Archive for chili pepper
La Lézarde
Posted in Kids, Mountains, pictures, Travel, Wines with tags amber beer, Basse-Terre, chili pepper, Guadeloupe, Lézarde, local beer, microbrewery, Parc National de la Guadeloupe on November 20, 2025 by xi'an
a journal of the cha(ca)os (and fig) year
Posted in Books, Kids, Mountains, pictures, Travel, Wines with tags Adam family, Basse-Terre, Black Plague, book reviews, buckwheat, cast iron pan, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Celtic noir, Chamonix, Chennai, chili pepper, cocoa, Cold Case, COVID-19, crêpes, cuisine, Daniel Defoe, domestic violence, E.M. Forster, Edinburgh, fantasy, galettes, gardening, griddle, Guadeloupe, gun violence, homegrown, India, Japan, Journal of the Plague Year, kako, Outer Hebrides, Paris, Russian invasion, Scotland, Scoville scale, The Cramps, Ukraine, whey on October 1, 2025 by xi'an Read the last part of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell, which still takes place in the early 1800’s at the Dutch East India Company trading post Dejima in Nagasaki, as the historical aspects—like the attempt by a British ship to take over the outpost—beat the weakest features of the story. The end does feel rushed.
I made my first attempt at a chocolate tablet by mixing the cocoa—cacao in French—paste (kako in Créole) I brought back from Guadeloupe—made from the cocoa seeds I had bought at the market, roasting and crushing them—with crushed biscuits and a tiny bit of butter. The result was keeping with the bitter chocolate flavour I enjoy in 100% cocoa tablets, if presumably richer in fat and sugar, and more on the chocolate biscuit side! As the fig tree is now delivering at full speed, I am making compotes and office deliveries on most days, along with picking great tomatoes (which survived the heat waves) and the second chili pepper that grew from the chili tree this summer—sadly so low on the Scoville scale that it didn’t much differ from the peppers that also grew there—. In a bountiful year, the only failure was the buckwheat attempt, since no single flower came to deliver. Expert advice is thus sought for next year! This did not prevent me from resuming cooking whey (from skyr) and buckwheat, rye, or chestnut crêpes (on the Amazon iron griddle that no longer sticks!).
Watched and enjoyed the series Dept. Q, a gritty, depressing, and engrossing detective story that mixes cold cases, domestic violence, PTSD, sexism, several levels of guilt, and a variety of Scottish accents, from Edinburgh to the Western Isles. Despite the captivity thread in the scenario that I always dislike as a weak option in this kind of story, albeit making more sense as the episodes unfold. The grey areas surrounding most characters keeps the series at quite an acceptable level of engagement, as does the range of personalities thus displayed. This includes most victims that could have fallen into the poor-dear trap, but remain ambiguous and equally guilty to maintain the balance. Looking forward new seasons (not in the Scottish sense, where most days usually cover all four of them!). Also watched the second season of Wednesday, enjoyable enough if on the light and repetitive side. With Jenna Ortega still running the show, along with a stronger presence of Catherine Zeta-Jones. Just missing the Cramps moment of Season 1!
BayesComp 2025.2
Posted in Kids, pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags appam, Arianna Rosenbluth, BayesComp 2025, Bayesian neural networks, Bayesian robustness, Bayesian semi-parametrics, characteristic function, chili pepper, Chinatown, cut models, durian, equator, exam, Gaussian processes, Gibbs measure, Gibbs posterior, Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, Harvard University, HMC, MASH, Maxwell Hawker market, National University Singapore, NUS, PDMP, Poisson equation, popiah, pseudo-marginal MCMC, rojak, safe Bayes, self-normalised importance sampling, Shanghai, Singapore, stereographic MCMC, stochastic gradient MCMC, street food, unbiased MCMC, Université Paris Dauphine, xiaolongbao, zigzag algorithm on June 19, 2025 by xi'an
The main BayesComp²⁵ conference started with Pierre Jacob’s plenary talk on his recent advances on coupling for unbiased MCMC—currently ERC grantee on that topic—. Raising lazy questions like using a different target or transition kernel for the second chain in the coupling, connecting the Poisson equation and control variates, handling the signed issue with the unbiased approximations. Interestingly, they obtain an unbiased estimator of the asymptotic variance of the unbiased estimator. And a correction for self-normalised importance sampling, which has some connections with our 1996 (?) pinball sampler. Also an evaluation of the median of means, rather than the average of means, which is a thing I had been (lazily) contemplating for a while (On the greedy side, as I was writing my recovery exam for my Monte Carlo course, I realised the results Pierre presented could be somewhat recycled into exam problems!)
My first parallel session was on gradient-based methods with a talk by Francesca Crucinio on proximal particle Langevin algorithms (similar to the one she gave in PariSanté last year), a talk by Zhihao Wang on stereographic multiple try Metropolis(-Rosenbluth-Teller) that unsurprisingly recovers ergodicity thanks to the compactness of the ball. For which I wonder why a Normal proposal makes complete sense since one could consider a mover after the projection instead and why iid rather than repelling multiple proposals are used… The last speaker was just out from the plane from California, Siddharth Vishwanath who spoke about repelling-attracting HMC. With very nice animations of HMC, if reaching the main point of using both negative and positive frictions a few minutes before the session finished. The method preserves volume and potential, if not energy.
Speaking of which (energy), I find myself struggling with my less than 6 hours of sleep since arrival during the first afternoon session, despite a fiery hot spot lunch, which means in plainer terms that I alas dozed in and out of the talks. The second session saw Jack Jewson exposing in deeper details the exact PDMP algorithm for Gibbs measures Jeremias Knoblauch mentioned yesterday. And Jonathan Huggins as well, using Gaussian processes as proxies for expected likelihoods, with lower guarantees than pseudo-marginal versions. In a mildly connected way, Robin Ryder went through the resolution of the ecological inference challenge they produce with Nicolas Chopin and Théo Valdoire (all authors with whom I am connected, Théo being a brillant student of our MASH Master last year and now in Harvard, hopefully till the end of his PhD!)
