Links

Genetics:

• Everything Is Heritable:

  • “Behavior Genetic Research Methods: Testing Quasi-Causal Hypotheses Using Multivariate Twin Data”, Turkheimer & Harden2014

  • “How genome-wide association studies (GWAS) made traditional candidate gene studies obsolete”, Duncan et al 2019 (apropos of SSC on Border et al 2019 revisiting the candidate-gene & gene-environment debacles)

• Engineering:

  • full genome synthesis of E. coli: 4 million base-pairs (media)

  • The majority of SK police quarantine dogs are now clones

  • “Birth of clones of the world’s first cloned dog”, Kim et al 2017 (“We’ll always have Snuppy. Here’s looking at you, pup.”)

AI:

• “Adversarial Examples Are Not Bugs, They Are Features”, Ilyas et al 2019 (‽)

• “Meta-learning of Sequential Strategies”, Ortega et al 2019; “Reinforcement Learning, Fast and Slow”, Botvinick et al 2019; “Meta-learners’ learning dynamics are unlike learners’”, Rabinowitz2019; “Ray Interference: a Source of Plateaus in Deep Reinforcement Learning”, Schaul et al 2019 (Bayesian RL interpretations of meta-DRL & why DRL is so sample-inefficient)

• “GROVER: Defending Against Neural Fake News”, Zellers et al 2019 (training a GPT-2-1.5b on news articles to generate super-realistic fake news: online demo; oddly, GROVER can also do fanfiction/riddles/poetry)

• “EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks”, Tan & Le2019 (a simple architecture design trick to get new ImageNet SOTA at a fraction the model size; comments)

• “Speech2Face: Learning the Face Behind a Voice”, Oh et al 2019 (really?)

• SOLAR: “Model-Based Reinforcement Learning from Pixels with Structured Latent Variable Models”, Zhang et al 2019; VICE-RAQ: “End-to-End Deep Reinforcement Learning without Reward Engineering”, Singh et al 2019 (highly sample-efficient robot arm training)

• Bruteforcing Breakout (optimal play by depth-first search of an approximate MDP in an optimized C++ simulator for 6 CPU-years, which is possible because your computer is faster than you think; crazy gameplay—like chess endgame tables, a glimpse of superintelligence)

Statistics/Meta-Science:

• “Objecting to experiments that compare two unobjectionable policies or treatments”, Meyer et al 2019

• Life On the Infinite Farm, Schwartz2018 (Hilbert’s farm)

Politics/religion:

• How Soviet centralized economic planning led to the near-extinction of whales, for no particular reason

• “Medieval Monogamy”, Betzig1995

• “The Apostate: Paul Haggis vs. the Church of Scientology”

• “‘This place is pryson’: review of Hermits and Anchorites in England, 1200^–₃₅₀1550_474ya, ed Jones”

• “A Modern History of Satanic Panic in South Carolina”

Psychology/biology:

• “Invisible Designers: Brain Evolution Through the Lens of Parasite Manipulation”, Del Giudice2019 (SSC; is the complexity of brains largely accidental complexity, protective obfuscation against parasites, including design features like literally poisonous neurotransmitters?)

• “The Family That Feels Almost No Pain: An Italian clan’s curious insensitivity to pain has piqued the interest of geneticists seeking a new understanding of how to treat physical suffering” (more fodder for my backstop essay)

• “The Hype Cycle of Working Memory Training”, Redick2019

• “Strange-face illusions during eye-to-eye gazing in dyads: specific effects on derealization, depersonalization and dissociative identity”, Caputo2019 (media; only sort of works for me)

• “My Brother Tom’s Schizophrenia”

• “An astounding, one-of-a-kind trove of stories and drawings reveals what life was like for young men growing up in rural 19^th-century America” (on the Nelson Brothers’ Colonial America paracosm, “the Big, Long, and Round Continents”)

Technology:

• “How Complex Systems Fail”, Cook2000

• “SpaceX Launches 60 Starlink Internet Satellites Into Orbit”

• Rivest’s LCS35 time-lock crypto puzzle has been broken 15 years ahead of schedule by 2 different groups (HN; background on time-lock crypto)

• RIP: FBI has seized Deep Dot Web and arrested its administrators (indictment; mirrors of select DDW pages)

• “The Lost Picture Show: Hollywood Archivists Can’t Outpace Obsolescence—Studios invested heavily in magnetic-tape storage for film archiving but now struggle to keep up with the technology”

• “The Paris Compressed-Air Network” (cf. “The Paris Pneumatic Clock Network”)

• “Dictionary of Numbers, Putting numbers in human terms” (a browser extension for replacing large numbers in text with familiar quantities, Fermi-estimate-style)

Economics:

• “The Optimistic Thought Experiment”, Thiel 2008 (globalization, bubbles, technological progress, & survivorship bias)

• “The making of Amazon Prime, the Internet’s most successful and devastating membership program: An oral history of the subscription service that changed online shopping forever”

• “Shady Numbers And Bad Business: Inside The Esports Bubble”

Fiction:

• “Killing Rabbits”, Miroslav Válek (WWII/Cold War/vegetarianism etc; from One Hundred Years of Slovak Literature: An Anthology, ed Chrobakova 2000_24ya)

• “Case Study: Anime Music Videos”, Milstein2007

Film/TV

Live-action:

• Sicario (2015; cruelly perfect)

• Terminator 2 (entertaining but aside from great style, has little substance; I spent much of the time thinking about how ‘cheap’ the liquid metal special effects look now but how cutting-edge & excruciating those special effects were to pull off in 1991_33ya: “The tech of Terminator 2—an oral history”)

• Dialogues des Carmélites opera (review)

• Laura (1944_80ya; film noir murder mystery which benefits from sharp dialogue and casting, even though the culprit turns out to be precisely who you would guess a few minutes in and can hardly be considered to be a ‘mystery’)

• Pokémon Detective Pikachu (2019; review)

• It Follows (2014; review)

Animated:

• Children Who Chase Lost Voices (2011_13ya; review)

Music

Touhou:

• “きらめきの谺” (Foxtail-Grass; ‘つきよがたり。’ {R15}) [folk]

• “乱 -Ran-” (Stack; 第14回博麗神社例大祭 会場限定おまけCD {R14}) [rock]

• “Till The Next Journey” (Ringing Volcano; A Wolf and Gensokyo {R14}) [folk]

• “The Cattail’s Head” (Ringing Volcano; A Wolf and Gensokyo {R14}) [folk]

• “A Pub” (Ringing Volcano; A Wolf and Gensokyo {R14}) [folk]

• “The Ray of Light” (NAGI☆ feat. Vivienne; Increase Beat {R14}) [pop]

MLP:

• “The Daring Explorer” (Jyc Row; Jyc Row Orchestral Compilation Vol. 3—SOLAR {2018}) [instrumental rock]

• “478,000 Miles (Shining Forth)” (loophoof; Rebirth {2018}) [house]

• “Heir of the Moonlight (EnsionD remix)” (EnsionD & Synthis feat. FritzyBeat {2018}) [trance]

Doujin:

• “エヴリデイドリーム” (c-hicken; My Secret Cute {M3-39}) [acoustic]