Archive for Tōkaidō
岡崎の矢作橋 [ISBA 2026]
Posted in Mountains, pictures, Travel with tags Hiroshige, Japan, Mount Hongū, Nagoya, Okazaki, Tōkaidō, Utagawa Hiroshige, Yahagi river on August 11, 2026 by xi'an
venISBA⁴⁻
Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags ambulance, Bayesian conference, coreset, Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, ISBA, ISBA 2024, Isola de San Michele, Italia, Japan, Kullback-Leibler divergence, Nagoya, nested sampling, NUTS, organising committee, PDMP, poster session, slice sampling, slides, sticky PDMP, Tōkaidō, Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, Venezia, Venice, Venice cemetery on July 8, 2024 by xi'an
As I was released all of a sudden from the Ospedale Civile di Venezia around noon, I managed to attend the last session of ISBA 2024 (after stopping by my airbnb for an emergency coffee next to the hospital and stopping for showering, changing clothes, and eating something more substantial than the contents of IV bags).
My first of these last talks was about coresets by Trevor Campbell, for reducing sample sizes while keeping the likelihood roughly the same (and making me wondering if possibly getting some privacy on the side??) Original algorithm almost completely blind to the data, but a new version by subsample-optimize (KL distance to the posterior) version bringing huge improvements (although I missed the practical details on how the algorithm is reaching this minimum), namely a KL distance of order O(1), i.e., not growing in the sample size. Then, in the same session, a talk by Aikihiko Nakamura on mixing and PDMP, resulting in the novel bouncy Hamiltonian dynamics, which proves time reversible and volume preserving, with no U turns and the time within a given general Hamiltonian value being itself generated w/o rejection. (I am quite sorry to have missed other PDMP talks during the conference, eg, Paul Fearnhead’s, as well as the last poster session…) And I finally jumped rooms to listen to Sam Power on hybrid slice sampling with an MCMC extension to avoid simulating from the Uniform conditional. Reminding me of nested sampling, which also faces this difficulty of sampling from a possibly complex set. This was the end of a wonderful (if shortened by my personal issue) meeting. Next round, see you in Nagoya, Japan (on the Tōkaidō road!).
As a final word about this ISBA 2024 conference in Ca’Foscari, on many levels, I want to most warmly thank my friend Roberto Casarin for his investment and dedication for making the event running so efficiently, in an ideal environment for a meeting of this (800+) size that kept to the Aristotelian unities, especially keeping people together on a unique site without feeling crowded (and very few falling in a Venice canal). And many thanks as well to the local organisers (discounting my nominal inclusion in that group!), the Ca’Foscari staff, and all the students involved in the event!
a journal of the chaos, conquest, war, [stale nuts] famine, and death year
Posted in Books, Kids, Mountains, pictures, Running, Travel with tags book review, Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, COVID-19, Daniel Defoe, film review, French cheese, hazelnut, Hiroshige, Journal of the Plague Year, Judge Dee, Kyoto, Morocco, msemen, Netflix, nut butter, onions, pizza, Ramadan, Robert van Gulik, Russian invasion, teen culture, Tokyo, torrefaction, Tōkaidō, Ukraine, Utagawa, woodcuts on May 4, 2024 by xi'an
Read The Big Wall (in French), a manga by Yoji Kamata & Kunihiko Yokomizo, which my wife bought me while visiting the mountaineering Éditions Guérin in Chamonix. This is in fact a collection of seven stories about climbing and mountaineering, in Japan, the Himalayas, and Canada, all related with the same central climber. It is a bit similar to The Summit of the Gods, another if much earlier gift from my wife!, in that an outstanding climber, Yasushi, faces extreme situations, saves lesser climbers’ live while trying to solve a personal dilemma. The similarity extends to the highly unrealistic climbing situations where Yasushi survives despite all odds! I also finished Pascale Quiviger’s Royaume de Pierre d’Angle (3), again in French, with many more days and less enthusiasm than the earlier volumes as the story pace drags down to a confrontation between both royal brothers, with too many Deus ex Machina moments and the sad erosion of the ethics of 
Thibault, the current (and reluctant) king. I also started reading (the French translation) of Along the Tōkaidō trail, (Tōkaidōchū Hizakurige, 東海道中膝栗毛), by Jippensha Ikkû, which is a 1802 touring guide of the road between Tōkyō (Edo) and Kyōto, and its famous 53 stations celebrated by Utagawa Hiroshige in famous woodcuts. Its main appeal is that the guide is a pretext for a ribald novel about two rascals walking the road and the depiction of the Japan life and popular culture in the early days of the Edo Period. However, it is neither a bedside nor a travel book, since I need permanent access to internet to locate place, check the corresponding HIroshige woodprints, and read through the numerous footnotes explaining puns (like its title translating as Shank’s Mare) or special traditions, therefore travelling quite slowly on the Tōkaidō trail!
Cooked most days upon returning from the Alps, if nothing particularly novel, except for pissaladières made with Moroccan msemen basis rather than foccacia bread, since they were sold in the local bakery during Ramadan (along with Moroccan pastillas that were in high demand!). Making these “Nice pizzas” a quick dinner option, for only requiring frying onions for a few minutes and adding anchovies. I also made a few jars of hazelnut butter, upon advice from a visiting friend for using the bags of hazelnuts collected in late summer by my mother a few years ago! They had predictably turned sour but enough torrefaction hid the sourness to make the butter enjoyable (after a few attempts).
Watched a Netflix attempt at Judge Dee stories, which I found lacking when comparing with the original books by Robert van Gulik, especially since it is very loosely connected with some van Gulik’s stories (like The Chinese Bell Murders, The Chinese Gold Murders, The Haunted Monastery, The Lacquer Screen, The Red Pavilion). In addition, the underlying threat from a mysterious revolutionary organisation ruins the purpose of the story and the sleuthing abilities of Judge Dee often appear secondary. Some aspects remain appealing, like in the story centred on a puppet theatre show or the one where the central imperial authority gets questioned by the population of a Gobi town. Overall, I also disliked highly unrealistic resolutions (like the one involving a parting of the sea that was even more unbelievable than in the Ten Commandments!) and the very slow progress of Dee’s relationship with a courtesan whose past life is deeply intertwined with Dee’s family history (and missing from the books).
