Links

Genetics:

• 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
  • “The Importance of Heritability in Psychological Research: The Case of Attitudes”⁠, Tesser 1993
  • “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)
• “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
• “On the science and ethics of Ebola treatments”⁠, “Controlled trials: the 1948 watershed”
• “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
• “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 (Berkson’s paradox)
• “Investigating America’s elite: Cognitive ability, education, and sex differences”⁠, Wai 2013
• “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 (VR)”
• “Hervé This: The world’s weirdest chef; building food, molecule by molecule”
• “Two Centuries of Productivity Growth in Computing”⁠, Nordhaus 2007

Economics:

• “Why Isn’t the Whole World Developed? Lessons from the Cotton Mills”⁠, Clark 1987
• “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 (“For several years I struggled to come to terms with this new knowledge. Often when I woke in the night, horrific pictures sprang unbidden to my mind—Satan [one of the apes], cupping his hand below Sniff’s chin to drink the blood that welled from a great wound on his face; old Rodolf, usually so benign, standing upright to hurl a four-pound rock at Godi’s prostrate body; Jomeo tearing a strip of skin from Dé’s thigh; Figan, charging and hitting, again and again, the stricken, quivering body of Goliath, one of his childhood heroes…”)
• Bedford Level experiment
• “The Great Canadian Sperm Shortage”

Fiction:

• 2002 in anime (Overall, not the best year for anime by far; 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”

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)

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]