Archive for Fall
leaves & masks [cover]
Posted in Books, Kids, pictures, Travel with tags cover, dead leaves, face mask, Fall, Fall sweep, New York, NYC, The New Yorker on December 13, 2022 by xi'an
streets of Philly [jatp]
Posted in pictures, Running, Travel with tags Fall, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, morning run, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Philly, skyscrapers, USA on November 5, 2022 by xi'an
end-to-end Bayesian learning [CIRM]
Posted in Books, Kids, Mountains, pictures, Running, Statistics, University life with tags Bayesian learning, calanques, call for contributions, Casa Matemática Oaxaca, CIRM, CNRS, Fall, high dimensions, Luminy, Marseille, Méditerranée, mini-courses, Parc National des Calanques, robust Bayesian methods, scalable MCMC, Société Mathématique de France, Sugiton, workshop on February 1, 2021 by xi'an
Next Fall, there will be a workshop at CIRM, Luminy, Marseilles, on Bayesian learning. It takes place 22-29 October 2021 on this wonderful campus at the border with the beautiful Parc National des Calanques, in a wonderfully renovated CIRM building and involves friends and colleagues of mine as organisers and plenary speakers. (I am not involved!, but plan to organise a scalable MCMC workshop there the year after!) The conference is well-supported and the housing fees will be minimal since the centre is also subsidized by CNRS. The deadline for contributed talks and posters is 22 March, while it is 15 June for registration. Hopefully by this time the horizon will have cleared up enough to consider traveling and meeting again. Hopefully. (In which case I will miss this wonderful conference due to other meeting and teaching commitments in the Fall.)
horse ghost [jatp]
Posted in pictures, Running, Travel with tags Argentan, Fall, France, horse, horse mutilation mystery, Normandie, sunrise, trail running on September 15, 2020 by xi'an
FALL [book review]
Posted in Books, pictures, Travel with tags apocalypse, climate change, democracy, Fall, Greek mythology, India, Japan, Nature, Neal Stephenson, neural networks and learning machines, neurons, ocular migraine, optical migraine, REAMDE, Riverworld, The Guardian, USA on August 30, 2019 by xi'an
The “last” book I took with me to Japan is Neal Stephenson’s FALL. With subtitle “Dodge in Hell”. It shares some characters with REAMDE but nothing prevents reading it independently as a single volume. Or not reading it at all! I am rather disappointed by the book and hence sorry I had to carry it throughout Japan and back. And slightly X’ed at Nature writing such a positive review. And at The Guardian. (There is a theme there, as I took REAMDE for a trip to India with a similar feeling at the end. Maybe the sheer weight of the book is pulling my morale down…) The most important common feature to both books is the game industry, since the main (?) character is a game company manager, who is wealthy enough to ensure the rest of the story holds some financial likelihood. And whose training as a game designer impacts the construction of the afterlife that takes a good (or rather terrible) half of the heavy volume. The long minutes leading to his untimely death are also excruciatingly rendered (with none of the experimental nature of Leopold Bloom’s morning). With the side information that Dodge suffers from ocular migraine, a nuisance that visits me pretty regularly since my teenage years! The scientific aspects of the story are not particularly exciting either, since the core concept is that by registering the entire neuronal network of the brain of individuals after their death, a computer could revive them by simulating this network. With dead people keeping their personality if very little of their memories. And even more fanciful, interacting between them and producing a signal that can be understood by (living) humans. Despite having no sensory organs. The reconstruction of a world by the simulated NNs is unbearably slow and frankly uninteresting as it reproduces both living behaviours and borrows very heavily from the great myths, mostly Greek, with no discernible depth. The living side of the story is not much better, although with a little touch of the post-apocalyptic flavour I appreciated in Stephenson. But not enough to recover from the fall.
Among other things that set me off with the book, the complete lack of connection with the massive challenges currently facing humanity. Energy crisis? climate change? Nope. Keep taking an hydroplane to get from Seattle to islands on Puget Sound? Sure. Spending abyssal amounts of energy to animate this electronic Hades? By all means. More and more brittle democracies? Who cares, the Afterworld is a pantheon where gods clash and rule lower beings. Worse, the plot never reaches beyond America, from the heavily focused philosophical or religious background to the character life trajectories. Characters are surprisingly unidimensional, with no default until they become evil. Or die. Academics are not even unidimensional. For instance Sophie’s thesis defence is at best a chat in a café… And talks at a specialist workshop switch from impressive mathematical terms to a 3D representation of the activity of the simulated neuronal networks. Whille these few individuals keep impacting the whole World for their whole life. And beyond… By comparison, the Riverworld series of Phillip José Farmer (that I read forty years ago) is much more enjoyable as a tale of the Afterworld, even if one can object at “famous” people been central to the action. At least there are more of them and, judging from their (first) life, they may have interesting and innovative to say.
