Links

Politics/religion:

• “Preparing for the Possibility of a North Korean Collapse”, Bennett 2013 (A fascinating read. I didn’t know many of those details about how the East German collapse was able to go so smoothly, or that Kim Jong-Il had intimidated his subordinates during the ’90s famines with footage of impoverished humiliated East German elites.)
• “Where Was China?: Why the Twentieth-Century Was Not a Chinese Century”
• “The Market for Martyrs”, Iannaccone 2003 (excerpts)
• “The Paradox of Modern Individualism”
• “Real life conspiracies”
• “United States cryptologic security failures in WWII”
• “Happy birthday, Satoshi Nakamoto” (Satoshi Nakamoto left a cool Easter egg in his profile: his birthdate (5 April 1975) is a double reference to the banning & relegalization of gold in the USA.)
• Anti-tobacco movement in Nazi Germany
• “F.B.I. Informant Is Tied to Cyber Attacks Abroad”
• “Dead Souls: The Denationalization of the American Elite” (see particularly the “Unrepresentative Democracy” section)
• “Who Is Ali Khamenei? The Worldview of Iran’s Supreme Leader”

Statistics:

• “You’ve just been added to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List, how long will you survive?” (Survival analysis in R)
• “Randomized Controlled Trials Commissioned by the Institute of Education Sciences Since 2002: How Many Found Positive Versus Weak or No Effects?”, Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy 2013 (excerpts)
• “Preclinical research: Make mouse studies work”
• “Neural Networks, Manifolds, and Topology” (Very nice visualizations. Now I understand the appeal of topological approaches to machine learning.)
• “Rate of false conviction of criminal defendants who are sentenced to death”, Gross et al 2014 (An intriguing application of survival analysis)
• “The [Parapsychology] Control Group Is Out Of Control”
• Data scientist interview anthology (Nice selection of domains - computer vision for makeup selection? It’s a thing.)

Literature

• Calvin & Muad’Dib
• “The Sleepwalkers”
• “The Gloria Incident”
• “Equoid” (Charles Stross; Lovecraft meets My Little Pony)
• “The Study of Anglophysics”

• Seamus Heaney:

  • “A Dog Was Crying Tonight In Wicklow Also”
  • “When all the others were away at Mass”

Medicine/biology:

• “Interventions Tend To Combine Synergistically To Extend Life Span A Little, But The Typical Improvement Is Statistically Insignificant”, Kingsley 2013
• “Life Extension Supplements: A Reality Check; In a paper published late last year, a cautious and expert biochemist reports that none of the most popular “life extension supplement” mixes actually extend life span in mice”
• “New Drug Development: Estimating entry from human clinical trials”, Adams & Brantner 2003 (excerpts)
• “Breeding a better crop seed, trait by trait” (molecular breeding : plants :: embryo selection : humans?)
• “The Bell Curve: What happens when patients find out how good their doctors really are?” (Cystic fibrosis as paradigm for general differences in practical effectiveness between hospitals & practitioners. Also a reminder why you need things like multi-level models for analysis: there is hierarchical structure to outcomes.)
• “DNA methylation age of human tissues and cell types” (FAQ), Horvath 2013; mainstream overview of results: “Biomarkers and Ageing: The clock-watcher; Biomathematician Steve Horvath has discovered a strikingly accurate way to measure human Ageing through epigenetic signatures” (The truly exciting part here is the possibility that his clock will not just be real, but it’ll be caused by aging and not just correlated through the myriads of possible pathways. If you get an actual biomarker for aging, it’ll revolutionize anti-aging studies by letting you test interventions in a decade with a small fraction of the humans you’d need with mortality-based methods. Right now, it takes decades and sample sizes of thousands or tens of thousands of people to show a reduction in all-cause mortality - a highly-precise anti-aging marker would change all that.)

