Some of the Og’s readers possibly remember the (long-winded?) entries on playing with the logo of a famous outdoor clothing brand (popularised into streetwear by 1990’s graffiti writers). As explained here, it all started with a (Norman) misconception about said logo. The joke is now sailing to another sea and another North, on a different vessel, if you do not mind staying onboard…
Archive for joke
from Þe Norse Farce to…
Posted in Books, Kids, pictures, Travel with tags Elder Futhark, Futhark runes, Half Dome, joke, logo, meme, Norman, Oseberg Ship, runic alphabet, Scandinavian ancestry, tee-shirt, The Norse Farce, The North, Thorn rune, Thurizas rune, TNF, Viking longship, Yosemite on May 17, 2025 by xi'anthe $1,547.02 book on neural networks
Posted in Statistics with tags Amazon, joke, machine learning, neural network, neural networks and learning machines, textbook on February 7, 2019 by xi'an
The day I invented Bayesian Lasso…
Posted in Books, Statistics with tags Bayesian decision theory, Bayesian lasso, joke, The Bayesian Choice on August 16, 2010 by xi'an
George Casella remarked to me last month in Padova that, once he and Trevor Park published The Bayesian Lasso in JASA, they received many claims for prior discovery of “Bayesian Lasso”! So, as a joke, let me add my claim as well! Indeed, in the first (1994) edition of The Bayesian Choice, I included an example in Chapter 4 (Example 4.2) about the fact that using a double exponential prior along a Cauchy likelihood was producing a zero MAP (maximum a posteriori) estimate. Isn’t that the essence of the Bayesian lasso?! Of course, as you can still check in the current edition, the example was intended as a counter-example to the use of MAP estimates, not as an argument about the parsimony induced by double exponential priors. (Exercice 4.6 in both editions builds upon t
his example to notice that, with a small enough scale parameter, the absolute shrinkage to zero vanishes.) I thus lost the opportunity of “inventing” the Bayesian Lasso! To my shame, I must add that in the even earlier 1992 French edition of the book, I made a mistake in the derivation of the MAP and hence completely missed the point!!!
