--- title: November 2019 News description: November 2019 Gwern.net newsletter with 2 essays, links on PGD and AI scaling, disappearing polymorphs, and The Public Domain Review; 2 opera and 1 anime reviews. created: 2019-10-13 status: finished previous: /newsletter/2019/10 next: /newsletter/2019/12 confidence: log cssExtension: dropcaps-de-zs backlink: False ... November 2019's [Gwern.net](/newsletter/2019/11 "'November 2019 News', Branwen 2019") [newsletter](https://gwern.substack.com/ "'Gwern.net newsletter (Substack subscription page)', Branwen 2013") is now out; previous, [October 2019](/newsletter/2019/10 "'October 2019 News', Branwen 2019") ([archives](/doc/newsletter/index)). This is a collation of links and summary of major changes, overlapping with my [Changelog](/changelog); brought to you by my donors on [Patreon](https://www.patreon.com/gwern). # Writings - [Rubrication Design Examples](/red "A gallery of typographic and graphics design examples of rubrication, a classic motif of using red against black for emphasis.") - [On Cats' Love of Earwax](/earwax "Collation of anecdotes and speculation about why cats like earwax, and human earwax especially.") - **Gwern.net**: reverse citation links now available in popups via [Jose Luis Ricon's](https://nintil.com/) new [Semantic Scholar search engine](https://ricon.dev/ "Meta-Search: Find Systematic reviews and meta-analysis that cite a given paper!") (which prioritizes reviews/meta-analyses which cite a given paper) # Media ## Links ### Genetics - **Everything Is Heritable**: - ["Rare Genetic Variants Associated With Sudden Cardiac Death in Adults"](/doc/genetics/heritable/rare/2019-khera.pdf), Khera et al 2019 (important use-case for population screening & embryo selection; previously: [Bagnall et al 2016](/doc/genetics/heritable/rare/2016-bagnall.pdf "A Prospective Study of Sudden Cardiac Death among Children and Young Adults")) - ["Genome-wide association study identifies 49 common genetic variants associated with handedness"](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/831321.full), Partida et al 2019 - ["Metagenomic analysis of a blood stain from the French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat (1743--1793)"](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/825034.full), de Dios et al 2019 - **Engineering**: - ['"Embryos have been chosen to reduce disease risk using pre-implantation genetic testing for polygenic traits, and this has resulted in pregnancy," Laurent Tellier, CEO of Genomic Prediction, told _New Scientist_.'](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2224569-controversial-dna-screening-technique-used-for-at-least-one-pregnancy/ "Controversial DNA screening technique used for at least one pregnancy") - ["Search-and-replace genome editing without double-strand breaks or donor DNA"](/doc/genetics/editing/2019-anzalone.pdf), Anzalone et al 2019 (prime editing competitor to CRISPR; media: [_Science_](https://www.science.org/news/2019/10/new-prime-genome-editor-could-surpass-crispr "New 'prime' genome editor could surpass CRISPR"), [_Wired_](https://www.wired.com/story/a-new-crispr-technique-could-fix-many-more-genetic-diseases/ "A New Crispr Technique Could Fix Almost All Genetic Diseases: A less error-prone DNA editing method could correct many more harmful mutations than was previously possible")) - ["A single combination gene therapy treats multiple age-related diseases"](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1910073116), Davidsohn et al 2019 ### AI - ["MuZero: Mastering Atari, Go, Chess and Shogi by Planning with a Learned Model"](https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.08265#deepmind), Schrittwieser et al 2019 (tree search over remarkably simple learned latent-dynamics model reaches AlphaZero level; plus beating both of the previous model-free ([R2D2](https://openreview.net/forum?id=r1lyTjAqYX#deepmind "'R2D2: Recurrent Experience Replay in Distributed Reinforcement Learning', Kapturowski et al 2018")) & model-based ([SimPLe](https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.00374 "'Model-Based Reinforcement Learning for Atari', Kaiser et al 2019")) ALE SOTAs; NNs are lazy and can do more if you just train them right. This should move your beliefs closer to ['Bitter Lesson'](http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html "'The Bitter Lesson', Sutton 2019")/Schmidhuber-style paradigms of simplicity & scaling. It will be interesting to see if MuZero can perhaps provide the equivalent of Zero for more complex environments: if it can roll out imagined abstract Go & ALE games, it can also roll out StarCraft II games...) - **Matters Of Scale**: - [OpenAI releases GPT-2 1.5B trained model & detection tools](https://openai.com/research/gpt-2-1-5b-release "'GPT-2: 1.5B Release', Solaiman et al 2019") ([paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.09203#openai "'Release Strategies and the Social Impacts of Language Models', Solaiman et al 2019"), with interesting appendices on generating ideological text; [GPT-2-1.5b web interface](https://app.inferkit.com/demo "'Talk To Transformer', King 2019")) - ["When will computer hardware match the human brain?"](https://jetpress.org/volume1/moravec.htm), [Moravec](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Moravec) 1998 - ["High Fidelity Video Prediction with Large Stochastic Recurrent Neural Networks"](https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01655#google), Villegas et al 2019 ([videos](https://sites.google.com/view/videopredictioncapacity "'High Fidelity Video Prediction with Large Stochastic Recurrent Neural Networks: Videos', Villegas et al 2019"); realistic 128px video generation by simply scaling up RNNs) - ["XLM-R: Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale"](https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.02116#facebook "'Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale', Conneau et al 2019"), Conneau et al 2019 ([blog](https://ai.facebook.com/blog/-xlm-r-state-of-the-art-cross-lingual-understanding-through-self-supervision/ "XLM-R: State-of-the-art cross-lingual understanding through self-supervision"); 2.5 TB text for training translations into 100 languages) - ["Learning to Predict Without Looking Ahead: World Models Without Forward Prediction"](https://learningtopredict.github.io/#google "Our agents are only given infrequent observations of the real environment. As a side effect for optimizing performance in this setting, a 'world model' emerges. We show the true dynamics in color, with full saturation denoting frames the policy can see. The black and white outline shows the state of the emergent world model. These world model exhibits similar, but not identical dynamics to forward predictive models but only model 'important' aspects of the environment"), Freeman et al 2019 ([paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.13038#google "'Learning to Predict Without Looking Ahead: World Models Without Forward Prediction', Freeman et al 2019"){#freeman-et-al-2019-paper}) - ["Talking Head Anime from a Single Image"](https://pkhungurn.github.io/talking-head-anime/), Pramook Khungurn (one-shot creation of ['Virtual Youtuber'](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VTuber)-style CGI talking heads from a single source image, allowing eg. [video⟺CGI-head transforms](https://old.reddit.com/link/e1k092/video/jqb6eziwgv041/player) of [live webcams](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1Gp-RxFZwU "A system for transferring human facial movement to anime characters. [English Version]"); replaces hand-coded CGI models with a learned differentiable DL model...) - AI Dungeon 2: ["My Musical Troupe of Orcs Uses Music to Advance Orc Rights"](https://web.archive.org/web/20191127163535/http://www.aidungeon.io/2019/11/my-orc-band-and-our-quest-for-equal.html "'AI Dungeon 2: My Musical Troupe of Orcs Uses Music to Advance Orc Rights', Walton 2019") (sample dialogue with a GPT-2-1.5b finetuned on text adventures) ### Statistics/Meta-Science - ["bioRxiv: the preprint server for biology"](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/833400.full), Sever et al 2019 (the growing success of bioRxiv) ### Politics/religion - [Did psychologist David Rosenhan fabricate his famous 1973 "Being Sane in Insane Places" mental hospital exposé?](https://nypost.com/2019/11/02/stanford-professor-who-changed-america-with-just-one-study-was-also-a-liar/ "Stanford professor who changed America with just one study was also a liar") ([_Nature_](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03268-y "On the troubling trail of psychiatry's pseudopatients stunt: Susannah Cahalan's investigation of the social-psychology experiment that saw healthy people sent to mental hospitals finds inconsistencies - Alison Abbott reviews") review; on the [Rosenhan experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment); interesting to consider [Spitzer 1975's criticisms](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/57c8/aa6e7101b6cb7f1db2076401318cdb60b0c1.pdf "On pseudoscience in science, logic in remission, and psychiatric diagnosis: A critique of Rosenhan's 'On being sane in insane places'") in light of this) - ["Orchestrating false beliefs about gender discrimination": what did the famous 'blind orchestra audition' study