Links

Everything is heritable:

• dysgenics:

  • disease mutation load: “The Genomic Health Of Ancient Hominins”, Berens et al 2017 (media; +35% percentile increase in general disease risks over past ~millennia?)
  • selection against education in the UK: “Signatures of negative selection in the genetic architecture of human complex traits”, Zeng et al 2018
  • “Detecting polygenic adaptation in admixture graphs”, Racimo et al 2017 (No sign of selection is found for Europeans, but if I understand the method right, it’s only looking at net selection with time steps corresponding to populations branching. So given the European pattern of selection for intelligence at least up until agriculture and then heavy recent dysgenics against education/intelligence, those might mostly cancel compared to an East Asian population like Japan which started later.)

• “Widespread signatures of positive selection in common risk alleles associated to autism spectrum disorder”, Polimanti & Gelernter 2017

• “Quantifying the impact of rare and ultra-rare coding variation across the phenotypic spectrum”, Ganna et al 2017

• “Discovery Of The First Genome-Wide Significant Risk Loci For ADHD”, Demontis et al 2017

• “Genetic contribution to two factors of neuroticism is associated with affluence, better health, and longer life”, Hill et al 2017

• “Environmental factors dominate over host genetics in shaping human gut microbiota composition”, Rothschild et al 2017 (commentary)

• “The Moral Question That Stanford Asks Its Bioengineering Students: It’s about the capacity to print a human genome.”

AI:

• “Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences”, Christiano et al 2017 (blogs: 1, 2)
• “Reluplex: An Efficient SMT Solver for Verifying Deep Neural Networks”, Katz et al 2017
• “A simple neural network module for relational reasoning”, Santoro et al 2017 (blog)
• “One Model To Learn Them All”, Kaiser et al 2017 (a single NN for multi-modal tasks: from image classification to image captioning to English parsing to English⟺German⟺French translation)
• “Attention Is All You Need” for SOTA machine translation, Vaswani et al 2017
• “Deal or No Deal? End-to-End Learning for Negotiation Dialogues”, Lewis et al 2017 (blog)
• “Learning to Learn from Noisy Web Videos”, Yeung et al 2017

Statistics/meta-science/mathematics:

• “Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?”
• “Measurement Error, Regression to the Mean, and Group Differences”
• “What works in e-commerce—a meta-analysis of 6700 online experiments”, Brown & Jones 2017 (Informative priors: most A/B experiments fail and the successful ones have small effects on the order of a few % at most. Note the implications that most successful, in the sense of p<0.05, A/B tests will grossly overestimate the true effect size; detecting realistic effects may require large sample sizes; and some categories of tests may well not be worth running at all. It would also be interesting to know how many of those nulls were based on correlational data…)

Politics/religion:

• “In Defense of Individualist Culture”
• “The Dark Legacy of Carlos Castaneda”

Psychology/biology:

• “Does High Self-esteem Cause Better Performance, Interpersonal Success, Happiness, or Healthier Lifestyles?”, Baumeister et al 2003; “The Man Who Destroyed America’s Ego: How a rebel psychologist challenged one of the 20th century’s biggest-and most dangerous-idea”; “‘It was quasi-religious’: the great self-esteem con”
• “Lithium in Drinking Water and Incidence of Suicide: A Nationwide Individual-Level Cohort Study with 22 Years of Follow-Up”, Knudsen et al 2017 (a major blow to the lithium hypothesis)
• “Where do hypotheses come from?”, Dasgupta et al 2017
• “How To Fall To Your Death And Live To Tell The Tale”
• “My déjà vu is so extreme I can’t tell what’s real any more”

Technology:

• PC gaming history: Jimmy Maher has an excellent blog on working & playing his way through the early computing industry as it impinged on gaming, covering the wild ferment of the times, D&D, the European scenes, the economic backstabbing, game creators and studios’ swift rises & even swifter falls, and everything (often benefiting from Jason Scott’s Get Lamp archives). There are many curious parts of gaming/computing history: for example, there is a striking prevalence of mtf (but not ftm) transsexuals; and exemplifying the chaos, it’s hard to identify any thing that people consistently got wrong—for every tactic that worked brilliantly one time & place, there appears to be an equal & opposite failure elsewhere. For one 1980s company, a foray into business software doomed it, while the same pivot works out brilliantly for another who is still around; one company dominates the market by leaping boldly onto a cutting-edge new system, while another bets the wrong way & dies or blows the revenue from its hit & is left scrambling; one company unwisely abandons the cash cow of older systems, while another reaps cash flow from obsolete microcomputers until it’s too late. The industry bet on computers rather than video game consoles looks like genius—right up until Nintendo invades. Many companies profit massively from selling hardware and commoditizing licensed OSes or software, unless they are IBM/Microsoft and it works out the other way etc. Given the sheer number of computer & video game platforms, people like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs come off as having been both inevitable & far more lucky than good. (See also my review of Brand’s The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT.) Many posts are worth the read:

