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]