Sabrina Carpenter’s hit Nonsense is a great song, both artistically and commercially. The song gives a “I-DONT-GIVE-A-SHIT” (IDGAS) energy. The singer herself said in Genius VERIFIED interview “…we were hitting a lot of walls and we’re like, you know what, let’s just literally write nonsense, no joke. and that’s how the song happened.” “A lot of our justification for lyrics was well it’s nonsense. so it doesn’t have to make any sense at all and we just have fun....

I’ve got two amazing topics to write about. One is Sabrina Carpenter’s single Nonsense, the other is the final season of The Marvelous Mrs Maisel. Cheers! Art for art’s sake. Stayed tuned before the holiday specials.

Who doesn’t love Messi? There is something mesmerising about his minimalism. He has stripped the game back to its essentials; his greatest gift has perhaps been his capacity to select the lowest-tariff option necessary in any given situation. There is an impish grace to everything he does on a pitch and yet his success is rooted in cold, unfussy calculation. But recently, something other than pure football is all over the news....

Following competition consequences I, part II about competition and repugnancy. A repugnant market refers to a market where certain goods or services are considered objectionable or morally unacceptable to buy and sell, despite there being potential buyers and sellers. Examples include markets for organs, surrogacy, and certain forms of labor. However, beyond moral objections, these markets raise additional concerns, as said in Al Roth’s Who Gets What and Why, it’s important to remember that:...

two market fokelores that have fascinated me for a while.

bridging concepts Recently, I’ve come to realize that there is a nuanced distinction between mechanism design and market design. Initially, I conflated the two, but a deeper dive into the subject matter—prompted by a friend’s bachelor thesis—has elucidated the critical differences. Mechanism design is inherently algorithmic, centered around eliciting information and strategically manipulating incentives through mathematical formulations. It’s a toolset for creating environments where desired outcomes can be achieved based on the information asymmetries and strategic interactions of participants....

I’ve recently stumbled across a photographer Chaoming Zeng (曾朝民) on instagram, whose base is also Guangdong China, but more in the rural area like Dong-guan. Here’s the particular work that really took my breath away: All rights belong to the original photographer, @chaomingzeng. But, OMG, this picture is almost like an oil painting of modern misery juxtaposed with the mundane hope of life. Personally, I am deeply attached to my hometown Guangzhou, of the vibrant yet chaotic essence, a raw, unpolished vitality that roots itself deeply in the everyday lives of its inhabitants....

There’s a meme that perfectly captures the essence of understanding machine learning, a realization that dawned on me after enrolling in both machine learning and statistics courses. It highlights the intricate relationship between these fields in a humorous yet profound way: It wasn’t until taking both machine learning and stats courses to make me recall how accurate this meme is. High Dimensional Statistics was an elective course I took last semester (Fall/Winter 2023-24) at SUFE, taught by Prof....

Currently, I’m immersed in two mechanism design projects, both intricately involving the integration of stochastic processes within their frameworks. This reminds me of a comic that resonates humorously with my work: An economist’s playful daydream or a mathematician’s practical joke, it’s a scenario where certainty is the only casualty and the pursuit of fairness takes a probabilistic turn. Prepare for a world where the accountants are the gamblers, and the odds are your tax bracket....

in every job that must be done, there is an element of fun…