Links

Tech­nol­o­gy:

• “Wel­come to the Jun­gle” (CPU de­sign and Moore’s law)
• De­bian bug re­port #217243: “wget: Pos­si­bil­ity to re­ally re­ject files on re­cur­sive down­loads” (se­ri­ous gotcha every­one needs to know about if they are try­ing to spi­der with wget a site re­quir­ing cookies/login, like, for ex­am­ple, a DNM fo­rum)
• “Com­pu­ta­tional Com­plex­ity of Air Travel Plan­ning”
• “RSA Key Ex­trac­tion via Low-Band­width Acoustic Crypt­analy­sis”
• “You ad­vo­cate a ________ ap­proach to cal­en­dar re­form” (I al­ways sigh when I have to deal with any date-time pro­gram­ming.)
• “Does Copy­right Affect Cre­ative Reuse? Ev­i­dence from the Dig­i­ti­za­tion of Base­ball Di­gest”, Na­garaj 2017
• Baal (Im­pres­sive. A ring of child pornog­ra­phers com­mu­ni­cat­ing se­curely via PGP & alt.anonymous mail­drops, ro­tat­ing keys reg­u­lar­ly, where the bust only hap­pened be­cause a mem­ber was busted for non-ring-re­lated prob­lems and the only busted mem­bers were vi­o­lat­ing the Hush­mail les­son by us­ing a third-party ser­vice.)
• “How close would you have to be to a su­per­nova to get a lethal dose of neu­trino ra­di­a­tion?”

Science/medicine/statistics:

• “The In­tel­li­gent Plant: Sci­en­tists de­bate a new way of un­der­stand­ing flora” (also worth read­ing: “If a Lion Could Talk: An­i­mal In­tel­li­gence and the Evo­lu­tion of Con­scious­ness”)
• “Em­bryo Se­lec­tion for Cog­ni­tive En­hance­ment: Cu­rios­ity or Game-chang­er?”, Shul­man & Bostrom 2013
• “Were James Bond’s drinks shaken be­cause of al­co­hol in­duced tremor?”, John­son et al 2013
• “So de­pres­sion is an in­flam­ma­tory dis­ease, but where does the in­flam­ma­tion come from?”, Berk et al 2013
• “Change in Against Malaria Foun­da­tion rec­om­men­da­tion sta­tus (room-for-more-fund­ing-re­lat­ed)”
• Repli­ca­tion back­lash
• “When Mice Mis­lead” (“Of Mice (S­tud­ies) and Men”)
• “The dan­gers of zero and one” (Fun ex­am­ple from ge­net­ics re­search of how even ex­tremely weak pri­ors are use­ful)
• “Do Cer­tain Coun­tries Pro­duce Only Pos­i­tive Re­sults? A Sys­tem­atic Re­view of Con­trolled Tri­als”, Vick­ers et al 1998
• “Chi­na’s aca­d­e­mic scan­dal: call tol­l-free hot­lines to get your name pub­lished”

Writ­ing:

• “Room­lore is the lore anent heav­enly bod­ies such as stars, wan­der­ers, moons, star clouds, star clus­ters, and star­swirls, their bod­ily work­ings, and their gath­er­ing…” (writ­ten in Anglish)
• “Dead­line” (science fic­tion sto­ry)
• Ex­cerpt from The Third Po­lice­man by Flann O’Brien (Atomic the­ory proves that bi­cy­cles are plot­ting against us.)
• “Lady Yo­do-Dono” (po­em)

Pol­i­tics:

• ‘Re­view of “The Rise of China vs. The Logic of Strat­egy” by Ed­ward Luttwak’
• “David Wal­sh’s wis­dom beats the odds”
• “Snow­den: Hero”
• “Good News You Might Have Missed in 2013” (Bill Gates re­views global health & poverty pro­gress)

Gen­er­al:

• “Like I Was Je­sus: How to bring a nine-year-old to Christ”
• “We Are All MsS­cribe” (sock­pup­pet­ing, fan­dom wars)
• Pref­er­ence fal­si­fi­ca­tion
• “An op­por­tu­nity cost model of sub­jec­tive effort and task per­for­mance”, Kurzban et al 2013 (willpow­er; dis­cus­sion)
• “Mak­ing a kan­gling for chöd” (An un­ex­pect­edly prac­ti­cal dis­cus­sion by David Chap­man of fe­mur-flutes.)
• “100 Years Lat­er, the Cross­word Is Still the King of Puz­zles”

Phi­los­o­phy:

• “Dis­cus­sions for in­for­ma­tion” (These are some of the rea­sons I’ve soured on dis­cus­sion as a way of ex­chang­ing in­for­ma­tion and eval­u­at­ing new stuff.)
• “Scott Aaron­son in­ter­view on Philo­soph­i­cal Progress”

Film/TV

• Aku no Hana: dropped after a few episodes, could­n’t stand the ro­to­scop­ing
• A Christ­mas Story/Na­tional Lam­poon: Christ­mas Va­ca­tion: watched with fam­i­ly. The for­mer was pretty good. The lat­ter, though, had some good jokes but was gen­er­ally mediocre and strained, and a prod­uct of its time.

Books

Music

Gi­ants (rec­om­mended if you like Ex­plo­sions in the Sky or El Ten Eleven; I par­tic­u­larly liked “While the Ages Steal”):

• “A Near-life Ex­pe­ri­ence” (Demo) [post-rock]
• “The Sleep of a La­bor­ing Man” (Demo)
• “Berlin Rooftop” (Demo)
• “Un­der The New Sun” (They, The Un­de­serv­ing)
• “Steps In Sta­tic Pro­gres­sion” (They, The Un­de­serv­ing)
• “The Palace Stands In Its Proper Place” (They, The Un­de­serv­ing)
• “With­ered Life- Com­mu­nal Rhythm” (They, The Un­de­serv­ing)
• “While The Ages Steal” (Old Sto­ries)
• “At Last, Ashore” (Old Sto­ries)
• “O’ Tide” (Old Sto­ries)

Misc:

• Raiders of the Lost Ark, “End Cred­its” (John Williams) [orches­tral]
• “I Saw Three Ships”, (K­ing’s Col­lege Cam­bridge) [Christ­mas car­ol]

Touhou:

• “流体、ライフサイクル in­stru­men­tal (Flu­id, Life Cy­cle)” (o ben to box; misky­works {C82}) [in­stru­men­tal]
• “パンザマスト (in­stru­men­tal)” (o ben to box; misky­works {C82}) [in­stru­men­tal]

Vocaloid:

• “echoes_teha” (声になる; HKGrecords) [trance/vocal]
• “van­ish­ing_しじみ” (声になる; HKGrecords) [electronic/vocal]
• “小規模な世界の私_ぴすた” (声になる; HKGrecords) [Jpop]