Links

Everything Is Heritable:

• “The contribution of de novo coding mutations to autism spectrum disorder”, Iossifov et al 2014 (media: 1, 2; discussion)
• “Cloning Cows From Steaks (and Other Ways of Building Better Cattle)”

Politics/religion:

• “Whither the Blank Slate? A Report on the Reception of Evolutionary Biological Ideas among Sociological Theorists”, Horowitz et al 2014 (media)
• “Transcript of secret meeting between Julian Assange and Google CEO Eric Schmidt”
• “The Micro-sociology of Violent Confrontations”, Collins 2009
• “Aum Shinrikyo and a Panic About Manga and Anime”, Gardner 2008
• “A Few Bad Men: Why America doesn’t really have a terrorism problem”
• “Bottom of the Barrel: Today’s terrorists aren’t ‘sophisticated’. They’re stupider than ever.”

Statistics/AI/meta-science:

• “What’s to know about the credibility of empirical economics?”, Ioannidis & Doucouliagos 2013
• “The Ironic Effect of Significant Results on the Credibility of Multiple-Study Articles”, Schimmack 2012
• “Bayesian data analysis”, Kruschke 2010
• “What Teachers Should Know about the Bootstrap: Resampling in the Undergraduate Statistics Curriculum”, Hesterberg 2014 (nice comprehensible discussion of various kinds of bootstraps and resampling which helps put together everything I’d learned piecemeal)
• “The harm done by tests of significance”, Hauer 2004 (how p-values increase traffic fatalities)
• “The Mind of a Con Man”: Stapel
• Stein’s paradox
• “Tiny Data, Approximate Bayesian Computation and the Unpaired Socks of Karl Broman” (demonstration of ABC)
• “A Vast Graveyard of Undead Theories: Publication Bias and Psychological Science’s Aversion to the Null”
• “Unreliable neuroscience? Why power matters: Small studies with low power undermine the reliability of science and new evidence suggests that low power is the norm in neuroscience”

Psychology/biology:

• “Is Psychometric g a Myth?”
• “Suppressing Intelligence Research: Hurting Those We Intend to Help”, Gottfredson 2005
• “Who Rises to the Top? Early Indicators”, Kell et al 2013 (does IQ cease to matter past 130? No.)
• “Life Paths and Accomplishments of Mathematically Precocious Males and Females Four Decades Later”, Lubinski et al 2014 (graphs)
• “Annals of psychometry: IQs of eminent scientists”
• “Studies Highlight [Futility] of Early Education”
• “Don’t Know? Or Don’t Care?: Predicting Educational Attainment Using Survey Item Response Rates and Coding Speed Tests as Measures of Conscientiousness”, Hitt & Trivitt 2013
• “Political Diversity Will Improve Social Psychological Science”, Duarte et al 2015 (liberal ideological homogeneity in social sciences causing problems)
• “Travels in the New Psychedelic Bazaar: The synthetic drugs being invented, refined, and produced today—and often shipped in from China—would have blown Timothy Leary’s mind. Who knows what they’re doing to the brains of users.”

Technology:

• “Anatomy of a hack: How crackers ransack passwords like qeadzcwrsfxv1331; For Ars, three crackers have at 16,000+ hashed passcodes—with 90% success”
• “Crypto Rebels: It’s the FBIs, NSAs, and Equifaxes of the world versus a swelling movement of Cypherpunks, civil libertarians, and millionaire hackers. At stake: Whether privacy will exist in the 21st century”
• N-body choreographies
• “How NASA brought the monstrous F-1 ‘moon rocket’ engine back to life”
• “A history of the Amiga, part 8: The demo scene”
• “Reimplementing git clone in Haskell from the bottom up”

Economics:

• “Of Frightened Horses and Autonomous Vehicles: Tort Law and its Assimilation of Innovations”, Graham 2012

• “The death of peak oil”

• Survivorship bias in equity returns

• disability, immigration, globalization, and technological unemployment:

  • “Unfit for Work: The startling rise of disability in America”
  • Murray’s Coming Apart
  • Autor on disability
  • “Untangling Trade and Technology: Evidence from Local Labor Markets”
  • “The Effect of Intelligence on Job Performance is Intuitive”
  • “Immigration and the American Worker: A Review of the Academic Literature”, Borjas 2013

Philosophy:

