Links

Genetics:

• Everything Is Heritable:

  • “Multi-trait analysis of genome-wide association summary statistics using MTAG”⁠, Turley et al 2018; “A combined analysis of genetically correlated traits identifies 107 loci associated with intelligence”⁠, Hill et al 2017 (use of multiple genetic correlations to overcome measurement error greatly boosts efficiency of IQ GWAS, and provides best public polygenic score to date: 7% of variance. This illustrates a good way to work around the shortage of high-quality IQ test scores by exploiting multiple more easily-measured phenotypes. Even better: like LD score regression, MTAG only requires public summary statistics; so it may also, like LD score regression, see an explosion in use—since it is usable by everyone & there are so many overlapping phenotypic measurements…)
  • “A genome-wide association study for extremely high intelligence”⁠, Zabaneh et al 2017 (see previously Spain et al 2016⁠; further confirmation that high intelligence is not genetically different from normal intelligence and is primarily a slightly better assortment of common additive variants)
  • “Genome-wide genetic data on ~500,000 UK Biobank participants”⁠, Bycroft et al 2017 (The full UK Biobank n = 500k genetics dataset is now available to researchers! UKBB is the gift that keeps on giving—and now it’s going to give even more by tripling the sample size.)
  • “Genetic Influence on Intergenerational Educational Attainment”⁠, Ayorech et al 2017
  • “116 independent genetic variants influence the neuroticism personality trait in over 329,000 UK Biobank individuals”⁠, Luciano et al 2017
  • “Genome-wide association analyses identify 44 risk variants and refine the genetic architecture of major depression”⁠, Wray et al 2017 (MDDWG PGC)

• Engineering:

  • “First Human Embryos Edited With CRISPR in U.S.”
  • “F.D.A. Panel Recommends Approval for Gene-Altering Leukemia Treatment”
  • “A complex multi-locus, multi-allelic genetic architecture underlying the long-term selection-response in the Virginia body weight line of chickens”⁠, Zan et al 2017 (soft selective sweeps)
  • “DIY Diagnosis: How an Extreme Athlete Uncovered Her Genetic Flaw”
  • “One of a Kind: What do you do if your child has a condition that is new to science?”
  • The USSR’s Moose Domestication Projects Yielded Mixed Results

• Recent Evolution:

  • “Polygenic Adaptation has Impacted Multiple Anthropometric Traits”⁠, Berg et al 2017 (see Berg & Coop 2014 for method & previous findings of selection)
  • between-group genetic differences: “The genomic landscape of African populations in health and disease”⁠, Rotimi et al 2017
  • “Genetic loci associated with coronary artery disease harbor evidence of selection and antagonistic pleiotropy”⁠, Byars et al 2017 (The much bally-hooed antagonistic pleiotropy theory makes a rare appearance.)

AI:

• reinforcement learning:

  • “deep learning can’t do planning”: “Learning model-based planning from scratch”⁠, Pascanu et al 2017; “Imagination-Augmented Agents for Deep Reinforcement Learning”⁠, Weber et al 2017 (blog); “Path Integral Networks: End-to-End Differentiable Optimal Control”⁠, Okada et al 2017; “Value Prediction Network”⁠, Oh et al 2017; “Prediction and Control with Temporal Segment Models”⁠, Mishra et al 2017; “Neural Network Dynamics for Model-Based Deep Reinforcement Learning with Model-Free Fine-Tuning”⁠, Nagabandi et al 2017; “Model-based Adversarial Imitation Learning”⁠, Baram et al 2016; “Learning Generalized Reactive Policies using Deep Neural Networks”⁠, Groshev et al 2017; “Deep Visual Foresight for Planning Robot Motion”⁠, Finn & Levine 2016
  • “Trial without Error: Towards Safe Reinforcement Learning via Human Intervention”⁠, Saunders et al 2017 (blog⁠; the Road Runner problem is an interesting example of reward hacking.)
  • “Learning Transferable Architectures for Scalable Image Recognition”⁠, Zoph et al 2017 (more NNs-designing-NNs, in this case beating the best human-designed CNNs for ImageNet!); “Reinforcement Learning for Architecture Search by Network Transformation”⁠, Cai et al 2017 (a great use of Net2Net to speed things up. I’ve said before that Net2Net is a criminally underused way to save training from scratch, especially in the RL CNN architecture search problem where you are training hundreds of slightly-different CNNs.)
  • “Noisy Networks for Exploration”⁠, Fortunato et al 2017; “The Intentional Unintentional Agent: Learning to Solve Many Continuous Control Tasks Simultaneously”⁠, Cabi et al 2017; “Distral: Robust Multitask Reinforcement Learning”⁠, Teh et al 2017
  • “Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning (GAIL)”⁠, Ho & Ermon 2016; “Learning human behaviors from motion capture by adversarial imitation”⁠, Merel et al 2017 (an unusual applied use of GANs); “Learning from Demonstrations for Real World Reinforcement Learning”⁠, Hester et al 2017
  • “Neuroscience-Inspired Artificial Intelligence”⁠, Hassabis et al 2017

