Links

Everything is heritable:

• MTAG: Multi-Trait Analysis of GWAS, Turley et al 2017; 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, MDDWG PGC 2017
• Quantifying the impact of rare and ultra-rare coding variation across the phenotypic spectrum, Ganna et al 2017 (on the unimportance of rare genetic variants)

• 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
  • 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 human 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
  • 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/mathematics:

• 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

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
• 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)
• 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
• A Tale of the Mirror World, Part 5: The Inflection Point (The extraordinary Soviet triple cross that restored their control over the Tetris franchise and royalties.)
• 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)
  • 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) (an aggressive mish-mash of action scenes with one of the most excessive Hollywood soundtrack, exhaustingly droning & thudding throughout the movie, I’ve ever heard. The special effects in the action scenes are, as usual, perfect, but oddly compromised by a lack of scale - while Dunkirk involved hundreds of thousands of men, somehow the effects conspire to create not a sense of catastrophe & crisis but a sense of conspicuous crampedness, as if only a few hundred men and a few dozen boats were ever involved rather than entire armies. The gritty & horrifying set pieces depicted with such cinematographic care ought to add up to more than they do.)

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]