Archive for Sevilla

a journal of the [new] year of the [old] plagues [defrozen post!]

Posted in Books, Kids, Mountains, pictures, Running, Travel with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 12, 2026 by xi'an

[I wrote a first draft of this journal post mid-December 2025, just before flying to Sevilla, and just realised now that I had not published it! Hence the bizarre title. As a weird coïncidence, this is the second post where I associate Knives out and guacamole… A post also served cold, then. And hopefully not stale!] Read the most recent Rankin’s Rebus (#25), Midnight and Blue, taking place in an Edinburgh jail, where Rebus has been locked for killing Big Ger Cafferty, after resurrecting him in Exit Music. (And not in Resurrection Men,  confusedly!) Which made me realise I had missed #24, A Heart Full of Headstones, and I ordered it on the spot! Hard to imagine such a setting could happen in real life, when Rebus mixes with people he contributed to send to jail… At such a degree of open association within jail! In the early pages I suspected Rebus was sent to jail as a ploy to uncover a criminal gang, but the murder of Cafferty sounded a serious enough accusation and none of the other characters were suspecting him of this. Apart from that, Midnight and Blue reads well and fast, if plagued as often by an unrealistic piling of coïncidences, convenient chance events, and character intersections.

Managed to confuse guacamole with soup while cleaning my freezer from long-time, anonymous, residents, which made the guacamole sour if manageable (with another ancient resident of said freezer, some octopus tentacles!).

Watched the third film in the Benoît Blanc series (Knives out), Wake Up Dead Man. Which was agaaaain of a Cluedo style, with caricatures of all characters, except for the punching priest, who manages to save the (soul of the) story, putting Blanc and his mannerisms in the background. If not in the grave (which remains a central piece of the scenario, along the church!)

calle naranja en sevilla [jatp]

Posted in pictures, Running, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , on January 8, 2026 by xi'an

a journal of the four horsemen year

Posted in Books, Kids, Mountains, pictures, Running, Travel, University life, Wines with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 7, 2026 by xi'an

Read a very light space-opera novel, (The Belt) Entanglement, by G.M. Kilby, with shallow characters, shallow plot with an unlikely McGuffin (a uniquely advanced quantum computer, even 20y later) and implausible rescue episodes (incl. one where a character punctures their spacesuit to recover from a broken propulsion thruster!). This book stands million years away from monuments of the genre, like Arthur C. Clarke‘s, Isaac Asimov‘s, Orson Scott Card‘s, Frank Herbert‘s or, to cite more recent writers, Iain Banks‘s, ‘sJohn Scalzi‘s, Becky Chambers‘s… I will most certainly not become entangled in the sequels! And am contemplating with glee attacking recent purchases and gifts, like Tasmyn Muir’s Nona the Ninth, Philip Pullman’s The Rose Field (Book of dust finale), and Florent Chavouet‘s Tokyo Sanpo (to revive memories of March’s visit to Edo!), discovered while attending an exhibit on Studio Ghibli’s Isao Takahata at Maison du Japon .

Brought back several litres of Andalusian olive oil from Sevilla! And made fresh green pici over the turn of the year, with spinach replacing water in the dough (following a recipe posted on the food weekly of France Inter), as well as three different dishes from the same batch of Norman scallops.

Watched Wake Up Dead Man, by Ryan Johnson, the third instalment of Benoît Blanc’s investigations. Which is rather fun, the more because Daniel Craig is visibly having fun playing a Southerner detective and over-doing his accent, while leaving a large chunk of the stage to other actors, like Josh O’Connor playing the junior, soul-searching priest. The plot itself is light and somewhat irrelevant (if with a wink to old classics of closed room murders, conveniently appearing in a Book Club list, if missing Gaston Leroux’s Mystère de la chambre jaune, as well as to Hitchcok’s Vertigo with a dolly zoom effect at the most dramatic instant), while the suspicion revolving among all characters is worth watching. Also tried a few episodes Just a bit Espers (ちょっとだけエスパー), a Japanese TV series on a group of almost ordinary persons with limited ExtraSensory PERception. The characters are nice but the plot is very weak, the resort to time travel all too common to this type of stories, the resolutions to the episodic challenges embarrassingly cringy, and the part of the story where a new employee (Bunty) has to play along being married to another (Shiki) who genuinely believes they are married is quite uncomfortable, to say the least…

Avancia, Botani, Tarantelo, Sacrima, y Sauterne

Posted in Statistics with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 20, 2025 by xi'an

a (sunny, crisp) day at ICSDS 2025

Posted in pictures, Running, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 19, 2025 by xi'an

While my first day at ICSDS 2025 was somewhat hectic, having realised late the night before that I was giving a talk!—I had forgotten I had submitted a title at registration time and never received any communication from the organisers, including (or excluding) a request for an abstract. I thus hastily updated my November talk in Sevilla for my December talk in Sevilla! but paid less attention than needed to the sessions I attended—, Wednesday was more peaceful—esp. after a 16K run along the Guadalquivir—and I engaged into two great Bayesian learning sessions, one that seemed designed for me!, involving my (40y long friend) Ed George on his latest result on proper prior minimaxity and shrinkage, with our late friend Bill Strawderman as a co-author since they worked on the problem prior to Bill’s demise, Charles Margossian on variational inference preserving some symmetries in the target and hence keeping the same statistics, with elliptically symmetric families, and Fletcher Christensen on DIC for some mixed models, with references to our “DIC’s eights” paper (but still picking one version of DIC in the end!)

The second session was on prediction learning!—with me as the chair, as I realized one minute before! AI !—with (my friend) Veronika Rockova using AI predictions as a prior predictive and connecting them with Bayesian nonparametrics, Kenyon Ng (who visited me last Spring) on a similar approach using pretrained transformers like TabPFN and martingale posterior inference, Lorenzo Cappello in a generalisation of martingale prediction and Andrea Ghiglietti on the mathematics of an involved urn system.


The afternoon session was a plenary talk by Daniela Witten in the magnificent building of the Real Fabrica de Tabacos, but the room was unfortunately too small for the audience and I could not enter. Hopefully her talk will have a significant intersection with the CRiSM colloquium she delivers in Warwick late January. I thus walked around the old town till the following poster session, held in the Real Fabrica courtyard, under the sun. As I got involved into a deep discussion of the relevance of mirror meetings (which I defend!) versus the dangers on principal (parent) conferences (which can be mitigated by the mirror conference participants registering, to some extent, for the principle one)—more to come on the ‘Og and in the ISBA Bulletin!—, I did not peruse the available posters, sorry…

And, by the way, the conference organisers also revealed the location of ICSDS 2026 which is Croatia, my first bet! In the city of Split we visited in 2023.