• “Bayesian Informal Logic and Fallacy”, Korb 2003; “Fallacies as weak Bayesian evidence”
• “Privileging the Question”
• “Be Specific” (if you make an abstract claim, can you give at least 3 specific examples? if not, maybe you need to think about it more)
• “Taking Charity Seriously: Toby Ord talk on charity effectiveness”

Misc:

• Taikyoku shogi
• “Try To Praise The Mutilated World”, Adam Zagajewski
• “Morning Song of Senlin”, Conrad Aiken
• “When Dickens met Dostoevsky” (literary hoaxes; followup)

Books

Nonfiction:

• Excuse Me Sir, Would You Like to Buy a Kilo of Isopropyl Bromide? (review)
• The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett, Bryne (review)
• Ketamine: Dreams and Realities, Jansen (review)
• The Art of Unix Usability, ESR (review)

Fiction:

• A Clockwork Orange, Burgess
• Lud-in-the-Mist, Mirrlees
• The Far Side Gallery 3 (I think I liked them better as a kid; re-reading, I realize Larson really only had a few jokes & characters which he permuted endlessly. It doesn’t grow up with you as much as some others like Calvin & Hobbes do.)

Film/TV

Live-action:

• The Shining: I watched it because it was a famous classic; it’s very slow-moving movie which has the pacing problem of spending what seems like half the movie establishing the basic premise and then short-changes the descent into madness, which comes off as abrupt and unconvincing. The special effects are now tame enough that they’re more amusing than frightening (the blood-hallway didn’t inspire any unease in me, just some wondering how they did it—a miniature set which they could flood at will?) except for the rotting woman. I also couldn’t get over how strange Shelley Duvall looks, and was a little offput by the Magical Negro character. Still, the hotel is a great setting and the ending works nicely, so I’d call it a good film.

• Blue Blazes

  Live-action Japanese TV series, 11 half-hour episodes: quasi-autobiographical account of the manga artist Kazuhiko Shimamoto’s university years as he flailed around, drew manga, and finally got a break in a magazine’s contest. The mangaka himself isn’t particularly notable—he did the Blazing Transfer Student manga and apparently the Anime Tenchou commercials, which are “hot blooded youth” bombastic fun heavy on sketchy art to convey intensity & drama & speed, but I had to look up his WP entry to realize that he was involved in those.

  The series is heavy on exaggerated emotion and facial reactions as the protagonist lurches from extremes of high and low, and draws on cringe-humor—you’re laughing at the follies of his youth, not laughing with him. Tastes will vary for this kind of humor. Personally, I find some bathos is fine, but sustained over a series is a bit too much. The romantic subplots are also a misstep as they wind up being irrelevant, and inflicting a character on us whose voice is best described as a nasal whine.

  The real interest of Blue Blazes is in the otaku culture depicted; it is stuffed with cameos (Hiroyuki Yamaga is the bartender in the scene about him forgetting to breathe; Toshio Okada plays Osamu Tezuka after Daicon; several manga editors have small parts), allusions and in-jokes, many of which I didn’t even get (the episode intros are based on kyodai hero poses from Ultraman & other franchises, but I’ve never seen enough of them to recognize them) but some of which were hysterical (to me)—the manga club character dominates every scene he is in, eg after crushing the protagonist’s dreams by critiquing his draft, remarks “One does not care to recollect the mistakes of youth!” and rides away on his pink bicycle, declaring, “it’s three times as fast!” (Char Aznable/Mobile Suit Gundam). In particular, I was surprised to learn that he had gone to the same university at the same time with some of the founders of Gainax, and it is depicting Hideaki Anno, Hiroyuki Yamaga, and the run-up to the DAICON films where it shines for me as it gives another perspective on early Gainax beyond The Notenki Memoirs. He apparently competed with them but was crushed; eg ep3 has Anno doing the Gendo pose after crushing everyone in animation (as expected from the master!). The character sketches are dead-on: when a room-mate’s sister visits and Anno learns she has not seen Mobile Suit Gundam and shows his hospitality by marathoning 12 episodes with her, one senses this is something that really happened and which his friends have never let him live it down. Other incidents are interestingly reflective of the times: getting a new VCR to allow stepping through home-videos of animated series frame by frame, to better understand them; visiting an animation supply shop just to watch a loop of anime series intros on their TV; passing out slowly and dramatically, imitating a tokusatsu; re-enacting a sea fight in the baths. The student films shown seem to either be the originals or shot-by-shot remakes. Other aspects are… odd. If episode 8 is remotely accurate, Toshio Okada was crazier than a bag of honey-roasted peanuts and his nouveau-riche family (with terrible decorating taste) made their money off blatantly counterfeiting money, which undermines my generally positive impression of him.

