by xi'an
It was most refreshing to hear the (very quiet) conversation of an Australian family sitting in the Eurostar to Paris across me, after being submitted, while waiting to board the train, to an horrid phone conversation of a father (?!) with his teenage child trying to be excused from a math test the same afternoon. (The level of the insults launched at the child would have qualified as child abuse. And cannot be printed here!)
[After entering the very first tunnel, a few minutes after departure] Are we entering France now?
[While still in England] Are we going to see the sea?
[Once in Northern France, crossing the wheat fields of Le Nord] This is very green, but where is the cattle?
visit at Gatsby
Posted in Statistics, Travel, University life with tags ABC, empirical likelihood, Eurostar, Gatsby, London, RKHS, seminar, St. John restaurant, UCL on February 8, 2013 by xi'an
Today I took the Eurostar to London to give a seminar at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, UCL. (Just a few blocks from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Diseases, where I gave an ABC talk last year.) I had great fun, thanks to an uninterrupted sequence of meetings: I got a crash course on RKHS (reproducible kernel Hilbert spaces) by Arthur Gretton, discussed about estimating the number of species, dealing with unknown functions of the parameter in the likelihood, using tests as ABC statistics, and explained how to use empirical likelihoods in non-iid settings. After this full day, we had a superb dinner at St. John, a Michelin starred restaurant with highly enjoyable English cuisine, offering game and offal dishes that reminded me of Le Petit Marguery in Paris… (Not a place for vegetarians, obviously.)
genetics
Posted in Books, Kids, Travel, University life with tags Charles Darwin, Eurostar, evolution, Francis Galton, Genetics, heredity, La Recherche, Le Monde, London, Madagascar, The Economist on April 9, 2012 by xi'an
Today, I was reading in the science leaflet of Le Monde about a new magnitude in sequencing cancerous tumors (wrong link, I know…). This made me wonder whether the sequence of (hundreds of) mutations leading from a normal cell to a cancerous one could be reconstituted in the way a genealogy is. (This reminds me of another exciting genetic article I read in the Eurostar back from London on Thursday, in the Economist, about the colonization of Madagascar by 30 women from the Malay archipelago: “The island was one of the last places on Earth to be settled, receiving its earliest migrants in the middle of the first millennium AD…“)
As a double coincidence, I was reading La Recherche yesterday in the métro to Dauphine, which central theme this month is about heredity beyond genetics. (Double because this also connected with the meeting in London.) The keyword is epigenetics, namely the activation or inactivation of a gene and the hereditary transmission of this character w/o a genetic mutation. This is quite interesting as it implies the hereditability of some adopted traits, i.e. forces one to reconsider the nature versus nurture debate. (This sentence is another input due to Galton!) It also implies that a much faster rate of species differentiation due to environmental changes (than the purely genetic one) is possible, which may sound promising in the light of the fast climate changes we are currently facing. However, what I do not understand is why the journal included a paper on the consequences of epigenetics on the Darwinian theory of evolution and… intelligent design. Indeed, I do not see why the inclusion of different vectors in the hereditary process would contradict Darwin’s notion of natural selection. Or even why considering a scientific modification or replacement of the current Darwinian theory of evolution would be an issue. Charles Darwin wrote his book in 1859, prior to the start of genetics, and the immense advances made since then led to modifications and adjustments from his original views. Without involving any irrational belief in the process.