Psychology:

• “Do Elephants Have Souls?” (“Another way of catching elephants, employed less now than it used to be, is to save the babies from a cull and market them. Because of the psychological problems caused by having their entire families slaughtered around them, culling experts now recommend just killing the babies with everybody else.”)
• “The Market for Less” (akrasia)
• “Genetic enhancement of cognition in a kindred with cone–rod dystrophy due to RIMS1 mutation”, Sisodiya et al 2007
• “Salt Iodization and the Enfranchisement of the American Worker”, Adhvaryu et al 2013
• “Neurological and psychological applications of transcranial lasers and LEDs”, Rojas & Gonzalez-Lima 2013
• “The reality show: Schizophrenics used to see demons and spirits. Now they talk about actors and hidden cameras – and make a lot of sense”
• “Psychedelics and Mental Health: A Population Study”, Krebs & Johansen 2013

Science/technology

• “The Challenge of Relativistic Spaceflight”
• “Information, Beliefs, and Trading”
• “The Steely, Headless King of Texas Hold ’Em” (Weren’t we being told 5 or 10 years ago that - sure, maybe chess is trivial for computers, but poker would be way harder?)
• “How to build a guerrilla communications network”
• “Tables of Soyga: the first cellular automaton?”
• “The Designers Behind Airline Business Class Seats”

Philosophy:

• “The Great Penguin Sweater Fiasco” (For when you’ve debated ‘effective altruism’ to such an extent that you’ve forgotten what the status quo looks like.)
• “The Unilateralist’s Curse: The Case for a Principle of Conformity” (see also winner’s curse & bid shading)

Business:

• “Yet another modest proposal: The Roentgen Monetary Standard”
• “How Japan Copied American Culture and Made it Better”
• “The Dead Zoo Gang” (Irish organized crime focusing on rhino horn theft for the Chinese market.)
• “What happened to Jai Alai?: Echoes of a dying game”
• “How Burrowing Owls Lead To Vomiting Anarchists (Or SF’s Housing Crisis Explained)”
• “Eliezer Yudkowsky asks about automation & unemployment”
• “The Value of a CEO”: estimating the damage done by Steve Ballmer to Microsoft
• “No Evolutions for Corporations or Nanodevices” (see also “Protein stability imposes limits on organism complexity and speed of molecular evolution”, Zeldovich et al 2007; “Mutation Induced Extinction in Finite Populations: Lethal Mutagenesis and Lethal Isolation”, Wylie & Shakhnovich 2012)

Misc:

• “…At the time the Dewey Decimal was introduced, most libraries in the US used fixed positioning: each book was assigned a permanent shelf position based on height and date of acquisition…”

Music

Kancolle:

• “Welcome to my harbor” (mag; Kantai Collection Arrange Compilation 2 {2013}) [instrumental]
• “Old navy never die.” (Morrigan feat. リリィ; Old navy never die. {C85; Kancolle}) [choral]

Touhou:

• “farce” (spctrm; historie {C78}) [instrumental]
• “fable” (spctrm; historie {C78}) [instrumental]
• “Dreaming Tonight” feat. Renko (ORANGE★JAM; Starlight {C85}) [trance/Jpop]

Doujin:

• “Landscape” (ryuryu; Homeland {VM14}) [instrumental]
• “Morning Glory” (Spr+out; Seasons {2013}) [pianostep]
• “Every cat dances to the premium music” (OSTER project; ねこのかんづめ☆プレミアム 2009) [jazz]
• “青色ブロウティアー” (カミヤシロ; Blue-pencil 2013) [instrumental]

Vocaloid:

• “Inverse Relation” (Miku; Clean Tears; Reverberations {C84}) [trance]
• “Count Down” (Gumi+Gakupo; [email protected]; Wakabairo D-i-s-k {VM17}) [Jpop]
• “Mitasare” (Luka; もふ＠, Tinkle-POP, 6人の君と僕の歌 {VM20}) [classical]
• “Counterclockwise” (Miku; ryuryu; Homeland {VM14}) [trance]
• “STEP” (Lily; maretu? Robot☆Anime VOCALOID War {March 2014}) [Jpop]
• “Aqua” (Meiko+Miku; shu-t; AIMS {2010}) [trance]

Books

Fiction:

• Household’s Rogue Male
• Marquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch
• Cesares’s The Invention of Morel

Nonfiction:

• Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (brief review)

Film/TV

Animation:

• Madoka: Rebellion (a must-watch for anyone who enjoyed the TV series; I am not certain in general what to make of it, and need to rewatch it. If you’re going to watch it at all, I recommend avoiding spoilers.)
• Ayakashi (3-part anthology; skip the truly wretched first part, watch the second if you have time for a mildly-interesting metafictional kabuki play, and enjoy the third part which started Mononoke)
• Frozen (unobjectionable for a Disney movie although not without flaws - slangy dialogue will date it fast, plot made characters unnecessarily evil, snowman was the most hateful character since Jar Jar Binks)