Links

Genetics:

• everything is heritable:

  • “Genetics and Crime: Integrating New Genomic Discoveries Into Psychological Research About Antisocial Behavior”, Wertz et al 2018 (IQ/EDU PGS predicts juvenile delinquency & crime; previously: Rautiainen et al 2016/Tielbeek et al 2017/Tielbeek et al 2018)¹
  • “Predicting educational achievement from genomic measures and socioeconomic status”, von Stumm et al 2019

• recent evolution:

  • “The growth of tea: Genetic studies of today’s tea plants are providing clues to how the plant was first domesticated”

• engineering:

  • “The Death of a Dreamer—Austen Heinz and Cambrian Genomics” (what happened to an early genome synthesis pioneer)
  • “The DIY designer baby project funded with Bitcoin: Cryptocurrency, biohacking, and the fantastic plan for transgenic humans” (Bryan Bishop’s startup for genetic editing of human embryos/sperm)

AI:

• “Better Language Models and Their Implications”, OpenAI (GPT-2, a 10x larger Transformer model than before w/unsupervised learning on 40GB text leads to large gains on natural language generation & high performance on untrained NLP tasks: “Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners”, Radford et al 2019. Worth pondering: GPT-2 costs only ~$43k raw compute; OA could afford to scale it 100x, which is still cheaper than their OA5 project. If GPT-2 is this good now, what does it look like scaled further, with improvements like limited recurrency?)
• “Real-time Continuous Transcription with Live Transcribe”/“Making audio more accessible with two new apps” (NN-powered Android app for live speech-to-text transcription, piloted at Gallaudet University for the deaf; great news for the hard-of-hearing too)
• StyleGAN source code & models released (I immediately applied it to create TWDNE)
• Entendrepreneur: a “Portmanteau & Rhyme Generator” using word embeddings, Simon 2018 (SSC, HN, /r/gwern; examples: “cat+rationality=mewtilitarian”; “computer+animation=miyazakistroke”; “the mapping of cats”: “geografeline”; see also “Alpha”)
• ProGAN generation of 128px anime faces, results (~3 weeks training on Danbooru2017)

Statistics/meta-science/mathematics:

• “Most Rigorous Large-Scale Educational RCTs are Uninformative: Should We Be Concerned?”, Lortie-Forgues & Inglis 2019 (the metallic laws strike again)
• “Review of Scientific Self-Experimentation: Ethics History, Regulation, Scenarios, And Views Among Ethics Committees And Prominent Scientists”, Hanley et al 2018

Politics/religion:

• “The Real War 1939–1945”, Paul Fussell 1989 (“…he watched in disbelief while fat maggots tumbled out of his muddy dungaree pockets, cartridge belt, legging lacings…too horrible and obscene even for hardened veterans”)

• “Avoid News: Towards a Healthy News Diet”, Dobelli 2010

• ‘Abandoned Footnotes’: The Good Parts

  • “Aztec Political Thought” (the king as Enemy and Mocker, leader of a theatre state)

  • Dictatorships:

    • “Qaddafi’s Chickens”
    • “Flattery Inflation”
    • “‘Ten thousand melodies cannot express our boundless hot love for you’: the Cult of Personality in Mao’s China”
    • “Francisco Franco, Robust Action, and the Power of Non-Commitment” (on Padgett & Ansell 1993)
    • “The Varieties of Electoral Experience”; “Electoral Parodies”
    • “The Good Tsar Bias”
    • “The Saudi Monarchy as a Family Firm”
    • “Propaganda Art as Signaling” (on Veyne 1988)

  • “Footnotes on things I’ve been reading: Steven Pfaff’s Exit-Voice Dynamics and the Collapse of East Germany”

  • “The most surprising sentence I read today”; “The Weather under Ceausescu”; “Principal-agent problems in the Soviet Union, circa 1990”

  • “The Great Norm Shift and the Triumph of Universal Suffrage: A Very Short Quantitative History of Political Regimes, Part 1.825”

  • “The Sun was once New”

• “Land lotteries, long-term wealth, and political selection”, Poulos 2019

• “Nggwal, who travels in structures of fiber and bone atop rivers of blood.”

• Suppression of the Society of Jesus

• “Taxes, Lawyers, and the Decline of Witch Trials in France”, Johnson & Koyama 2014

Psychology/biology:

• “Deep Intellect”: the mind of an octopus
• MEMORIZE (a randomized spaced-repetition review algorithm derived using principles from control theory)
• “A Suspense Novelist’s Trail of Deceptions” (psychiatric case study)
• “Congregations Of Tear-Drinking Bees At Human Eyes: Foraging Strategies For An Invaluable Resource By Lisotrigona In Thailand (Apidae, Meliponini)”, Bänziger 2018

Technology:

• “What Color are your bits?”
• “Fruit Walls: Urban Farming in the 1600s” (pre-greenhouse tech: thick southern-facing walls for passive heating)
• “Crinkler secrets: 4k-intro executable compression at its best”
• Typography in Alien
• Typography in Blade Runner
• “Scanning a Braille Playboy issue”, Jason Scott

Economics:

• “The true story of Russia’s weakness [stifled by bad planning, bureaucratic inefficiency, and lack of any real incentive]”, Nutter 1957 (prescient)
• “The Great Shift in Japanese Pop Culture—Part One”/Part Two/Part Three/Part Four/Part Five
• “You Say You Want a Devolution? For most of the last century, America’s cultural landscape—its fashion, art, music, design, entertainment—changed dramatically every 20 years or so. But these days, even as technological and scientific leaps have continued to revolutionize life, popular style has been stuck on repeat, consuming the past instead of creating the new”
• “The Borderlands Gun Collector’s Club”, Steve Yegge 2012 (emergent token economies in video games)