  • Ken & Roberta Williams and the founding of Sierra
  • The Prisoner
  • Programming text adventures on the Z virtual machine
  • the creation of & struggle over the IBM PC: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
  • Britain’s occult uncle: Dennis Wheatley; “The Dennis Wheatley Crime Dossiers”; Deadline, first real-time text adventure: 1, 2, 3, 4
  • “Free Fall, Part 2: Murder on the Zinderneuf”: procedurally generated mysteries
  • The Hobbit: dynamic video game worlds
  • the vicious UK computer market: “The Spectrum”, “The Commodore 64”, “Business is War”
  • the UK market continued and the great PC industry crash: “This Tormented Business”: 1, 2, 3; “Acorn and Amstrad”
  • early Apple: Apple II; “Shiny and Exciting vs. Dull and Boring”; “Seeing Farther”; “The Macintosh”
  • “Dan Bunten and M.U.L.E.”
  • the genesis of CD-ROMs: “The Dawn of Multimedia”, “The Laser Craze”; “A Slow-Motion Revolution”
  • Michael Crichton: “From Congo to Amazon”, “Amazon in Pictures”
  • The painful genesis of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure
  • “Elite (or, The Universe on 32 K Per Day)”
  • the odd origins of Rare: “The Legend of Ultimate Play The Game”
  • “Robert Pinsky’s Mindwheel (or, The Poet and the Hackers)”
  • “Of Wizards And Bards”: Wizardry giving way to The Bard’s Tale
  • Ultima: “The Road to Ultima IV”, Ultima IV; “The Road to Ultima IV”, Ultima V
  • “Apple, Carmen Sandiego, and the Rise of Edutainment”
  • The Case of the Amiga: “Lorraine”, “Jack Tramiel Is Back”, “We Made Amiga, They Fucked It Up”, “Rock Lobster”
  • Sid Meier: “MicroProse’s Simulation-Industrial Complex (or, The Ballad of Sid and Wild Bill)”, Pirates!, Railroad Tycoon
  • LucasArts: “Fractal Dreamers”, “A Habitat in Cyberspace”, “SCUMM”
  • “Lovecraft on the Tabletop”: Call of Cthulhu
  • Pirates vs early DRM: “Don’t Copy That Floppy”, “The Scene”, “Case Studies in Copy Protection”
  • “Bill Williams: The Story of a Life”
  • “Opening the Gold Box, Part 2: 10 Odd Years at TSR”, “The Ambush at Sheridan Springs”
  • “Generation Nintendo”: the Japanese invasion
  • Kit Williams’s Masquerade: “The Contest”, “Aftermath”
  • “The Freedom to Associate”: Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson
  • “Turning on, Booting up, and Jacking into Neuromancer”: the Cabana Boys, the Plastic Surgeon, and Timothy Leary
  • Edward Mannock: “A Working-Class Hero”: “Proletariat, Prisoner, and Pilot”, “Bloody April”, “Ace and Tactician”, “A Hero’s Legacy”: Wings
  • early patent trolls: “Mediagenic (or, The Patent from Hell)”: The Baer Patent on All Games
  • “The 640K Barrier”: PC’s curse of backwards compatibility

• “Computational Complexity of Air Travel Planning”, De Marcken 2003 / ITA Software (Airline ticket search is not just NP-hard or worse, but undecidable.)

• “Information Leakage from Optical Emanations”, Loughry & Umphress 2002

• “Google-Wide Profiling: A Continuous Profiling Infrastructure for Data Centers”, Ren et al 2010 (“…GWP profiles revealed that the zlib library accounted for nearly 5% of all CPU cycles consumed…”)

Economics:

• “Property Is Another Name for Monopoly: Facilitating Efficient Bargaining with Partial Common Ownership of Spectrum, Corporations, and Land”, Posner & Weyl 2016
• “The Perfect Heist: Recipes from Around the World”, Lafleur et al 2014

Film/TV

Live-action:

• L.A. Confidential (one of the best noir films; Exley is particularly interesting as neither hero nor anti-hero)

• All About Eve (excellent character-study/drama about the price of fame, the sincerest forms of flattery, and a little meta-fictionally, the psychology of the theatre and Broadway being usurped by Hollywood; like Hitchcock’s Suspicion, the driving force is detecting deception or the lack thereof. Features an unexpected appearance by Marilyn Monroe.)

