Oftentimes, the most beautiful piece is never the most difficult or the flashiest one. Cantabile. Lyrical. Expressive. Jean-Pierre Rampal plays the flute as if he were singing — every phrase shaped like a breath, every note carrying the weight of a spoken word. Camille Saint-Saëns’ Romance, Op. 37 isn’t a technically demanding piece. The notes are simple, the scales predictable, the fingerings familiar. On paper, it looks almost effortless — something any advanced student could easily sight-read....

The movie An American in Paris has almost all of its music based on George Gershwin’s compositions and adjustments. Not only in the grand ballet scene or the famous “I got rhythm” dance. It’s a very luxury, abusive application of all Gershwin’s music. For example. where’s a tiny fleeting moments, when Adam Cook (the pianist) playing improvised Jazz, Henri Baurel (a singer) teased him about Jazz’s ‘randomness’ Da da da da da da… that was how you win your scholarship?...

Classical music are (almost) defined as those scored to be replayed. Jazz, on the other hand, blew this wall open by improvisation. This makes jazz infinitely more adaptable. For example, if you swap the French horn part in Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 to Oboe, purists might want to put you on a murder list. But in jazz, rewriting, embellishing, and reinventing are celebrated. A pianist can take a popular jazz standard and spin it into a dazzling, virtuosic variation, and nobody bats an eye....

Masterpiece!!!

I’ve listened to enough of Professor Ye’s talks that my Apple Photos automatically organizes pictures of his slides into a “memory” album (by recognizing Prof Ye of course). Interestingly delightful — I always learn so much from them! Professor Ye: Slay. Another refreshing piece of research on applying OR to game theory: The Implicit Barrier of Utility Maximization: An Interior-Point Approach for Market Equilibria Chuwen Zhang, Chang He, Bo Jiang, Yinyu Ye | ArXiv link...

I’m not a LaTeX expert, but after a few papers and too many deadlines, here’s the system I’ve been using to stay sane, and stay synced. TeX was created by Donald Knuth, the legendary computer scientist, while writing the legendary The Art of Computer Programming (He wasn’t happy with the typesetting quality, so he built TeX in 1978). The beauty is that LaTeX’s elegance lies in its logic + automation — like once the stage is set up, the rest is “the creation of beautiful books”....

Two years! Ariana’s Blog quietly turns another page today. Another anniversary, another orbit around this little sun of words. Small but meaningful changes have crept in. I’ve been trying to write more independently, to keep AI assistance at some distance except grammar debugs. There’s a certain procrastination settling in — perhaps next year I’ll shake it off a bit. My taste in classical music has evolved, too — reshaped by evenings spent in concert halls instead of restaurants, my shopping and dining budgets willingly surrendered to (a lot of) Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov and Chopin....

What a joy it is to stumble upon a seminal paper—then realizing it’s by someone you’ll get to know in the future. Moments like these make research feel like a small, interconnected world: The Combinatorial Assignment Problem: Approximate Competitive Equilibrium from Equal Incomes Eric Budish link This paper proposes a new mechanism for combinatorial assignment—for example, assigning schedules of courses to students—based on an approximation to competitive equilibrium from equal incomes (CEEI) in which incomes are unequal but arbitrarily close together....

Five minutes before boarding I picked up a book at the airport bookstore — flash shopping. Only later did I realize it was Gabriel García Márquez’s final work — the Nobel Prize-winning author of One Hundred Years of Solitude. En agosto nos vemos (Until August) (amazon link) turned out to be a light companion for the flight home, and perfectly timed for late August. The novella follows a woman who returns each year on August 16 to a lonely island where her mother is buried....

The CCF EconCS annual gathering is taking place at Nanjing University this year. The Associate Head of Jing’an District delivered an opening talk on how big data and related technologies are driving economic growth. About Jing’an District 静安 JingAn district is in central Shanghai. It is the most fancy commercial area — aka shopping heaven. Like, it is the place I take my friends to if they’re visiting Shanghai everytime (like I’ve been there too many times during my undergrad)....