On the extra-academic curriculum, I had a yummy dinner in the Maxwell Hawker (street) food centre, incl. Xiao Long Bao that cooled down fast enough to avoid the usual scalding effect, plus rojak a mixed fruit and vegetable fried in a peanut sauce that I had never tasted before, popiah (ditto), chili noodles, and an appam with durian deepfried balls as a fabulous and unexpected dessert.
[not so] hostile takeover on my Nature issue
Posted in Books, pictures, Travel, University life with tags AF beer, AI scare, AlphaFold, alternative meat, black holes, book review, bread, buckwheat, Caspian sea, CHANCE, chili pepper, cultivated meat, curry, English beer, flight mode, foie gras, fruit fly, group picture, Internet, internet security, Montréal, Nature, Nobel Prize, origin of bread, Parasite, rye bread, Singapore, solar system, wasps on November 29, 2024 by xi'anWhen flying to Montréal last week, I took with me this 16 September issue of Nature but forgot it in the plane. But had time to read a tribune warning on the dangers of governments being involved in running the Internet. And thus disrupting its decentralised structure… And a short highlight on the (minimal) impact of atom-sized, asteroid-mass black holes crossing the Solar System, awakening me to the very existence of such stellar objects! And remained skeptical at the proposal to downsize pint glasses to lower beer consumption in the UK. (Although I now find myself unable to drink a whole pint of beer, outside eating a fiery curry! Or an alcohol free version.) And read how NobAIl Prize winning Alphafold2 unfolded a structure common to a family of flavivirus that make them relative with a common ancestor. And a book review pondering whether or not AI can feel distress, pondering at their sentience. (The book is freely available on OUP webpage.) Unlikely to be re-reviewed for CHANCE! And a fairly interesting long comment on how some Asian nations are massively investing into alternative approaches to meat production. (In particular since mentioning Singapore, where the company employing one of my nephews is soon to introduce in-vitro foie gras.) But missed the research paper on the origin and evolution of the bread wheat D genome, which I would have most certainly devoured, despite my favouring rye and buckwheat breads! (No bread was hurt in the study, since the 60 wheat landraces analysed therein came from the CIMMYT and ICARDA gene banks.) The origin is thus most likely on the “southern shores of the Caspian Sea 8,000–11,000 years ago”. Which sounds quite recent, all things considered!
a journal of the conquest, war, famine, death, and chaos year
Posted in Books, Kids, pictures, Running, Travel with tags Australia, Benoit Mandelbrot, book review, books, Charlotte Bronte, chili pepper, COVID-19, Daniel Defoe, Discworld, dystopia, 경성, film review, four horsemen of the Apocalypse, Jane Eyre, Japanese human experiments, Journal of the Plague Year, mad scientist, Mandchuria, miso, Oxford, oysters, Russian invasion, St Kilda, teen culture, Terry Pratchett, Ukraine, Unit 731 on February 15, 2024 by xi'anHad to find a fifth horseman of the Apocalypse for 2024, and figured out that Terry Pratchett was the ultimate expert on these characters, witness
“The Four Horsemen whose Ride presages the end of the world are known to be Death, War, Famine, and Pestilence. But even less significant events have their own Horsemen. For example, the Four Horsemen of the Common Cold are Sniffles, Chesty, Nostril, and Lack of Tissues; the Four Horsemen whose appearance foreshadows any public holiday are Storm, Gales, Sleet, and Contra-flow.” Terry Pratchet, Interesting Times
Hence followed suit when he signaled Chaos as the fifth (part-time) horseman. In Thief of Time. (Incidentally, I do not remember ever finishing a single book from his Discworld series, despite several attempts and encouragements from fellow readers.) With the precision of “not [being] the chaos which can be used to draw pretty Mandelbrot patterns”.
Read The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon. While I did not like much the author’s later The Priory of the Orange Tree, bought in one of the many Montréal bookstores and read by Lac Saint-Jean, which I found very shallow and predictable [the book, not the lake!], with most of the tropes of the genre (e.g., ninja-like fighters, heroes uncovering long-lost magical artefacts, super-evil entity about to return to life/power, a few predestined characters saving the Universe), unrealistic events, all-too-convenient coincidences, with little efforts put in the construction of the world, of the magical rules, or of the political structure, I still picked this rather heavy volume in a St Kilda bookstore, in [misguided] prevision for the flight back to Paris and read it later over the Winter solstice break. It is actually much better and enjoyable, in terms of world building for certain, involving a modified history of our World, mostly Britain and Ireland, with a non-human dominant species in the background, a no-man’s land gothic Oxford surrounded by zombies (?), and a part of humanity endowed with paranormal powers. The characters have some depth as well, even when remaining somehow predictable and often repetitive, and the scenario is mostly solid, apart from the unraveling finale. (The Guardian pointed out a direct filiation to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, which I certainly did not see coming.) I am unsure I am ready for the next six volumes in the series, though!
Watched Gyeongseong, a Korean TV series that is a mix of horror, period, WW II, sadistic, mad scientists, nationalist, colonialist, family, survival, love, comical, soapy, teary stories all at once! Gyeongseong [경성, capital city] being the name of Seoul during the Japanese occupation and the entire series takes place in a recreated city that resembles the one in other period series I watched. Still enjoyable with a complete suspension of belief (as the scenario accumulates convenient coincidences, clueless Japanese occupiers, and bullet proof main characters) and the acceptance of the cartoonesque nature of fights and innumerable deaths.
Xi'an's Og