Books

Fiction:

• Worm (review)
• Echopraxia, Peter Watts (review)
• Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Marquez (review)
• The Metropolitan Man (review)
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (review)

Links

Everything is heritable:

• A Gene That Makes You Need Less Sleep? (see Heritability of Performance Deficit Accumulation During Acute Sleep Deprivation in Twins, The Transcriptional Repressor DEC2 Regulates Sleep Length in Mammals, & A Novel BHLHE41 Variant is Associated with Short Sleep and Resistance to Sleep Deprivation in Humans)
• How harmful is smoking during pregnancy - after controlling for the sort of people who would do that?
• On the genetic architecture of intelligence and other quantitative traits, Hsu 2014
• Not by Twins Alone: Using the Extended Family Design to Investigate Genetic Influence on Political Beliefs, Hatemi et al 2010 (excerpts)
• Smoking is heritable but not through shared environment
• The Importance of Heritability in Psychological Research: The Case of Attitudes, Tesser 1993 (excerpts)
• Inheritance of migratory direction in a bird species: a cross-breeding experiment with SE- and SW-migrating blackcaps (Sylvia atricapilla), Helbig 1991 (For blackcap warblers, the direction of migration is clearly innate, so crossbreeding a group of blackcaps who flew south for fall migration with a group that oriented westward resulted in offspring who flew in a southwesterly direction.)

Statistics/AI/meta-science:

• Personal reflections on lessons learned from randomized trials involving newborn infants, 1951 to 1967, Silverman 2003 (9 out of 10 dead babies agree: even cherished obvious beliefs must be tested by RCTs)
• Publication bias in the social sciences: Unlocking the file drawer, Franco et al 2014 (Nature; Andrew Gelman; excerpts)
• Better Estimation When Perfection Is Unlikely: A Bayesian Example
• The Lyme Wars: The Lyme-disease infection rate is growing. So is the battle over how to treat it., What Science Needs
• Mathematics in the Age of the Turing Machine, Hales 2013 (excerpts)
• On the science and ethics of Ebola treatments, Controlled trials: the 1948 watershed (excerpts)
• Academic urban legends, Rekdal 2014
• In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal

Psychology:

• Metabolic costs and evolutionary implications of human brain development, Kuzawa et al 2014 (excerpts)
• Lead exposure and behavior: effects on antisocial and risky behavior among children and adolescents, Reyes 2014
• Bastards and Stereotype Accuracy
• How are conscientiousness and cognitive ability related to one another? A re-examination of the intelligence compensation hypothesis, Murray et al 2014 (excerpts)
• Investigating America’s elite: Cognitive ability, education, and sex differences, Wai 2013 (excerpts)
• What Happens to Women Who Are Denied Abortions?
• Standard and trace-dose lithium: A systematic review of dementia prevention and other behavioral benefits, Mauer et al 2014
• Puppy pregnancy syndrome

Technology:

• Hal Finney has died (NYT)
• The Rise and Fall and Rise of Virtual Reality
• Hervé This: The world’s weirdest chef; building food, molecule by molecule
• Two Centuries of Productivity Growth in Computing, Nordhaus 2007 (excerpts)

Economics:

• Why Isn’t the Whole World Developed? Lessons from the Cotton Mills, Clark 1987 (excerpts)
• How the Robots Lost: High-Frequency Trading’s Rise and Fall
• What Do Chinese Dumplings Have to Do With Global Warming?
• Rag-picker

Politics/religion:

• The Bomb Didn’t Beat Japan… Stalin Did: Have 70 years of nuclear policy been based on a lie?
• Gombe Chimpanzee War
• Bedford Level experiment
• The Great Canadian Sperm Shortage

Fiction:

• 2002 in anime (Overall, not the best year for anime by far, but nevertheless, I would happily rewatch Azumanga Daioh, Haibane Renmei, & RahXephon any number of times, and picked up some interesting suggestions for future watching like Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat in Space.)
• The Too-Clever Fox
• TvTropes reviews Nature of Nature’s Art webcomic

Misc:

• Evolution of E. Coli over 60k generations
• War in the womb: A ferocious biological struggle between mother and baby belies any sentimental ideas we might have about pregnancy
• A Parable, Dijkstra 1973 (Orienting toilets on train cars.)
• Judas goat
• The Strange & Curious Tale of the Last True Hermit: For nearly thirty years, a phantom haunted the woods of Central Maine

Film/TV

Anime:

• Fuse Teppō Musume no Torimonochō (review)
• Cat Shit One (review)
• The SoulTaker (review)

Live-action:

• Three Coins in the Fountain (Actually not that bad. Sort of a silly romantic comedy of manners, and when you get bored with that, you can pay attention to post-WWII Italy and note how privileged Americans were, how women smoked back then, etc. It feels weird to see offices without computers in them - just papers. and phones. Oh, and random monks in the background: the camera just pans across them like they’re not there.)

Music

Touhou:

• 廃獄ララバイ (Toy; 協奏符「拾遺物語」 {R11}) [symphony]
• おつかいメイドのひといき (水橋ゆっきー; Kirisame Mahou Yougashiten {C85}) [instrumental]
• 竹取飛翔 (k-wave labs; 幽かのたまゆら {C84}) [Celtic]
• 東方妖々夢 (k-wave labs; 幽かのたまゆら {C84}) [Celtic]
• 幽雅に咲かせ、墨染の桜 (k-waves LAB; 幽かのたまゆら {C84}) [Celtic]
• ほおずきみたいに紅い魂 (k-wave labs; 幽かのたまゆら {C84}) [Celtic]
• 時間差カルテ (Tokyo Active NEETs; Touhou Bakuon Jazz 4 {C84}) [jazz]
• 令・瞑コード零 (Tokyo Active NEETs; Touhou Bakuon Jazz 4 {C84}) [jazz]
• 紅星ミゼラブル～廃憶編 (Tokyo Active NEETs; Touhou Bakuon Jazz 4 {C84}) [jazz]
• 感情の摩天楼 ～ Cosmic Mind (あきやまうに; 暗黒能楽集・心綺楼 東方心綺楼 ORIGINAL SOUND TRACK {C84}) [instrumental]
• Thawing Realism (Autoban feat. Senya; Hiding You in the Evening Cherry Trees {C85}) [trance]
• NEXTLIFE (隣人 feat. 坂上なち (twinkle* twinkle); THE LEAP NEXTRA {C84}) [electronic]
• party in the streets of Tokyo (Renko; a-romatic {C84}) [house]
• 風の向こうへ (JeetSingh feat. Chia; Serendipity {R10}) [vocal]
• voyage (きりん feat 茶々; con spirito {C85}) [vocal]
• Cherry Ashes (senya; The Whole World {C84}) [vocal]