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): ...

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). Basically, they are the history of the flute instrument. ...