Links

Genetics:

• Everything Is Heritable:

  • “Common risk variants identified in autism spectrum disorder”, Grove et al 2017 (ASD, as expected, crosses the sample size threshold for hits. More importantly: the genetic correlations imply that autism is not a single thing & that intelligence genes are not inherently ‘autistic’; hence it will be possible to select for intelligence without selecting for autism. I’ve always had a hard time believing the simple genetic correlations between intelligence and ‘autism spectrum disorder’ since it’s unclear why variants that improve intelligence would decrease social functioning which should require intelligence as much as anything else; if it’s simply that there’s heterogeneity and that, say, ‘systematizing’ is shared between intelligence and autism diagnoses, that would be a credible resolution.)
  • The genomic revolution will continue until morale improves: “Between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, leading personal genomics company AncestryDNA sold about 1.5 million of their testing kits designed to provide insights into your ethnicity and familial connections.”
  • “Human longevity: 25 genetic loci associated in 389,166 UK Biobank participants”, Pilling et al 2017 (Tripling the sample size yields more hits, as expected.)
  • “Predictive accuracy of combined genetic and environmental risk scores”, Dudbridge et al 2017
  • “Most people say they think nurture is more important than nature, especially white Americans”

• Engineering:

  • “A 100-Year Review: Methods and impacts of genetic selection in dairy cattle—From daughter-dam comparisons to deep learning algorithms”, Weigel et al 2017 (A preview of improving genomic prediction & selection.)- “A 100-Year Review: Methods and impacts of genetic selection in dairy cattle—From daughter-dam comparisons to deep learning algorithms”, Weigel et al 2017 (A preview of improving genomic prediction & selection.)
  • “Haemophilia A genetic-engineering trial results ‘mind-blowing’” (on Rangarajan et al 2017)
  • “Crispr Therapeutics Plans Its First Clinical Trial for Genetic Disease”

• Recent Evolution:

  “A simple test identifies selection on complex traits in breeding and experimentally-evolved populations”, Beissinger et al 2017 (Potentially big: an easy, powerful test for recent evolution/selection. Authors claim this withstands high polygenicity in soft sweeps well, and if anything, gains statistical power in those scenarios. Could this uncloak much of the rest of recent human evolution? We know it’s there across all sorts of traits, we just can’t identify the specifics yet…)

AI:

• “Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm”, Silver et al 2017 (commentary; meme summary; expert iteration generalizes even better than I expected it to, in chess reaching parity with or superiority over Stockfish (!) in 4 hours wallclock.)
• reproducibility/evaluation/progress issues: “Deep Reinforcement Learning that Matters”, Henderson et al 2017/“Are GANs Created Equal? A Large-Scale Study”, Lucic et al 2017/“On the State of the Art of Evaluation in Neural Language Models”, Melis et al 2017
• “Machine Learning for Systems and Systems for Machine Learning”, Jeff Dean, 2017 NIPS slides (see also the mentioned “The Case for Learned Index Structures”, Kraska et al 2017 which surprisingly proves that small NNs are profitable inside databases; aside from revealing some details on the enormous neural processing power of the second generation of TPUs—each pod of 64 TPU2s will deliver 11,500 teraflops, compared to, say, a 1080ti’s ~13 teraflops—Dean reveals the incredibly ambitious plans to use reinforcement learning & neural nets for pretty much everything in Google’s databases, compilers, OSes, networking, datacenters, computer chips… Truly, all tool AIs want to be agent AIs.)
• “Using Artificial Intelligence to Augment Human Intelligence: By creating user interfaces which let us work with the representations inside machine learning models, we can give people new tools for reasoning” (fun font demos)
• “High-Resolution Image Synthesis and Semantic Manipulation with Conditional GANs”, Wang et al 2017 (pix2pixHD)

Politics/religion:

• “The World Might Be Better Off Without College for Everyone: Students don’t seem to be getting much out of higher education”
• “Book Review: David Friedman’s Legal Systems Very Different From Ours”
• “Where the Small-Town American Dream Lives On”
• “Post-apocalyptic life in American health care”; SMBC on health insurance; “Prescription Drugs May Cost More With Insurance Than Without It”. (How far can it go? What is the breaking point? “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation”, per Smith—but not an infinite amount.)
• “In China, a Three-Digit Score Could Dictate Your Place in Society” (a more in-depth look into the ‘social credit’ system than I’ve seen before)
• “Postmortem: Every Frame a Painting” (Copyright is why we can’t have nice things: they spent almost as much time dealing with YouTube’s copyright enforcement as editing, it sounds like, and had to give up entirely on major topics like Andrei Tarkovsky because they didn’t think they could trick the IP enforcers into permitting a legitimate exercise of fair use.)

