Links

Genetics:

• Everything Is Heritable:

  • “74 SNP hits on cognitive ability from 300k individuals”

  • “The Evolutionary Genetics of Personality”, Penke et al 2007_17ya (holds up well after the GWASes for IQ & OCEAN; although prediction that OCEAN hits will be more plentiful than IQ seems to have fallen victim to personality being somewhat more polygenic than expected & non-additive; see the authors’ own evaluation, “The Evolutionary Genetics of Personality Revisited”, Penke & Jokela2016)

  • “…intelligence GWAS hits: Their relationship to country IQ…”, Piffer2015

• Recent Evolution:

  • “Population genetic differentiation of height and body mass index across Europe”, Robinson et al 2015 (to quote Yvain: “Genetic differences explain 24% of between-national-populations differences in height and 8% of between-national-populations in BMI across Europe. Now that the only two massively polygenic traits that might vary among national populations have been successfully studied, I look forward to never having to read any further research of this sort ever again.”)

• Engineering:

  • “Eugenics, Ready or Not”, Salter

Politics/religion:

• “est, Werner Erhard, and the corporatization of self-help”

• “The End of History?”, Francis Fukuyama (ISIS is both discredited & defeated; Russian nationalists have no greater ambition than to preserve regional influence & sow chaos; and the Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping has abandoned even its half-hearted attempt at doing anything but securing its power & privilege)

• Queue hairstyle

• “Malcolm X’s Purge, Second Thoughts, and Murder (Chapters 16–19, plus Haley’s Epilogue)”

Statistics/AI/meta-science:

• “The Bayesian Reproducibility Project” (interpreting the psychology reproducibility projects’ results not by uninterpretable p-values but by a direct Bayesian examination of whether the replications support or contradict the originals)

• “The Most Dangerous Equation” (sample size and standard error; examples: coinage, disease rates, small schools, male test scores.)

• “Correlation, Causation, and Confusion”

• Galton’s problem (Another name for pseudoreplication/autocorrelation/hierarchical-structure/non-independence. Definitely a concern in cross-racial genetics when you’re using population-level averages.)

• “The perilous plight of the (non)-replicator”

• “Empirical evidence of bias in treatment effect estimates in controlled trials with different interventions and outcomes: meta-epidemiological study”, Wood et al 2008

• “aRrgh: a newcomer’s (angry) guide to R” (I read this when starting out with R; in retrospect, it turned out to be more useful than I thought at the time)

• “Guessing the Truth: How good are we at guessing the truth of open conjectures?”

• “The Mayan Doomsday’s effect on survival outcomes in clinical trials”, Wheatley-Price et al 2012-12-11

Psychology/biology:

• “A 2-Year Randomized Controlled Trial of Human Caloric Restriction: Feasibility and Effects on Predictors of Health Span and Longevity” (the CALERIE study), Ravussin et al 2015

• “The Zombie Preacher of Somerset”

• “Operation Delirium: Decades after a risky Cold War experiment, a scientist lives with secrets”

• Rind et al controversy

Technology:

• “1 to 10 billion earth-like planets in the Milky Way Galaxy”

• the Vallejo kidnappings (This is so cyberpunk a true-crime story even Gibson wouldn’t dare write a novel about it. I was baffled when I originally read it, and I’m still baffled now.)

• “The Web We Lost”

• Physics Special Topics

• “Predicting and controlling NetHack’s randomness” (for an even more impressive speedrun, requiring multiple 72-core AWS computers to bruteforce the PRNG, see “SWAGGINZZZ”)

• “The hum that helps to fight crime”

• “Norvig’s Law”

Economics:

• “Crockford’s Club: How a Fishmonger Built a Gambling Hall and Bankrupted the British Aristocracy”

• “There are four ways to get fired from Caesars: (1) theft, (2) sexual harassment, (3) running an experiment without a control group, and (4) keeping a gambling addict away from the casino”

• “Housewife, ‘Gold Miss’, and Equal: The Evolution of Educated Women’s Role in Asia and the U.S.”, Hwang2013

• “Money, Dear Boy”

Fiction:

• “Biases of Fiction”

• “Cavemen Were Better at Depicting Quadruped Walking than Modern Artists: Erroneous Walking Illustrations in the Fine Arts from Prehistory to Today”, Horvath et al 2012

Books

Nonfiction:

• Epic Measures: One Doctor. Seven Billion Patients., on Christopher Murray’s Global Burden of Disease

• Practical Criticism, I.A. Richards 1930_94ya (review)

• Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace, Lipsky 2010_14ya (review)

• Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha (review)

Film/TV

Live-action:

• The Theory of Everything (review)

Anime:

• Shirobako (review)

Other Media

• XCOM: Enemy Unknown: 2012_12ya turn-based tactical strategy (isometric 3D) game; on Steam for Linux. You kill aliens. Heavy on the atmosphere and moody graphics, with many special effects and little cut-scenes. As a tactical strategy, it has weaknesses; units must be trained & upgraded over many missions so they are worth their weight in gold, one-shot kills are always possible, getting in the first shot is critical, and the level layout has the standard mechanism where clusters of aliens are triggered when one moves, all of which combine to force on you an extremely conservative gameplay style where you move as slowly as possible through the level with all your soldiers always in cover, lest you trigger 3 or 4 groups of aliens simultaneously and lose one or more near-irreplaceable units. It is quite an incentive to reload levels that go badly and one well-placed enemy or even-slightly-aggressive move costs you 2 or 3 elites of your squad (I didn’t reload… much.) As such, the snipers level up with the greatest of ease as they do most of the killing, and they only get more overpowered when Archangel armor is developed and they can now shoot across almost entire levels without having to move! The levels themselves are not too imaginative either, with all of them boiling down to search-and-destroy in levels which are copies of each other, even the hostage-rescue and bomb-defusing missions (where the best strategy seems to be to, yes, just killing the aliens as fast as possible). Tech upgrades are doled out sparingly, so that one only gets the funnest weapons like the Ghost armor (temporary invisibility) or Blaster Launcher (rockets that go around corners) as the game is ending. (Holding Ghost armor until the end is particularly unfortunate, since it helps reduce the incentive for ultra-conservative explorations and the 4-turn limit makes it a challenge to use optimally.) I have to contrast the tactical strategy aspect of XCOM unfavorably to the last game I was playing, Advance Wars: Dual Strike: units can be risked in gambits and attacks because losing them is not so devastating, the first-attacker still has a huge advantage but this makes for interesting ambushes and tactics rather than forcing passivity, and since the enemy is always in motion, you are constantly under pressure to act too. Overall, I enjoyed it, but don’t feel any need to play it again.

Music

Touhou:

• “eye” (Syrufit feat. Mei Ayakura; TRATRA -Extra Track- {TM2010_14ya}) [trance]

• “Sakura, Sakura～ Japanese Dream…” (Alstroemeria Records; against, perfect cherry blossom. {C66}) [ambient/trance]

• “Day and Night” (Maurits Cornelis feat. Vivienne; World Trick {C88}) [Jpop]

• “Whole lotta love-spark” (Moon-Tone; Downtime Sessions—Toho Relax {R12}) [ambient]

• “The drive home” (Moon-Tone; Downtime Sessions—Toho Relax {R12}) [ambient]

Doujin:

• “youthful” (スズム; 青春の味と空論の君 {C84}) [instrumental]