The pepper-heavy cuisine in Southwest China has an economic reason.

I still can’t believe I performed Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring when I was like 16 or so —the flute part, no less. It felt impossible at the time (still does). The beat counting alone is a waking nightmare for any flutist. You don’t “understand” the piece as much as survive it. Now years later as I’m watching a recreation of its riotous 1913 premiere—courtesy of the film Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky (2009)—I’m still stunned....

I’ve came across some interesting stories about Tchaikovsky and his music, from the official website of the Berliner Philharmoniker: What you (might) not know about Pyotr Ilych Tchaikovsky Lino Knocke | Link: https://www.berliner-philharmoniker.de/en/stories/what-you-might-not-know-about-pyotr-ilych-tchaikovsky/ The Porcelain Child “Even as a boy, he responded intensely to his surroundings – and especially to music. Certain harmonies moved him so deeply that he would burst into tears, or collapse sobbing onto his bed after playing the piano, overwhelmed by the physical force of the experience....

Our reading group recently wrapped up a sequence of papers under the theme Beyond Bayesian Bandits — or as I like to think of it, “3B.” (Yes, like the composers: Bach, Beethoven, Brahms. Also sometimes a bit boring.) Anyway, here’s what we’ve covered so far. For some books and papers I don’t attach links but they should be google-able. 📚 Completed Readings Kleinberg: Introduction to Multi-Armed Bandits Slides (Cornell CS6840, 2017) Dumitriu, Tetali, Winkler: Playing Golf with Two Balls Whittle (1980): Multi-armed Bandits and the Gittins Index More useful Gittins Index books: Gittins, Glazebrook and Weber (2011) Multi-armed Bandit Allocation Indices (Second Edition) Qing Zhao (2019) (Section II and III of) Multi-Armed Bandits: Theory and Applications to Online Learning in Networks Hadfield-Menell & Russell (UAI 2015): Multitask Inverse Reinforcement Learning PDF Guha, Munagala, Shi: Restless Bandits with Constraints FOCS 2007 / SODA 2009 Doval & Scully (2024, under review): Local Hedging in Bandits arXiv Chawla, Christou, Harlev, Scully (2025, in submission) arXiv 🔍 Future Readings Gupta, Jiang, Scully, Singla: The Markovian Price of Information arXiv Hajiaghayi, Krysta, Mahdavi, Shin (EC 2025): Delegation with Costly Inspection Banihashem, Hajiaghayi, Krysta, Shin (EC 2025): Delegated Choice with Combinatorial Constraints Ziv Scully & Alexander Terenin: Tutorial: The Gittins Index as a Design Principle (Seems like a solid conceptual anchor for everything above....

The Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux is bouncy, full of energy. Full sheet music can be downloaded at IMSLP. Reading the complete score is really not so convenient (cause all instruments are stacked together): I’m always awed by how fast conductors read… The female variation has light, crisp and joyful and consistent melody that really make up nice orchestra audition snippet. I assemble them, just for reference (although you can probably just memorize the melody after several pass of the music anyway, but just in case):...

A brief summary and proof sketch of the core theorem behind the Universal Singular Value Thresholding (USVT) estimator for matrix completion.

This is the arguably the most helpful and standard exercise set for the flute: 17 Grands exercices journaliers de mécanisme (17 grand daily mechanism exercises). IMSLP link. About the authors: Claude-Paul Taffanel (his Wikipedia) was a French flutist and composer and was regarded as the founder of the French Flute School that dominated much of flute composition and performance during the mid-20th century. Taffanel’s student Philippe Gaubert (the other composer) was also a distinguished flute performer, with the Paris Opera and was also Professor of flute in the Conservatoire de Paris (teacher of Marcel Moyse, who is the teacher of Sir James Galway)....

Our reading group covered this paper today: Local hedging approximately solves Pandora’s box problems with nonobligatory inspection Ziv Scully and Laura Doval (2025) | Link: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.19011 Abstract: We consider search problems with nonobligatory inspection and single-item or combinatorial selection. A decision maker is presented with a number of items, each of which contains an unknown price, and can pay an inspection cost to observe the item’s price before selecting it. Under single-item selection, the decision maker must select one item; under combinatorial selection, the decision maker must select a set of items that satisfies certain constraints....

The Economist has a really interesting July 24 story and relevant articles about AI and its effect on (main macro) economics: The economics of superintelligence | If Silicon Valley’s predictions are even close to being accurate, expect unprecedented upheaval https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/07/24/the-economics-of-superintelligence (The cover is very adorable, click the above link and check it out) The article says, it is believed that superintelligence that outwits (at least average) humanity AI would soon emerge....

I’m practicing the adapted flute solo piece for Lensky’s Aria from Tchaivkosky’s Opera Eugene Onegin. Here’s the background check for this piece: The opera has three acts and Lensky’s aria takes place near the end of Act II: Act I: Tatyana, a bookish and romantic young woman, falls in love with the dashing but aloof Eugene Onegin, a friend of the poet Vladimir Lensky. She writes Onegin a heartfelt letter confessing her feelings....