In the middle of downtown Kunming lies 翠湖 (might as well be translated to the ‘Green’ Lake?) — a small, quiet lake locals call “the eye of the city.” Around 1940s when Japanese troops pushed deep into China, our top universities — Peking University, Tsinghua, and Nankai — merged and moved south to Kunming, forming the National Southwest Associated University (西南联大). Among its students was the writer 汪曾祺. He later wrote about 翠湖 with the same tone that runs through much of his work: humorous, subtle, warm. His essays recall a city that, despite the war, still had tea houses humming, professors shuffling past with stacks of books, students renting cramped rooms, neighbors chatting in the alleys. Like though life must be tough then during war, people still found small ways to live well. ...

July and August in Yunnan are jùnzi season — the local word for the wild fungi that spill out of the mountains and into dinner tables. Among all these one stands out: the truffle. Truffles shaved in paper-thin slices over pasta are certificates for good dating dinner, their price that can hit USD$50 for just 28 grams. In Yunnan, they’re tossed into scrambled eggs without ceremony, folded into a bowl of noodles, or dropped straight into a pot of rice noodles — as casually as tossing in a handful of button mushrooms. ...

Guiyang’s food mirrors the city’s geography and spirit — rugged, unpretentious, and joyfully rebellious. As I wrote before (Why the food here is so spicy…), history gave China Southwest people a deep bond with chili. Add to that the fact that Guiyang has never been a major economic, political, or trade hub, and you get a food culture that defies easy categorization — a kind of culinary anarchy. In Guangzhou — arguably the city with the best food in China — cooking is treated like a form of high art. A single shrimp dumpling there has to follow an exact choreography: the skin must be translucent but elastic, the filling is expected to be ‘鲜’ and the shrimp inside sweet and bouncy. Like there’s a “right” way to do almost everything. ...

When asked why he wanted to climb Everest, adventurer George Mallory famously replied: “Because it’s there.” Turns out, Fanjing Mountain (2,336m) was also there—when we’ve paid the sunk cost of an expensive ticket and the cable took us to the foot of the mountain—so up I went. Halfway up, Li Bai’s 《蜀道难》 (The Hard Road to Shu) rang painfully true: “噫吁嚱，危乎高哉！蜀道之难，难于上青天！” “Ah, wretched heights! The road to Shu is harder than climbing to heaven!” ...

I spent the day hiking up a valley, tracing a stream until it cascaded into a waterfall. The water was glass-clear, tumbling over stones exactly as the ancient poem describes: “清泉石上流” (Over mossy stones, the crystal stream glides.) The beauty was undeniable—but as a metropolitan indoor person, I’ll admit the aesthetic was more rewarding than the activity. Pro tip: Wear proper hiking shoes and athletic gear. Not designer dresses—unless you enjoy wrestling in waterfalls with couture and crocs sandals. ...

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. The film opens with a faithful reenactment of that infamous night when Paris’s upperclass literally lost their mind and etiquette over, divine art: (fun fact: the movie is (loosely) about a love affair between Chanel and Stravinsky. With Mads Mikkelsen playing Stravinsky, honestly, I’d believe he can have an affair with anyone…) ...

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): ...