  Overall: a must-watch for anyone interested in Gainax; probably a good watch for anyone who liked Bakuman or Genshiken; maybe a watch for anime fans; probably better skipped by anyone else.

• The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013 remake); pretty decent, albeit very little like story, and a rather shoehorned in quest/Blue Bird of Happiness which undermines original short story’s protagonist by implying he was a failure before & the core dreaming was escapism

The Wire

The Wire

Lives up to its fame (as long as you watch with subtitles), more than 12 years later. Satisfyingly intricate and intelligent police drama delving into the War on Drugs from a realistic point of view not blinded by idealism or unfounded confidence in police, courts, or governments like so many other shows which are based more on what writers think the audience wants to be true. Better than any other cop show I’ve watched. The filming on location in Baltimore helps realism for me, since I’ve wandered around Baltimore more than once. The downside is that the ~60 hours demands to be marathoned, and ate my month.

The first season is perfect in its taut narrative from start to finish and illustrating the theme of The Wire: it’s the incentives, stupid.

There’s a lot of discussion of The Wire and praise for how it deals with racial themes, but this misses the mark—race is almost entirely irrelevant in the series, except occasionally as something fools are blinded by and can be manipulated with (such as how Clay Davis gulls voters and jurymen with racial rhetoric). What is important is how, black or white, male or female, everyone faces pressure from the system & reality to maximize pursuit of their assigned objectives, not the underlying latent goals.

Everyone is ‘juking the stats’ and responding to incentives to the extent that the series is practically a primer on public choice: the police respond to overtime increases and pressure to fake the crime statistics; poorer people respond to demand from junkies to make easy risky money selling drugs; politicians respond to the pressure from myopic voters and their ambition for re-election or election to higher office to do what looks good rather than what is good; newspapers tolerate faked news for the potential awards; and everyone faces coordination problems posed by incentives. Stringer Bell & Avon Barksdale sell each other out, resulting in their death & incarceration respectively; two prisoners remain silent but one is tricked into thinking the other is talking and then defects; a stickup boy is tortured to death, not because anyone really wants to but to maintain deterrence; a young boy talks to police, but an error results in his defection being detected and punished; the mayor frantically argues with his advisers to maintain a successful drug legalization policy but his police chief interprets the delay as indicating the mayor is preparing to pin all the blame on him and defects to the newspapers, contributing to the mayor’s electoral defeat; the next mayor asks for FBI help with a cluster of murders but that’s outside the FBI’s terrorism mission (FBI employees are not rewarded for making Americans safer but fighting ‘the War on Terror’) and he refuses the political sacrifice which would give them cover to help. Incentives pop up from the grand politics to the low interpersonal relationships: the political consultant won’t sleep with the mayor when he’s only a lowly councilman but the instant he’s elected? Jumps on him the first moment they’re alone.

And this is all systemic, so it’s not clear how it could ever be fixed. Anyone who claims to be a reformer may well decide to ‘sell out’ and respond to the incentives, as the season 3–5 mayoral arc illustrates (Carcetti seems to start off a genuine believer, but weak from the start), or their morals revealed to be irrelevant (Omar says “a man got to have a code” and prides himself on never targeting innocents, but innocents die anyway as a direct & predictable result of his gangster lifestyle and as Bunk points out to him, Omar is part of the cancer which destroyed the neighborhood they grew up in). Real-world events since then have illustrated this: one of the saddest things about The Wire is that there’s only one thing in the Wire world which actually seems to be done right and morally: the eponymous wiretaps. They have to show probable cause, they get it for limited times and purposes, barely abuse it at all, and have to fight to have it at all. When they do abuse it, it’s in the service of a good cause, the abuse is discovered, and the culprits are punished more than most characters. And now here we are in 2014 with smartphones and Facebook and the endless Snowden revelations, and it all doesn’t mean shit any more. All it took was one terrorist attack, and that was that. The politicians responded to the incentives.

