Links

Genetics:

• Everything Is Heritable:

  • “Genes Take Charge, and Diets Fall by the Wayside”

  • “Not by Twins Alone: Using the Extended Family Design to Investigate Genetic Influence on Political Beliefs”, Hatemi et al 2010

  • “Chimpanzee Intelligence Is Heritable”, Hopkins et al 2014

  • “Genetic Variation Associated with Differential Educational Attainment in Adults Has Anticipated Associations with School Performance in Children”, Ward et al 2014 (Rietveld et al 2013’s 3 SNP hits for intelligence are starting to replicate)

  • “The genetics of investment biases”, Cronqvist & Siegal2014

  • “Genetic Relations Among Procrastination, Impulsivity, and Goal-Management Ability: Implications for the Evolutionary Origin of Procrastination”, Gustavson et al 2014

Politics/religion:

• “ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World” (very impressive historically-accurate in-browser simulation of the logistics of the ancient Roman Empire. My only regret is that I can’t think of any situation in which I actually need an exact calculation of how much it would have cost to get from Londinium to Rome during winter while avoiding the Atlantic. But some of the graphs showing cost-distances between Rome and the provinces are pretty interesting, as are some of the disparities)

• “Differences in negativity bias underlie variations in political ideology”, Hibbing et al 2014 (media)

• Dinosaur Comics on the lyrics of “La Marseillaise”

• “Political Extremism Is Supported by an Illusion of Understanding”, Fernbach et al 2013

• “Toward a [J-curve] theory of revolution”, Davies1962

• “Paying Kidnapping Ransoms, Europe Bankrolls Qaeda Terror” (incentives matter)

• “How Hijackers Commandeered Over 130 American Planes—In 5 Years”: the golden age of hijacking

• “NSA-proof encryption exists. Why doesn’t anyone use it?”

• “Inside the United States: GlobalPost goes inside the United States to uncover the regime’s dramatic descent into authoritarian rule and how the opposition plans to fight back.”

• Saint Guinefort: greyhound & patron of sick children

• Dr Seuss and the Cold War

• “The Blurb I Wish I’d Had”

• “Nakatomi Space” (Die Hard as conceptual art/philosophy)

• “Welcome to the Future Nauseous”

Statistics/AI/meta-science:

• “Teachers and Income: What Did the Project STAR Kindergarten Study Really Find?”

• “The Small Schools Myth”

• “Online Controlled Experiments at Large Scale”, Kohavi et al 2013_11ya (“One interesting tidbit is that Bing found that every 100ms faster they deliver search result pages to searchers yields 0.6% more in revenue (which is a similar result to an old Amazon test).”)

• “What does randomness look like?” (the classic statistics examples of Poisson distributions like V-bombs falling on London)

• “How Not to Be Misled by the Jobs Report” (Depicts the sampling error associated with each estimate by providing an animation showing repeated draws assuming the point-estimate is the ground truth. Good for showing you how easily ‘patterns’ show up with a few data points.)

• “Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures”, Breiman2001

• Distributed vectors for image recognition from textual descriptions

• “Future progress in artificial intelligence: a poll among experts”, Müller & Bostrom2014

• “HeartMath Considered Incoherent”

• “Deep impact: unintended consequences of journal rank”, Brembs et al 2013_11ya (meta-science)

Psychology:

• “Humans are not automatically strategic”

• “Pre-Crastination: Hastening Subgoal Completion at the Expense of Extra Physical Effort”, Rosenbaum et al 2014 (NYT)

• Poincaré on intuition in mathematics

• “Does incubation enhance problem-solving? A meta-analytic review”, Sio & Ormerod2009

• “It Takes Guts To Do Research” (on Oppenheimer & missed opportunities)

• “Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind”, Wilson et al 2014

• OkCupid experiments demonstrating shallowness in dating

• “On the trail of the elusive successful psychopath”

• “Cannabis, IQ and socio-economic status in the Dunedin data—an update”

• “Alcoholism in Antarctica”

• Suicide is highest in spring

• “Character amnesia…whereby experienced speakers of East Asian languages forget how to write Chinese characters previously well known”

Technology:

• On the n-body problem’s exact but useless solution

• “Inside a Startup’s Plan to Turn a Swarm of DIY Satellites Into an All-Seeing Eye” (see WP: ultimately launched some satellites, was acquired by Google)

• “Harnessing human computation: Luis von Ahn helped save the internet from spammers. His larger quest is to put internet chores to productive use”

• “Inside The Immortality Business: Thanks to a small but devoted core of true believers and an infusion of Silicon Valley research funds, the once-revered, much-reviled science of cryopreservation may itself be coming back from the dead. Welcome to Alcor, where death is merely a temporary setback.”

Economics:

• How Wizards of the Coast distributed equity as a startup

• Libertarians against recycling

• “Labor’s Declining Share of Income and Rising Inequality”

• When should the Devil keep his deals? a game-theoretic approach

Fiction:

• 2001 in anime reviewed (an incredible year for anime, as it gave us: Animation Runner Kuromi, Cat Soup, Cowboy Bebop: Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door, FLCL, Fruits Basket, Haré+Guu, Metropolis, Millennium Actress, Princess Arete, Read or Die OVA, & Spirited Away.)

• “Harry Potter Fanfiction Data (Most popular characters, publishing rates, etc)” (I would not have guessed that fictions starring Harry & Daphne were the most popular!)

• “Pierre Menard Author of the Quixote”, by Jorge Luis Borges

• “The Game of Rat and Dragon”, Cordwainer Smith 1955

Misc:

• Long hair

Books

Nonfiction:

• 2014 COPSS anthology, Past, Present, and Future of Statistical Science (review)

• Pioneers of Soviet Computing, Malinovsky 2010_14ya (review)

Fiction:

• Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic

• Poul Anderson’s Brain Wave

• Zelazny’s A Night in the Lonesome October

• Paolini’s Eragon (review)

Film/TV

Live-action:

• Gravity (great; the technical criticisms are overblown)

• The Wild Geese (for a classic movie about mercenaries, pretty dumb)

• Tea with Mussolini

Anime:

• Maoyuu Maou Yuusha (I found it relatively interesting and the harem antics not as bad as expected; Spice and Wolf is still better, though)

Music

Explosions in the Sky:

• “Your Hand in Mine (piano cover)”, rmadlal

Touhou:

God is an Astronaut: