Links

Politics/religion:

• “The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy”, Woodberry 2012 (excerpts; popular media coverage)
• “An Economic Analysis of the Financial Records of al-Qa’ida in Iraq”, Bahney et al 2010; “$0.60 for cake: Al-Qaida [in Mali] records every expense”
• “The lost history of Helmand” (failed nation-state building project in Afghanistan which exemplifies Scott’s Seeing Like A State)
• “The Lost World of the London Coffeehouse”
• “Secret without Reason and Costly without Accomplishment: Questioning the National Security Agency’s Metadata Program”, Mueller & Stewart 2014 (excerpts)
• “Aztec Political Thought” (the king as Enemy and Mocker, leader of a theatre state)
• “Hallucinated Gods” (on Julian Jaynes’s book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind)
• “Thank God for Cancer”

Business:

• “Hatred and Profits: Getting Under the Hood of the Ku Klux Klan”, Fryer & Levitt 2007 (discussion; excerpts)
• “Inside the World of the Double-Crossing Fake Hitman”
• “A Dolphin’s Tale: The Story of GameCube” (history)
• “Death at the Summit” (Intrade)

Literature:

• “Dwarf Fortress: A Marxist Analysis” (discussion)
• “The Gooseberry Fallacy” (Russian literature & thoughts on the good life) “…But for Me, It Was Tuesday” (TvTropes)

Medicine:

• “Marijuana: Much More Than You Wanted To Know”
• “Aretaeus On Bipolar Disorder” (ancient-Greek/psychiatry comparison)
• “Beware Mass-Produced Medical Recommendations” (on vitamin D & niacin)

Statistics:

• “Bayes’ Rule and the Paradox of Pre-Registration of RCTs”
• “Josef Urban on Machine Learning and Automated Reasoning”
• “Using deep learning to listen for whales”
• “Adversarial Bandits and the Exp3 Algorithm”
• “A Few Useful Things to Know about Machine Learning”, Domingos 2012 (nice guide to ‘common sense’ - data cleaning, modeling, overfitting, bias/variance, combining models, representation & learnability)
• “The Median is Not the Message”, Gould (on cancer survival and interpreting statistics)
• “Adventures in the Assessment of Animal Speed and Morality”
• “Posterior-Hacking”
• “Visualization Series: Using Scatterplots and Models to Understand the Diamond Market”

Technology:

• “A Future Of Pipes” (the future of cities and computing power: cooling is a big deal but not a defeater)
• “Auto Correct: Has the self-driving car at last arrived?”
• “Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning”, Mnih et al 2013
• Command-line folklore: the sort --key trick
• “Mobile Computing Research Is a Hornet’s Nest of Deception and Chicanery”, Mickens (excerpts)
• “The Slow Winter”, Mickens (excerpts)
• “The Night Watch”, Mickens (excerpts)
• “The Graph of Math”

Rationality:

• Best of Rationality Quotes 2013
• “Lily Allen & decision theory” (Bitcoin)
• “Lullaby Language”

Misc:

• Subreddit: “Things Fitting Perfectly Into Other Things”
• Ship’s cat
• Israel-related animal conspiracy theories

Books

Nonfiction:

• The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field, Jacques Hadamard (1945; review)
• The City of Falling Angels, Berendt (2000; review)
• Six Memos For The Next Millennium, Italo Calvino (1985)

Fiction:

• Diaspora, Greg Egan
• I Am A Cat, Natsume Soseki

Manga:

• Oyasumi Punpun (see TvTropes; dark and depressing - worth a reread but not sure I can bring myself to do it)

Film/TV

Film:

• Computer Chess (great world-building for a plot that did not deserve it)

Anime:

• Toradora
• Watamote (review)
• Garden of Words (review)
• Little Witch Academia (review)
• Hataraku Maou-sama! (review)

Music

Touhou:

• “上海tea” (堕悪祭怪&昼; ‘⇔LIGHT’ {R5}) [electronic]
• “パンザマスト (instrumental)” (“o ben to box”; miskyworks {C82}) [instrumental]
• “けろけろハッピー” (堕悪祭怪&昼; ‘XXXXX EX STAGE R-21’ {C78}) [trance]
• “イケナイ子守唄” (堕悪祭怪&昼; ‘いやしサンドバッグ’ {東方不敗小町5}) [trance]