One of the things I like most is that almost none of this is spoonfed you: season 3 doesn’t ever explicitly point out the parallel plots are Prisoner’s Dilemmas in which both groups wind up defecting and reaching the worst outcome for most members, it expects you to infer this; similarly, when the white junkie kid ODs, it doesn’t hammer his death in, just does a quick ~10 second bit of his body being found and you barely see his face; or when you see the police major at a gay bar, explaining why he has no family and is such a paranoid careerist, he’s just a face in the background; or it establishes characters in bits which are almost invisible, such as in season 4 when the camera pans in on the ex-convict’s boxing gym past a poster of Avon’s photo up on the wall with the legend ‘platinum club’—referencing the original photo in season 1 of Avon, and also requiring us to remember that Avon didn’t want his sponsorship known because he was free but that he’s back in jail now in this season and this is a comment on the boxer’s loyalty. Timing can be established similarly, in the unremarked-upon upgrade of kids playing Halo on Xbox to playing it on Xbox 360.

There are some missteps. I disagree with the Pollyanna-ish approach to inner-city school problems; the kids are pretty bad at playing Halo—the SMGs are useless against close-in Elites, they should’ve been meleeing them; Stringer Bell misuses the concept of elasticity, confusing it with competitiveness/market-power; the Brother Muzon character was a bad idea, coming off like a shonen or comic book monster-of-the-week character (‘the nerd gunfighter!’); in contrast to the others, the gang boss Marlo is too opaque and it’s unclear what motivates him besides sheer lust for power and an animalistic taste for conflict; season 2 wastes time on the Ziggy character who winds up contributing nothing; and I’m unsure the mayoral arc of season 3–5 really needed to last that long.

Music

Touhou:

• “千年幻想郷 ~ History of the Moon” (Liverne (ゆう), Yu- (Phoenix Project), Tokunan; Touhou Gensou Shiten 2 “Canon” {C71}) [metal]
• “チルノ ／おてんば恋娘” (Yoshiki Ara; Charisma Lash Type-M {C86}) [orchestral]
• “ソリテス・パラドックス” (Ryuuha Mikaido; ティマイオス ～風の詩～ {C86}) [orchestral]
• “オッカムの剃刀” (Ryuuha Mikaido; ティマイオス ～風の詩～ {C86}) [orchestral]
• “Even if they say nothing in the night” (Machikado-Mapoze; Dancing Phantasmagoria {C86}) [waltz]
• “Library Rag” (Machikado-Mapoze; Dancing Phantasmagoria {C86}) [ragtime]
• “巫女みこ茶々々” (Machikado-Mapoze; Dancing Phantasmagoria {C86}) [Cha-cha-chá]
• “佐々木喜善はかく語りき ～ 願わくはこれを語りて平地人を戦慄せしめよ” (ジャム; DAYDREAM TUNES {C86}) [classical]
• “天空の花の都” (埼玉最終兵器; Cradle Re:BOOT -東方幻樂祀典- {C86}) [metal]
• “An Enlarging Story” (RD-Sounds; Slaughter {C86}) [orchestral]
• “Way to go Shinmyoumaru ~Battle with Titans~” (RD-Sounds; Slaughter {C86}) [orchestral]
• “Could She Know The Summer?” (setsugen; DAYDREAM TUNES {C86}) [classical]

Doujin:

• “Summer Dayz” (村瀬悠太; AD:HOUSE 3 {C86}) [instrumental]
• “またあした” (bacon8 feat. nijimine kakoi; luminous flux {C85}) [acoustic]
• “パラミシアの狼” (O-kei feat. ヤマイ; SONORA {2014}) [Jpop]
• “Call My Cell” (Hige Driver feat. ΦKushiΦ; Hige Dance {C86}) [electronic]

Vocaloid:

• “Back to You” (Luka; Planty; Planet Planty {2014}) [trance]
• “In Adversae” (Luka, Kaito; Planty; Planet Planty {2014}) [trance]
• “It was ten days ago.” (Miku; Toku-P; The Universe {2009}) [vocal]
• “魁!パンツメン☆ミ” (Miku; KASANE; sync-loid:05 {2014}) [Jpop]
• “Boku mo Kuzu Dakara” (Miku; PinnochioP; Yusei Masshirake {VM27}) [Jpop]