The academy nominated movie Tar (2022) tells a story of a fictional female conductor Lydia Tár. The film starts with Tár at the peak of her career (a protege of Leonard Bernstein, director of the Berlin Phil, finishing recording the last of her Mahler cycle). Some says the film is psychic, confusing, and somewhat creepy and haunting. Despite that Google autocompletes “What the heck is tar about” — the script is nice. Cate Blanchett did a great job. Music reference and orchestra scenes are highly accurate and professional. The movie’s deep. Reviews discuss a lot on Tár’s implied psychological nuance, feminism and anti-misogyny, as of the modern art world’s cancel culture, identity abuse (eg “I don’t like Bach because he’s straight and have 20 kids!”), and the long-argue about whether we should separate artist’s personal conduct with their work, etc etc. ...

Cross-country data reveals large total factor production (TFP) differences. This lecture asks: how does misallocation of inputs across heterogeneous firms affects measured sectoral TFP? Define and Measure Wedge in Monopolistic Competition Market Consider a market with final good producer, a continumm of intermediate good firms $i\in [0, 1]$, and households who supply labor inelastically at wage $W$ (taken as given by firms). The final good producer’s production function is $Y = \left( \int_0^1 Y_i^{\frac{\sigma-1}{\sigma}} \, \text{d}i \right)^{\frac{\sigma}{\sigma-1}}$. He maximizes $\max_{Y, \lbrace Y_i\rbrace}PY - \int P_i Y_i\,\text{di}$ take price as given. His maximization gives a demand function for each firm: ...

From the front line of macro class: Motivation Most poor countries remain heavily agricultural yet exhibit low agricultural productivity relative to richer economies. The central question is: what prevents reallocation of labor from agriculture to manufacturing? The class studied Russian industrialization (1880–1940) as a laboratory. Pre-1928: ~80% of labor in agriculture, yet agriculture accounts for less than 50% of value added. Post-1928 under Stalin: 30 percentage points of labor shift to manufacturing in 12 years, accompanied by famine and mass repression. ...

Sleepingbot has a bug that new blog posts in content/posts never made into the chatbot’s catalogue. Content never synced automatically. The original setup required manually running sync_content.sh after every new post. Really? So I scrapped the GitHub Actions approach entirely and replaced it with a local git pre-push hook (.git/hooks/pre-push): #!/bin/bash echo "Syncing blog content to chatbot..." rsync -av --delete content/posts/ blog-chatbot/content/posts/ git add blog-chatbot/content/ git diff --cached --quiet || git commit -m "Auto-sync blog content" echo "Sync done." This runs silently on every git push, syncs the posts, and commits them.

From the paper: Investigating the potential of investing in fine stringed instruments as an alternative investment asset. Angela ORTIZ MUÑOZ, 2020. PhD Thesis A helpful reference Investing in Fine Instruments, a PhD Thesis Investigation | Dr. Angela Ortiz Muñoz analyzes fine stringed instruments as an investment asset. Tarisio TL;DR: Violins are a real, if niche, alternative asset — not just a passion hobby. They offer ~3.5–5% real annual returns with genuinely low correlation to financial markets, meaning they earn their place in a diversified portfolio at a modest (~10%) allocation. The two most striking findings are that maker identity dominates everything else in price formation (Stradivari/del Gesù = +333% value impact), and that which musician plays an instrument functions like a credit rating upgrade, creating measurable abnormal returns. The market survived 2008 without a downturn, which is rare for any asset class. ...

The Maxinomics’ new video points out a new way fashion industry works. Instead of experimenting and betting on what the next hit style is, they just follow the authority: you might remember Pantone’s annual color, or: WGSN: trend forecasting From viral TikTok trends to shifts in global consumer behaviour, the world is changing fast. While anyone can spot a trend once it arrives, the most successful brands know what’s coming beforehand – and act on it early. That’s the power of trend forecasting. ...

The market for classical music has never been larger than it is now, yet the number of full-time soloists on any given instrument is also on the order of only a few hundred (and much smaller for instruments other than voice, violin, and piano). Performers of first rank comprise a limited handful out of these small totals and have very large incomes. There are also known to be substantial differences in income between them and those in the second rank, even though most consumers would have difficulty detecting more than minor differences in a “blind” hearing. (Rosen 1981) ...

Joffrey’s winter season show the American Icons is on. It features four contemporary choreographies in one night. Kettentanz choreographed by Gerald Arpino, with music by Johann Strauss Sr. Secular Games by Martha Graham Exerpt from Postcards by Robert Joffrey, with music by Satie Voluntaries by Glen Tetley, with music by Francis Poulenc A view into the kaleidoscope night: The night begins with — Teletubbies? Just kidding. The Kettentanz features Strauss Sr.’s cheerful composition — straightforward, happy, a little boring. As if it’s chosen intentionally to mimic the music we hear at ballet classes (but my standard is Tchaikovsky and Chopin, so judge not the pianist not, judge me). Kettentanz’s choreography feels less like an piece intended for performance and more like an etudes — a series of Grand Allegros, with dense technique showcase and seldom thinkings. You’ll see what I mean: ...

In my hugo papermod powered website where math is rendered by Katex, math blocks were silently failing to render mid-page. Everything after a certain point appeared as raw LaTeX. Here’s the fix. NOTE: The fix is generated by Claude. It works. But I’m not sure if the mechanism is 100% correct. But it works. Root Causes 1. Goldmark mangles math before KaTeX sees it Hugo uses Goldmark as its Markdown renderer. Goldmark processes the .md file first — and it escapes or corrupts characters like \, _, {, } inside math delimiters. By the time KaTeX receives the string, the LaTeX is broken. ...

In the early days of recording, the microphone could only cleanly capture a narrow frequency range. So engineers were like: we’ll just record what the microphone handles. Fair enough. Then the microphone got better. Then digital audio arrived. Then we could capture everything. But by then, scholars had already proven theoretically that music only contains those frequencies. The proof was very elegant. It won a Gramophone award. And to this day, grad students learn that a symphony is just a low-frequency hum with robust standard errors. ...