Psychology/biology:

• “The Fireplace Delusion”; “Wood-smoke Health Effects: A Review”, Naeher et al 2007 (the Global Burden of Disease estimate for poor countries is that 7.7% of all DALYs lost is due to chronic & ‘lower respiratory infections’, more than either HIV or malaria. Happy holidays.)
• “Measles Deaths Fall to a Record Low Worldwide”
• “The Social Origins of Inventors”, Aghion et al 2017 (Since they include no correction for measurement error and the IQ score is quite bad (decimalized!) and patents aren’t so great either, some of their interpretations, particularly the last one, are highly questionable, but the takeaway is that even crude measures of intelligence and innovation show a strong predictive relationship, as expected.)
• “IQ decline and Piaget: Does the rot start at the top?”, James Flynn & Shayer 2017 (James Flynn (of the Flynn effect) endorses dysgenics and explores where the impacts are: in the most intelligent childrens’ ability to abstract and experiment. This is further evidence that the Flynn effect is hollow as by thin tails, a half SD or more average increase should produce an enormous multiplicative increase in the number of children at the highest stage of Piagetian development, rather than an equally enormous fall.)
• “Is 8:30 a.m. Still Too Early to Start School? A 10:00 AM School Start Time Improves Health and Performance of Students Aged 13–16”, Kelley et al 2017
• “Meta-Analysis of the Antidepressant Effects of Acute Sleep Deprivation”, Boland et al 2017 (wake therapy is so weird)
• “Do High School Sports Build or Reveal Character?”, Ransom & Ransom 2017 (Everything is correlated/correlation≠causation/CICO is false.)
• “As Zika Babies Become Toddlers, Some Can’t See, Walk or Talk” (Zika is turning out to be as bad as the initial microcephaly & birth defects indicated.)
• “China’s Selfie Obsession: Meitu’s apps are changing what it means to be beautiful in the most populous country on earth” (on mobile apps & streaming)
• “How (and Why) Athletes Go Broke” (head injuries…?)
• “Does pride really come before a fall? Longitudinal analysis of older English adults”, McMinn et al 2017

Technology:

• “How a Dorm Room Minecraft Scam Brought Down the Internet” (So Mirai was developed to… extort Minecraft servers‽ 2017 is truly beyond parody. Also, we’re doomed.)
• “Games on the Net Before the Web, Part 2: MUD (1979)”
• “Computer latency: 1977–2017” (Why are modern computers so much less pleasant than a 1980s terminal in some ways? One way is that they are actually slower in a crucial way: input/display latency. Luu measures terminal scrolling in a wide variety of devices and scroll latency in mobile browsers and finds decades-old devices are often the best. Even keyboards turn out to vary by a factor of 5 in simple keypress latency!)

Economics:

• “99 Reasons 2017 Was A Great Year: If you’re feeling despair about the fate of humanity in the 21st century, you might want to reconsider.” (2017: between the steady improvements across the board on almost all metrics of health and wealth and tech and violence, and population growth, 2017 saw perhaps the greatest increase in utility in the history of the human species—just like 2016 before it, and 2015, and 2014…)
• The end of famine
• “Back in the USSR: What life was like in the Soviet Union”
• “In Search of the Elusive Bitcoin Billionaire: Bitcoin is booming. Libertarians were there first. So where are all the cryptocurrency tycoons?”
• “Jim Simons, the Numbers King: Algorithms made him a Wall Street billionaire. His new research center helps scientists mine data for the common good.”
• Hacking Minecraft economies with arbitrage & cartels (Alice Maz)
• “Spies, Dossiers, and the Insane Lengths Restaurants Go to Track and Influence Food Critics: Some top DC dining rooms will do anything for a great review. Do their tactics work?”