• Amy (2015):

  Amy is a documentary/biopic on singer Amy Winehouse; while I was almost totally ignorant of Winehouse beside knowing she was some sort of singer who died of a drug overdose a few years ago, this was highly rated as a documentary, with the major attraction of Winehouse having been filmed in long home videos for years long before she ever became famous. Since for famous people, the most interesting part of their life is often their obscure beginnings, which for exactly that reason is also the most poorly documented part of their lives, this makes the documentary much more interesting than usual.

  So, Winehouse. I assumed from the bizarre makeup and tattoos I’d seen in occasional photos that she was some sort of southern American redneck; turns out she was actually British and more or less a chav (despite being Jewish?), inheriting all the pathologies of the lower classes. A proper review of this could only be written by Theodore Dalrymple but the summary is short: fame often makes people more than themselves, and Winehouse was broken from early on & lived with broken people, from her dubiously supportive friends to her useless parasite boyfriends/husbands to her negligent, selfish, exploitative father to the record industry to the fans who bought her 2006 song “Rehab” & funded the paparazzi. Perhaps she might have grown out of it into a better self, but the accelerants of fame & money spread the fire too fast.

  The documentary tries to suggest that Winehouse’s problems were all Freudian and based on her parent’s divorce around while she was starting puberty, but this is unlikely as it is a bit of a post hoc (impulsivity and behavioral problems would tend to surface around that time regardless), most people survive a divorce without becoming drug addicts, and problems of various sorts appear to run in the family (“everything is heritable”/“everything is correlated”). The genesis of “Rehab” really says it all—a quip boasting about not getting treatment for the poly drug abuse (including but not limited to tobacco, marijuana, heroin, & alcohol) which was quite visibly killing her—watching the videos progress over the film, she looks half-dead by 2006 as she destroyed herself with drugs, tattoos, and ever more bizarre makeup—is greeted by her collaborator not as something to be slapped down but a hook for a new song, and by the rest of the world as a revelation. (To quote Dante’s description of Wuthering Heights: “The action is laid in Hell,—only it seems places and people have English names there.” Presumably, the second/third circle, the realm of hungry ghosts.) The surprising thing is not that Winehouse died young but that she survived so long. So it is a horror movie. As far as that goes, it is quite good and greatly benefits from the home videos.

  The major flaw of Amy is that it does a terrible job of showing why Winehouse & her music were so popular. The music is presented mostly as snippets, and I am left not understanding what was good about it. This leads to some eyebrow-raising scenes like early on where a music executive praises the young teen Winehouse as “a force of nature” in her first label audition as she plays on a guitar straining to sing some lyrics which sound like, well, a young teenage girl had written them in a diary decorated with drawings of little hearts. One does not care to recall the mistakes of youth, but the director is hardly doing a good job of showing what musical talent she had to deserve world fame and Grammies. I should not have to go outside the text to understand something as fundamental to a musician’s life as their music.

  Overall, required viewing for any Winehouse fan and of general psychiatric interest; possibly too painful to watch for others.

• 8 1/2 (a lame waste of time; not remotely funny nor insightful nor rendered sufficiently interesting by the now-exotic setting of 1960s Catholic Italy, as the making of 8 1/2 is Fellini’s excuse for making 8 1/2 in a third-rate breaking-the-fourth-wall exercise)

• Annie Hall (a few one-liners aside, Woody Allen’s neurotic humor is unbearable to watch. It would seem that Allen movies are not for me.)

Music

Touhou:

• “冬中火葬” (PIROPARU; Send_Off {C80}) [folk]
• “人別離苦” (PIROPARU; Send_Off {C80}) [folk]
• “廃獄のロア” (Cororo feat. Sara Matsumoto; Edis revir -Riverside vocal best album & ryuno’s art works vol.1- {R8}) [folk]
• “揺籃曲 -Pure Japanese Ver.-” (Cororo feat. Sara Matsumoto; Edis revir -Riverside vocal best album & ryuno’s art works vol.1- {R8}) [folk]
• “Aisya -ye ru amma-” (Cororo feat. Sara Matsumoto; Edis revir -Riverside vocal best album & ryuno’s art works vol.1- {R8}) [folk]

Doujin:

• “Kemono Friends BGM” (Kou Ogata; {2017}) [Celtic]