Happy Sunday! Unlike sophisticated, beautifully depressed Brahms or Schubert impromptus, here’s a bit of a jolly music: Whoever came up with this project deserves the highest honor of classical manager. You will find the best resolution available on Medici tv. The hero was Christopher Nupen: Program Note from Medici TV: On August 30, 1969, five young musicians—all well on their way to establishing themselves as renowned international artists—came together to play Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet in London’s new Queen Elizabeth Hall. Their names: Daniel Barenboim, Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman, Jacqueline du Pré, and Zubin Mehta. ...

Fun fact: Franz Schubert’s “D” number refers to the Deutsch catalogue, a chronological listing of all his works compiled by musicologist Otto Erich Deutsch (1883–1967). Mainly because Because Schubert lived a short life and wrote many works that were not published immediately, Opus numbers are insufficient/misleading for chronological ordering. Let’s exercise a level of aesthetic pickiness that earlier listeners would have considered an unimaginable luxury—pick your favorite: Ah, Zimmerman got a good photographer for this album cover. ...

Hmmm. So we can trust nothing from the internet now? Debunking the AI food delivery hoax that fooled Reddit Casey Newton Jan 5, 2026 | Platformer | Link A “whistleblower” tried to corroborate his viral post with AI-generated evidence. This is how I caught him. PLUS: Grok’s image-generation crisis, and the rapture over Claude Opus 4.5 A journalist contacted the Reddit whistleblower and tries to get an interview and more information. The whistleblower throws the whistleblower a “fake” ArXiv paper and used a Uber-Eat ID card generated by AI. ...

Brahms wrote it when he was 20. The melodies are warm and expressive (Brahms…). But the music is long and structurally loose. In his fifties (1889) Brahms revised it. The later version has leaner piano, the motives are more rigorous and the overall architecture of the piece is clearer — just a lot more better in all perspectives. The 2nd version is the one often performed today. The piece is not technically demanding but actually (and well, naturally for Brahms) takes a lot of maturity to play well. You need control, patience, emotional restraint to present the textures, tempos and development in the music. ...

It was out a while ago. But reading it is still, well, astounding: Nature’s 10 A fired public-health official, a mosquito breeder and a baby with a smile seen around the world. These are just a few of the remarkable people chosen for Nature’s 10. The Nature’s 10 list recognizes important scientific trends and discoveries over the course of a year and tells the stories of the people involved. It is compiled by Nature’s editors to highlight some of the most influential research and important developments shaping our world. This year’s selection acknowledges scientists peering into the farthest reaches of the Universe and the deepest depths of the ocean, as well as a civil servant who stood up for evidence-based public-health policy amid a vast upheaval in the United States. ...

Chinese are always serious and obsessed about food. On the 26th birthday of Alibaba (2025 Sept 10), AMap released a new Local Discovery Ranking (扫街榜) — for restaurant and general local service recommendations. Unlike traditional online rating platforms rely mainly on user ratings, AMap uses behavioral data including navigation usage, in-store visits, repeat visits, and intentional destination trips to make the rankings more authentic, trustworthy and immune to score manipulation. AMap’s CEO Ning Guo (郭宁) pledge that the rankings would “never be commercialized”: ...

Prokofiev composed the Flute Sonata (Op. 94) between 1942-43. Though it is commissioned, he like flute (thankfully) and probably had poured his personality all over the piece — “I had long wished to write music for the flute, an instrument which I felt had been undeservedly neglected.” In 1943 Prokofiev adapted few changes for bowing to transcribe a version for violin. Ah, the long tradition of flutist and violinist stealing each other’s repertoire. ...

Mencius was a famous Chinese philosopher (Mengzi, 孟子), a major follower of Confucius who lived during the Warring States period (roughly 4th century BCE). There’s a historical legend that Mencius’s mother moved house three times to find a better environment for his education. Acient wisdom of explained by modern economic: Neighborhood Effects and the Missing Market for Opportunity Lawrence Katz (Harvard) | 2026 Jan 2 Watch the full AEA 2026 President Address here ...

A reddit user who claimed to be an engineer at a major food delivery platform talked about why he doesn’t enjoy working there. TL;DR: a lot of intransparency, fees and tips don’t got to driver, sludge, etc. Particularly, I find the following desperation score to be quite a bad idea: The “Desperation Score”… a hidden metric for drivers that tracks how desperate they are for cash based on their acceptance behavior." ...

An interesting paper to read and understand how to get more citations: Nonuniversal power law scaling in the probability distribution of scientific citations Peterson, Pressé and Dill (2010) PNAS ABSTRACT: We develop a model for the distribution of scientific citations. The model involves a dual mechanism: in the direct mechanism, the author of a new paper finds an old paper A and cites it. In the indirect mechanism, the author of a new paper finds an old paper A only via the reference list of a newer intermediary paper B, which has previously cited A. By comparison to citation databases, we find that papers having few citations are cited mainly by the direct mechanism. Papers already having many citations (“classics”) are cited mainly by the indirect mechanism. The indirect mechanism gives a power-law tail. The“tipping point” at which a paper becomes a classic is about 25 citations for papers published in the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) Web of Science database in 1981, 31 for Physical Review D papers published from 1975–1994, and 37 for all publications from a list of high h-index chemists assembled in 2007. The power-law exponent is not universal. Individuals who are highly cited have a systematically smaller exponent than individuals who are less cited. ...