Books

Fiction:

• Sunset in a Spiderweb: Sijo Poetry of Ancient Korea, Baron & Kim 1974
• Selected Poems: Summer Knowledge, Delmore Schwartz

Film/TV

Live-action:

• Icarus (documentary about the Russian doping program’s (temporary) downfall; the filmmaker Bryan Fogel benefits from the incredible luck of having decided to dabble in doping (EPO+testosterone) for bicycle racing to demonstrate how the anti-doping test programs can be defeated, with some assistance from the director of the Russian anti-doping laboratory, Grigory Rodchenkov. They hit it off and he has interviews/conversation from before and during the exposure, assists Grigory in escaping from Russia and avoiding an unexpected heart attack like his colleague, and whistleblowing to the FBI & NYT. The first ~15 minutes includes somewhat graphic needle use. The fly-on-the-wall aspect is compelling the same way The King of Kong is, but downplays the big picture in favor of a close focus on Grigory as a character study of an aging athletics nerd: what are his real motives? Did he really want to expose the truth and reveal the Russian cheating, or is he more of a Samson, pulling down the temple walls on himself & his enemies and destroying his own lifework by exposing the total bankruptcy of the anti-doping program as ordered by the Russian government from the top down? For all the film of his daily routine and playing with the filmmaker’s dog and Skype interviews with his family—incidentally, hacked snippets of which were apparently used on Russian TV to try to discredit him, which says interesting things about Microsoft’s stewardship of Skype—and rather heavy-handed invocations of Orwell’s 1984, he ultimately remains something of a cipher.)
• Rollerball (1975; a humorous-sounding cult film, Rollerball is deadly serious about its dystopian setting. Following a quasi-Brave New World tact of a protagonist waking up to a post-freedom corporate-government dictatorship with a population distracted by drugs and circuses, with an Ender’s Game/Hunger Games/Battle Royale twist of the protagonist being an athlete whose success at the game causes others to try to use the game to destroy him. The rollerball sport itself is done with impressive dedication, and one can see why the Wikipedia entry mentions people being interested in ‘life imitating art’—certainly rollerball makes more sense than Quidditch, and as much sense as football, to me, although admittedly the equipment/rink requirements are challenging. The film breaks off before depicting the expected culmination in a revolution. Despite the length, not much actually happens due to a remarkably leisurely pacing: we see the protagonist’s home quite often, and not much of the world or his supposed effects on the masses. This puts Rollerball in an awkward place: it’s not camp or funny, but it also spends too much time on largely wasted moody scene-setting in between rollerball games so the world-building is unconvincing despite a few pointed scenes that work well such as the senile world computer which is unable to answer any questions or an elite party devolving into hysterical violence in blowing up trees.)

Animated:

• Prison School (inside all the juvenile raunch, the BDSM and nipple-hair jokes, in the broad manzai-style comedy familiar from anime comedies like Cromartie High, beats a full-metal shonen heart of gold as the protagonists become nakama and learn the value of manly friendship. Combined with the fairly intricate plotting, I enjoyed PS more than I expected.)

Music

Touhou:

• “Illusory Manzairaku” (RD-Sounds feat. Meramipop; Stories {C91}) [folk]
• “The First Play ‘Secret Notes of Humans and Dragons’” (RD-Sounds feat. nayuta; Stories {C91}) [rock]
• “Kyougen ‘Tsukumo Falling Stars’” (RD-Sounds; Stories {C91}) [folk rock]
• “鬼vs鬼” (あいざわ; 悠々幻想響 {R12}) [orchestral]
• “魔法の道も一歩から” (Second Fragment; 幻想郷と煌めく虹色の花 {C92}) [jazz]
• “Forest under the crescent” (Second Fragment; 幻想郷と煌めく虹色の花 {C92}) [jazz]
• “いつか辿り着く場所” (Second Fragment; 幻想郷と煌めく虹色の花 {C92}) [jazz]

Doujin:

• “残照 -Zansyou-” (Akt; 残響-Zankyo- {C92}) [orchestral]
• “ピアノソナタ「残響」- III ’Scherzo’Presto vivace” (Akt; 残響-Zankyo- {C92}) [orchestral]
• “ピアノソナタ「残響」- IV ’Rondo’Allegretto” (Akt; ‘残響-Zankyo-’ {C92}) [orchestral]
• “二台のチェロのための3つの幻想曲—02「栄華」” (Akt; 残響-Zankyo- {C92}) [orchestral]
• “二台のチェロのための3つの幻想曲—03「静寂」” (Akt; 残響-Zankyo- {C92}) [orchestral]
• “ピアノ五重奏曲「記憶」- III Adagio e dolce” (Akt; 残響-Zankyo- {C92}) [orchestral]

Vocaloid:

• “最后的歌 (LA LA LA)” (阿良良木健 feat. Luo Tianyi; Love Theory {2016}) [electronic/J-pop]