• “Robust Physical-World Attacks on Machine Learning Models”⁠, Evtimov et al 2017 (adversarial instances are getting scary)

• “Meta-Learning with Temporal Convolutions”⁠, Mishra et al 2017a (Impressively simple & effective; is there anything causal/temporal/dilated convolutions can’t do?)

Statistics/Meta-Science:

• “Bayesian probability theory as extended logic—a new propositional logic result”
• “Preprint Déjà Vu: an FAQ”⁠, Ginsparg 2017 (retrospective on Arxiv’s success by its founder)
• “Determining Cat Chirality”: Sequential testing for estimating cat sleeping preference (results)

Politics/religion:

• “Growing Numbers: For 40 years, the General Social Survey (GSS) has cultivated a vast body of open knowledge about Americans’ personal attitudes and opinions”
• “Radical Book Club: the Decentralized Left”: Hegemony How-To, Direct Action, Rules For Revolutionaries, & Beautiful Trouble (Right-wing review of left-wing organizing & political tricks manuals.)

Psychology/biology:

• “The US President’s Malaria Initiative and under-5 child mortality in sub-Saharan Africa: A difference-in-differences analysis”⁠, Jakubowski et al 2017
• “Lithium in drinking water and the incidence of bipolar disorder: A nation-wide population-based study”⁠, Kessing et al 2017 (Another major blow to the lithium/drinking-water hypothesis, hard on the heels of Knudsen et al 2017⁠.)
• “Metformin alters the gut microbiome of individuals with treatment-naive type 2 diabetes, contributing to the therapeutic effects of the drug”⁠, Wu et al 2017
• “Childhood intelligence in relation to major causes of death in 68 year follow-up: prospective population study”⁠, Deary et al 2017 (note these relationships are at least partially confounded by all the genetic correlations with intelligence)
• “Book Review: Barriers to Bioweapons” (are would-be bioterrorists just… too lazy?)
• “The Power and the Gory”⁠, Solotaroff 1990 (Gonzo journalism on steroids & bodybuilding; multiple waves in bodybuilding track scientific/technological/economic progress in hormone/drug development); “Sam Fussell: an interview with the author of Muscle”
• “How long does it take to research and develop a new vaccine?”
• “Computational Analysis of Lifespan Experiment Reproducibility”⁠, Petrascheck & Miller 2017 (Power analysis of Gompertz curve mortality data: as expected, most animal studies of possible life-extension drugs are severely underpowered, which has the usual implications for replication, exaggerated effect sizes, & publication bias.)

Technology:

• Hoare’s classic 1980 Turing Award Lecture on complexity & failure in software design: “The Emperor’s Old Clothes”
• Falsehoods Programmers Believe About X
• “How the Oil Pipeline Began”
• “8 Lessons from Reviewing 20 Years of Technology Hype Cycles”
• “Hard Drive Cost Per Gigabyte” as of July 2017: price trends (Backblaze)
• Single-letter second-level domains (why are almost all the alphabetic domains like a.com not used? Because Jon Postel bought them up back in 1992 and IANA/ICANN have squatted them ever since.)

Economics:

• “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox”⁠, Khan 2017
• “Amazon Prime does more for northern food security than federal subsidies, say Iqaluit residents”

Philosophy:

• Borges⁠, Selected Nonfictions:

