“This piece was recorded between 1930 and 1935 and this isn’t a scamm, it really is Prokofiev who is playing the piano!!”

Mariinsky Ballet at Shanghai, Oct. 23 2024. Ballet Gala. Don Quixote Act II pas de deux. One nice thing about ballet is that you can cheer and applause during the performance—so it’s worthwhile to watch it live (even from the third floor)—to be among the audience and enjoy the awe. The ballerina wasn’t technically 100% perfect—you can observe a tiny trip at 11s. Yet the audience was ignited and she got thundering applause....

La Bayadère is a three-act ballet. It was premiered by the Imperial Ballet at Bolshoi Kamenny, St. Petersburg, Russia in 1877. Music by Ludwig Minkus. Synopsis Set in the Royal India of the past, La Bayadère is a story of eternal love, mystery, fate, vengeance, and justice. The ballet relates the drama of a temple dancer (bayadère), Nikiya, who is loved by Solor, a noble warrior. She is also loved by the High Brahmin, but does not love him in return, as she does Solor....

Here are two interesting pieces: both are from Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream—overture or the incidental music suit, arranged for solo/duet piano. 1. Martha Argerich and Cristina Marton play Ouverture and Scherzo Summernight Dream: 2. the famous Scherzo, paraphrased by Rachmaninov ester egg: the flute solo of the Scherzo is a very difficult solo

This is from the Game Changer podcast:Behind the Stars: Uncovering the Biases in Online Reviews | with Tommaso Bondi. Link to the podcast website. The podcast features Tommaso Bondi (link to his webpage) and his paper Alone, Together: A Model of Social (Mis)Learning from Consumer Reviews. The problem roots in cultural markets, like movies, music, books where consumers discover and experience the product without knowing their exact utilities ex-ante. To decide which product to consume, we might utilitze reviews to gauge the unknown utility....

Three miscellaneous for the weekend: the procrastinator Did you know Felix Mendelssohn composed music for Shakespeare’s comedy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, not once, but twice? At the tender age of 17, he crafted the overture (Op. 21, 1826). Later in his career, in 1842—just five years before his demise—he completed a full suite of incidental music (Op. 61) for the play’s production. Btw, the beloved Wedding March we all know is from this very suite!...

A good place to begin—how modern Google search works: Mission of Google’s search: “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” — like an advanced yellowbook. Google declared their mission in Our approach to Search, including 6 key aspects: (1) Deliver the most relevant and reliable information available. (2) Maximize access to information (3) Present information in the most useful way (4) Protect your privacy (5) Sell ads, nothing more...

ChatGPT makes it much easier to modify configurations for my website. I changed the font to Montserrat—an open source font provided by Google font (fonts.google.com) that is highly similar to Google’s proprietary logo font Product Sans. Google Sans [and Product Sans] is not available for use outside of Google. It is our brand font and is exclusively used in Google products. Fine. Google font has a delivery service—everytime the website loads, it fetches font files from Google....

Something interesting happened in today’s seminar course. One of my classmates presented his final paper, and as expected in a seminar setting, our instructor, Hu Fu, wants everyone to stay engaged and understand what’s being discussed. Today’s presenter had clearly prepared and read the paper but had no clue how to structure an academic talk. He skipped all the basics—no background, no context of the model provided—and jumped straight into the technical details....

Motivation Preview from problem set 2, question 4: (link to original file) This gives a reduction: [submodular welfare maximization] <= [maximize a monotone submodular function s.t. matroid constarint]. Remarks: hardness & approximation of the problem [submodular welfare maximization] >= [maximize a monotone submodular function s.t. matroid constarint] (Is it true though?). maximize monotone submodular function is hard. Because, for instance, one can reduce Partition problem to it. That’s why we started looking at submodular maximization s....