Links

Politics/religion:

• “The Anti-Reactionary FAQ”

• Some thoughts on education and political priorities (Amazingly synoptic read from Dominic Cummings: physicists, psychometrics, education, experience curves, Fermi estimates, teaching high-IQ students, behavioral genetics—he’s got everything. LW discussion, Guardian)

• “From the Okhrana to the KGB: Continuities in Russian foreign intelligence operations since the 1880s”, Andrew1989

• “$0.60 for cake: Al-Qaida records every expense” (Principal-agent problems—because terrorism is not about beliefs; see also “An Economic Analysis of the Financial Records of al-Qa’ida in Iraq”)

• “Appendix F—Personal observations on the reliability of the Shuttle” (Feynman’s classic appendix on the Space Shuttle program is worth a read if you’ve never gotten around to it before.)

• “Francisco Franco, Robust Action, and the Power of Non-Commitment”

• “What Is the Koran? Researchers with a variety of academic and theological interests are proposing controversial theories about the Koran and Islamic history, and are striving to reinterpret Islam for the modern world. This is, as one scholar puts it, a ‘sensitive business’”

• “No Safe Haven: Iran’s Global Assassination Campaign” (I look forward to their version for the USA & Israel)

• “As Tanzania’s Albino Killings Continue, Unanswered Questions Raise Fears: Targeted by witch doctors and underserved by government, East African albinos face many challenges”

• “What if the Tsarnaevs had been giant copper robots?”

• On the recent origins of ancient traditions:

  • “Don’t tell the kids: The real history of the tooth fairy; She’s way younger than you’d think. And she might be descended from the Tooth Mouse” / “The tooth fairy and the traditionality of modernity”

  • Buddhist modernism / “A new World Religion”

  • “The invention of tradition (karate edition)”

Business:

• “How the Fed Let the World Blow Up in 2008: High oil prices blinded the Fed to the growing danger before the crash”

• “The Milkman Cometh: What did George Sperti have to do with America’s obsession with supplements? The long, winding tale of a clever young UC engineering student, a nation fighting rickets, and a little money-maker called vitamin D.” (rise and fall of the Vitamin D cartel)

• “What Bad Students Know that Good Economists Don’t” (I’ve been remarking for the past two years or so that we should find it very odd that the college wage premium keeps going up even as graduation rates stagnate; I’m glad Caplan has been looking at the problem.)

Literature:

• “William Gibson, The Art of Fiction No. 211”

• “You have a sad feeling for a moment, then it passes.” (Nethack essay on pets)

• “Our Toyota was Fantastic”

• Wondermark: “Better Olympic Narratives” / #1001; “In which Athletes are overgood”

• “SCP-1370”

• “Composer of the Month—Jun Maeda”

Medicine:

• “The Nazi War on Cancer”

• “IamA Anesthesia Awareness survivor!” (see also Inverse P-zombies)

• “Bad Dreams”

Psychology:

• “Maxims or Myths of Beauty? A Meta-Analytic and Theoretical Review”, Langlois et al 2000

• “Hints of genomic dark matter: rare variants contribute to schizophrenia risk”

• “Xenopsychology”

• “Nootropics surveys and results” (I also did a multi-level model analysis of the data)

Statistics:

• Inferring XKCD topics with Latent Dirichlet Allocation

• Lies, Damned Lies, And Social Media (Part 5 of ∞) (rape statistics)

• Beware Mass-Produced Medical Recommendations (I disagree on the benefits of vitamin D for all-cause mortality; see my comments)

• “If our Twitter timelines (tweets by the people we follow) actually extended off the screen in both directions, how tall would they be?”