  • 1929: “The Duration of Hell” (pg47–51)
  • 1932: “A Defense of the Kabbalah” (pg83–86)
  • 1932: “The Homeric Versions” (pg71–74)
  • 1932: “A Defense of Basilides the False”
  • 1933: “The Art of Verbal Abuse” (pg 87–91)
  • 1936: “A History of Eternity” (pg123–139)
  • 1936: “The Doctrine of Cycles” (pg115–122)
  • 1936: “The Translators of The Thousand and One Nights” (pg92–109)
  • 1937: “Ramon Llull’s Thinking Machine” (pg155–159)
  • 1938: “Richard Hull, Excellent Intentions” (pg184)
  • 1939: “The Total Library” (pg214–216)
  • 1942: “John Wilkins’s Analytical Language”
  • 1943: “On William Beckford’s Vathek”
  • 1947: “A New Refutation of Time” (pg317–332)
  • 1948: John Donne’s “Biathanatos” (pg333–336)
  • 1951: “Coleridge’s Dream” (pg369–372)
  • 1951: “Pascal’s Sphere” (pg351–353)
  • 1951: “The Argentine Writer and Tradition”
  • 1951: “The Enigma of Edward Fitzgerald” (pg366–368)
  • 1953: “The Dialogues of Ascetic and King” (pg382–385)
  • 1953: “The Scandinavian Destiny” (pg377–381)
  • 1961: “Edward Gibbon, Pages of History and Autobiography” (pg438–444)
  • 1962: “The Concept of an Academy and the Celts” (pg458–463)
  • 1964: “The Enigma of Shakespeare” (pg463–473)
  • 1975: “Emanuel Swedenborg, Mystical Works” (pg449–457)
  • 1977: “Blindness” (pg473–483)

• Carl Shulman bibliography

Books

Nonfiction:

• Selected Non-Fictions⁠, Jorge Luis Borges (review)
• The Secret History of the Mongols (review)
• Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World⁠, Cal Newport
• Mature Optimization⁠, Bueno 2013 (review)

Film/TV

Live-action:

• Dunkirk (2017) (review)

Games

• Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions (purchased after a Linux upgrade killed my copy of GridWars 2⁠; GW2 had entranced me after reading World of Stuart’s review and being intrigued by the described strategic gameplay of black hole farming. After some experimentation, I discovered that the control combination of a mouse for movement and the d-pad for firing offered me an extraordinary level of laser-sharp eyeblink-fast control which unlocked the higher reaches of black hole farming, allowing for intense trance-inducing games lasting up to my high score of 35m30s/2,945,963 points. Naturally I assumed as a ‘clone’ that GW2’s mouse-keyboard control scheme was drawn from the original Geometry Wars. Alas! GW3, despite many years of development, offers naught but the twin-sticks Xbox gamepad and a clumsy keyboard-only control scheme. Playing even the simplest level of GW3 feels like wading through mud—after being anesthetized. Going back would be as difficult as using a push lawn mower after a z-track riding lawn mower, a HDD after an SSD, a mouse after a trackball… GW3 boasts many levels and modes, but I fear they all must be enjoyed through the same control scheme. If I had not played GW2, perhaps I could appreciate GW3 for what it is, but I have been spoiled. I will simply have to figure out how to get GW2 running again, in a VM if I must.)

Music

Touhou:

• “Day and Night” (Maurits“禅”Cornelis feat. Vivienne; Rebirth Story Ⅲ {R13}) [electronic]
• “Melty Wind” (NAGI☆ feat. 美歌 (Mika); Rebirth Story Ⅲ {R13}) [trance]
• “While Hiding A Crime” (NAGI☆ feat. 美歌 (Mika); Rebirth Story Ⅲ {R13}) [vocal/classical]
• “Let it all out of you” (Maurits“禅”Cornelis feat. Vivienne; Rebirth Story Ⅲ {R13}) [rock]
• “Puppet in the Dark[PartⅡ Buried Away]” (Maurits“禅”Cornelis feat. Vivienne; Rebirth Story Ⅲ {R13}) [rock]
• “サナエ・テレグラフ (2016)” (minimum electric design; RENOVATION {C90}) [instrumental rock]
• “into my depressed brain (2016)” (minimum electric design; RENOVATION {C90}) [electronic]
• “ユカリ・テレグラフ” (minimum electric design feat. mineko; RENOVATION {C90}) [electronic]

Kantai Collection:

• “水雷戦隊の反撃” (Tokyo Active NEETs; Fourth Kantai Philharmonic Orchestra {C90}) [orchestral]

Misc:

• “Cara Mia Addio! (Turret Opera)” (Aperture Science Psychoacoustics Laboratory feat. Ellen McLain; Portal 2: Songs to Test By—Volume 3 {2011-09-30}) [classical]
• “Los! Los! Los!” (Yuuki Aoi; Los! Los! Los! {2017}) [rock]