Philosophy:

• “The Force That Drives the Flower”, Dillard 1973 (existential horror)

Fiction:

• “A Colder War”, Charles Stross 2000
• “The Proverbial Murder Mystery”, SSC, SSC (see also “The Study of Anglophysics”)
• “The Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld”

Misc:

• Olbers’ paradox
• The terribly tragic life of the terrible painter Benjamin Haydon
• “The Gravity Research Foundation” (dedicated to the war on gravity)

Books

Nonfiction:

• Practical Typography, Matthew Butterick 2013 (a useful if idiosyncratic introduction to typography with a word processor/HTML focus; reading through this was helpful in understanding possible CSS/design improvements while improving gwern.net this month)

Film/TV

Live-action:

• Carmen opera

  I attended a live broadcast in my local movie theater of the NYC Metropolitan Opera’s performance of Carmen on 2 February 2019 in the Metropolitan Opera House (the titular role played by Clémentine Margaine with malignant splendor), which was part of their long-running “Metropolitan Opera Live in HD” broadcast series, one of a number of special screenings distributed through Fathom Events.

  While watching They Shall Not Grow Old in December 2018, I noticed it was done through a “Fathom Events” rather than the usual movie distributors, and made a note to look that up afterwards. I did and realized it was actually something I had intended to look more into almost a decade ago, way back in 2008, when I noticed that the local university theater had live opera broadcasts. Opera, while more of a topic for parody these days than anything else (even among urban elites), is nevertheless one of the major Western art forms and a major influence (or at least, assumed common knowledge) on so many important Westerners like Friedrich Nietzsche, and I’d always felt the lack of seeing one. Even if I did not like them, I still ought to see at least one to know what they are like. But actually going into NYC to the Met would be an all-day trip on the train, quite expensive, and requiring advance planning. (I was not bothered by the need for subtitles, as I have always needed & preferred them.) The broadcasts were a better approach, but I still needed to figure out when exactly any of them aired, how one gets tickets for them, which ones I might want to see, and so on, and unsurprisingly, I never did wind up going & soon enough forgot entirely about the Met broadcasts. Once in a while I might think about finding a filmed version, but watching one on a TV or computer screen seems unfaithful enough to the original & sufficiently diminished/unrepresentative to hardly be worthwhile. So when I saw them on the Fathom Events website, I resolved to not let it slip this time, and fortunately for me, the first opera was Carmen, which I knew to be one of the most popular & exciting operas, and an excellent first choice, and scheduled a reminder to go.

  Day of, I showed up, and behind a crowd of elderly people, bought my $22 ticket. (Expensive, but it is not your ordinary movie, and much longer as well: 3h40m nominally.) I was surprised how large the audience was: I counted at least 120 people in the auditorium. I was not the youngest person there, but I was not far off.

  The broadcast began sometime before I showed up as a live feed of the audience in the Met Opera House, switching between multiple angles and parts of the audience; modern opera-going audiences appear to not dress up much, and selfies were much in evidence. The live audience was far younger than my remote audience, and I suspect most of them were tourists, benefiting from a tourist-friendly 1PM–5PM Saturday scheduling to see big city opera. It was quickly clear that this was no cut-rate broadcast with one or two fixed perspectives zoomed back to cover the whole stage being aired at low resolution and jittery streaming, but one with a full complement of cameras & crew and dynamic movie-style directing yielding a rock-solid high-res video stream. The broadcast switched over to some introductions with our host set backstage among the technical crew like the sound engineers. (Hunched in front of their giant consoles with all the knobs and widgets, they reminded me of the air traffic controllers in the NY TRACON, or sailors in control rooms.) Then the opera began in earnest.

  The opera was amazing. The ceaseless assault of music, singing, choreography and sets, while not necessarily superior in every point of detail (there are musicals whose best songs or lyrics are better than Carmen’s best songs or lyrics, ballets or dances whose best dancing is better, dramas whose best writing is better, symphonies whose best music is better etc), adds up to more than their sum. The directing of the cameras was skillfully handled, and the subtitles (doubtless drawn up in advance) threaded the fine line between distractingly translating every last spoken fragment or repeated chorus & translating so little one became confused. The time flew by to the intermission, where the broadcast again went above & beyond—where the live audience sees the curtain fall and presumably must kill time by wandering off to the bathroom or idling on their phones, the broadcast audience instead goes behind the curtain again, to watch the Met Opera House’s famous technical features in action as the stages and sets rotate, pieces descend on wires to fit in place, sets get trotted in piece by piece by a small army, nervous actors assemble in their place and do little routines to psych themselves up, and a few of the actors or staffers get interviewed (like the child actors, 11–13yo, whose interview may not have shed tremendous light on anything, but they certainly handled it better than I would’ve at their age & they did seem to be having fun scampering around on stage). I always like seeing behind the scenes, so I didn’t even get up for the intermission. How could one get up? It’s such a vivid tragedy, watching Margaine’s Carmen casually seduce another woman’s man for the challenge and then, growing bored after forcing him to sacrifice everything, discarding him, ultimately dooming them both.

  I stumbled out thoroughly impressed and regretful I hadn’t followed through a decade ago. Am I an opera fan? I do not know, but I’m giving it another go.

  I immediately checked for the next broadcasts on Fathom Events, but was not too interested by the description of La Fille du Régiment, the Bolshoi’s Swan Lake is sadly not being broadcast at my theater, but there is a broadcast at the end of March of Wagner’s Die Walküre I am excited about—I enjoyed reading The Ring as a kid, so how much better should it be to see an actual production of it? (It may not be Bayreuth, but at least I don’t have to spend a decade waiting for tickets & travel halfway around the world only to get a heavy-handed environmental parable with copulating crocodiles).