Science/technology:

• “A Star in a Bottle: An audacious plan to create a new energy source could save the planet from catastrophe. But time is running out.” (ITER fusion research update; some shades of Radiance/NIF in there…)

• “Geoengineering research” (Givewell)

• “On the Statistics of Individual Variations of Productivity in Research Laboratories”, Shockley1957 (discussion; see also “Age and Outstanding Achievement: What Do We Know After a Century of Research?”, Simonton1988)

• Fully Decentralized Bitcoin Prediction Markets:

  On-blockchain transactions. The key idea is how judgment of a prediction market is carried out: holders of ‘truthcoins’ submit encrypted votes 1/0 on every outstanding market, and rather than a simple majority vote, they’re weighted by how well they mirror the overall consensus and paid out a share of trading fees based on that weight. This punishes deviation from the majority and reminds me of Bayesian truth serum. Very clever. I haven’t been too impressed with the Bitcoin betting sites I’ve seen too far (some of them like Bets of Bitcoin are just atrocious), but this seems like a fully decentralized design. The problem is it’s so complex that I don’t see anyone implementing it anytime soon.

• “The recent ‘How Quantum is the D-Wave Machine?’ Shin et al paper” (If I had D-Wave shares, I would be selling at any price.)

• “Little’s Law, Scalability and Fault Tolerance: The OS is your bottleneck (and what you can do about it)” (possibly obvious notes on server scaling to anyone working on big services, but I liked the use of Little’s law to structure the discussion.)

• “Another Empty, Lifeless Planet Found” (satire)

Misc:

• “Don’t End The Week With Nothing” (Portfolios and working in public.)

• “What the Tortoise Said to Achilles”, Lewis Carroll

Books

Fiction:

• Absolute Sandman, vol III-IV

• Radiance (review)

• Brosh2013’s Hyperbole and a Half (review)

Film/TV

Film:

• All Is Lost: if the WP description of a 1.5 hour dialogue-less film about a small-boat disaster & survival sounds like something you’d enjoy, you probably will; Redford does an excellent job and it is interesting to watch his character think & improvise and try to master the situations he finds himself in

• The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel: not nearly as awful and sentimental tripe as one would expect given the setting of a retirement home in India, and particularly interesting for depicting some of the struggles elderly people experience these days (not something I see much of).

Anime:

• Silver Spoon

• Uchouten Kazoku

• Genshiken Nidaime (review)

• Iblard Time

Music

Touhou:

• “真生未分の一心” (spctrm; Duende {C80}) [orchestral/folk]

• “eureka” (hiro.na; eureka {C77}) [folk/inst rock]

• “avatar” (綾倉盟; eureka {C77}) [instrumental/electronic]

• “a field of clouds” (hiro.na; eureka {C77}) [instrumental]

• “Dreaming Tonight” feat. Renko (Kirin; Starlight {C85}) [trance]

• “Floral Colors” feat. 陽花 (Tim Vegas; Nothing but Flowers {C80}) [Jpop/trance]

Doujin:

• “Look up in the Sky” feat. mow*2 (P*Light; HARDCORE UNITED TOKYO {C84}) [hardcore]

• “TOKONATSU” (P*light; SUPER SONIC !! {C84}) [hardcore]

• “Bring the Sun” (fang; Driven’ De:st-ructure3 {C84}) [hardcore]

• “Walking” (fang; Driven’ De:st-ructure3 {C84}) [hardcore]

• “Rhythm Of Love” feat. Yuki (M-Project; Blood, Sweat & Makina {C84}) [techno]

• “Are You Ready (DJ SHIMAMURA Remix)” feat. Yukacco (kors k; HARDCORE UNITED TOKYO {C84}) [hardcore]

Vocaloid:

• “Inverse Relation” (Miku; Clean Tears; Reverberations {C84}) [trance]

• “Reverberations” (Miku; Clean Tears; Reverberations {C84}) [trance]

• “こどものしくみ” (Miku; by 鹿乃; 或る街の白昼夢 {C85}) [Jpop]

• “パンデミックの掃除” (Rin; かがみね★ふぇすた 2013) [Jpop]

• “mugs” (古川本舗 & 630; Alice in wonderword) [rock]

• “Alice” (Meiko; Alice in wonderword) [Jpop?]

• “ピアノ・レッスン” (野宮真貴 with Baguettes Ensemble; Alice in wonderword) [jazz]

Misc:

• “Pulstar” (Vangelis; Albedo 0.39) [electronic]

• “Heaven & Hell, Pt. 1” (Vangelis; The Music of Cosmos) [classical]