There’s a lovely scene at the end of Étoile (2025) (Amazon’s TV about ballet), when the boy went to watched the first ballet show and then waited backstage for the ballerina for a date: ‘There were a lot of feathers up there… And I (almost) didn’t fall asleep! The boy said after his first ballet, probably swan lake ...
Visualization of the Mitosis algorithm. Here’s a poster for the (preliminary version of) the paper Contextual Budget Bandit for Food Rescue. Still working on some last 20% works that takes 80% of the time before pushing it to ArXiv.
I remember once going on a date when my friend casually said, “I love opera. Someday, I want to go to London and watch The Phantom of the Opera live.” At that moment, I was honestly terrified — what an ignorant, pretentious idiot?! But then… I stumbled across a live concert by The 3 Tenors — Plácido Domingo, José Carreras, and Luciano Pavarotti — accompanied by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by the legendary Zubin Mehta. They performed Andrew Lloyd Webber’s All I Ask of You from The Phantom of the Opera. ...
A lighthearted vignette.
As I’m practicing this piece, here’s a bit more about it: “In my concertos I have allotted the instruments the types of themes which correspond to their particular tone qualities and respect their expressive possibilities.” This statement of Jacques Ibert’s certainly applies to his Flute Concerto, written over the years 1932-1933. The work was dedicated to Marcel Moyse (who’s quite the central spotlight of Paris-school flute, read more about him here), who was the featured soloist in its premiere performance, under Philippe Gaubert’s direction, in Paris on February 25, 1934. Both Moyse and Gaubert, incidentally, were students of the great French flutist and teacher Paul Taffanel, for whom many of the greatest French flute works were written. ...
Here’s one more interesting matrix completion paper: Matrix Completion from Non-Uniformly Sampled Entries Yuanyu Wan, Jinfeng Yi, Lijun Zhang https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1806.10308 we assume that a small number of columns are randomly selected and fully observed, and each remaining column is partially observed with uniform sampling. To recover the unknown matrix, we first recover its column space from the fully observed columns. Then, for each partially observed column, we recover it by finding a vector which lies in the recovered column space and consists of the observed entries. When the unknown m×n matrix is low-rank, we show that our algorithm can exactly recover it from merely Ω(rnlnn) entries, where r is the rank of the matrix. ...
Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune) is an orchestral work composed by Claude Debussy in 1894. It was inspired by Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem L’Après-midi d’un faune, which evokes the dreamy, sensual thoughts of a faun on a languid afternoon. It’s called a prélude because Debussy meant it as a musical introduction to the poem’s atmosphere, not a literal retelling. A Faun’s Afternoon (Snippet) Stéphane Mallarmé and Richard Howard ...
Meituan, the parent company of DianPing (often called “China’s Yelp”), has quietly launched a new food rating app called Duck Finding Food. Screenshot of the app’s logo, UI, recommendation policies. The app is still very beta — currently only available in Beijing. At its core, the app is for finding good places to eat. What makes it interesting is its ambition: 100% ad-free, bot-free, and purely based on authentic recommendations. ...
In 1936, critiques were targeted towards Shostakovich’s successful opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1932), which led to his first downfall. Cause the plot of Lady Macbeth is, well, very wild: TL;DR for Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk: Katerina Izmailova, a bored and lonely merchant’s wife in a provincial Russian town, begins an affair with a worker named Sergei. To escape her stifling life, she helps him murder her father-in-law, then her husband. ...
In memory of one of the greatest composers of the 20th century, Dmitri Shostakovich (Sept. 25, 1906 — Aug. 9, 1975): Shostakovich’s life reads like a legend. He seemed to live with his whole heart, navigating both artistic triumph and personal turbulence. His early breakthrough came with his Symphony No. 1 (1925), written at just 19, which won acclaim in both Russia and the West. But in 1936, official criticism targeted his work — especially his successful opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1932). Under intense pressure, he withdrew his Fourth Symphony before its premiere, and composed Symphony No. 5 (1937) as a public “response” that restored his standing. The piece satisfied official expectations, yet still carried a subtle undercurrent of irony. ...