show?](https://jsmp.medium.com/orchestrating-false-beliefs-about-gender-discrimination-a25a48e1d02 "'Orchestrating false beliefs about gender discrimination', Pallesen 2019") ([Gelman commentary](https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/05/11/did-blind-orchestra-auditions-really-benefit-women/ "Did blind orchestra auditions really benefit women?")) ### Psychology/biology - ["A century of research on conscientiousness at work"](/doc/psychology/personality/conscientiousness/2019-wilmot.pdf), Wilmot & Ones 2019 - ["Towards a 'Treadmill Test' for Cognition: Reliable Prediction of Intelligence From Whole-Brain Task Activation Patterns"](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/412056.full), Sripada et al 2018 (_r_ = 0.68) - ["Mechanisms of Scent-tracking in Humans"](/doc/psychology/smell/human/2006-porter.pdf "'Mechanisms of scent-tracking in humans', Porter et al 2006"), Porter et al 2006 ([video](/doc/psychology/2006-porter-humanscenttracking-41593_2007_bfnn1819_moesm2_esm.mp4); see also ["Poor Human Olfaction is a Nineteenth Century Myth"](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5512720/ "'Poor human olfaction is a 19th-century myth', McGann 2017"), McGann 2017) - [Disappearing polymorphs](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Polymorphism_(materials_science)&oldid=999770848#Disappearing_polymorphs) (Ice-Nine in real life): ["Disappearing Polymorphs Revisited"](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/anie.201410356), Bučar et al 2015; ["Disappearing Polymorphs"](/doc/science/1995-dunitz.pdf), Dunitz & Bernstein 1995; [glycerine & ethylene diamine tartarate (EDT)](/doc/science/1960-campbell.pdf#page=5 "'The Self-Repairing Robot', Campbell 1960") ([Kohman 1950](/doc/science/1950-kohman.pdf "The case of the barnacled crystal")) examples ([Lowe commentary](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/blog-post.14882 "Perverse Polymorphism"); [IAPAC archives](/doc/biology/2000-iapac-norvir/description.html "'Norvir Advisory', Care 2000") on the [Norvir incident](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ritonavir#Polymorphism_and_temporary_market_withdrawal)) - ["Who is the real Dice Man? The elusive writer behind the disturbing cult novel"](https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/nov/07/the-dice-man-elusive-author-luke-rhinehart-george-cockroft-emmanuel-carrere "'Who is the real Dice Man? The elusive writer behind the disturbing cult novel: A search for the mysterious author of a counterculture classic led to someone else entirely. Or did it?', Carrère 2019") (the followers inspired by [_The Dice Man_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dice_Man) turn out to be more interesting than the author; see also [_Yes Man_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes_Man_\(film\))) - [How a con man got Afghani princess Fatima into the White House](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1968/11/16/the-big-little-man-from-brooklyn "The Big Little Man from Brooklyn—I: Stanley Clifford Weyman impersonated everyone from a doctor to an official with the U.S. State Department. How did he do it?Aa Brooklyn-born man impersonated several doctors, psychiatrists, a number of officers in the U.S. Army and Navy, a couple of lawyers, the State Department Naval Liaison Officer, sanitation expert, many consuls-general, and an expert on Balkan and Asian affairs throughout the early 20th century"), [part 2](/doc/psychology/1968-mckelway.pdf "'The Big Little Man From Brooklyn—II [Annals of Imposture]', McKelway 1968") (on [Stanley Clifford Weyman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Clifford_Weyman); [_Atlas Obscura_](https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/imposter-brooklyn-weyman-clifford "The Many Faces of Brooklyn's Greatest Imposter: Stanley Clifford Weyman lived many, many lives")) ### Technology - ["Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later"](https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2019/11/22/progress.html "'Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: 5 Years Later', Buterin 2019"), Vitalik Buterin - ["They Might Never Tell You It's Broken"](https://pointersgonewild.com/2019/11/02/they-might-never-tell-you-its-broken/) ([HN](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21427996); the [1% rule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule) strikes again: if you don't file that bug report or tell someone their website is broken, probably no one will---a truth I have learned time and again, for my stuff as well. For example, on [TWDNE](/twdne#mobile-broken), or a few days after reading this, I learned a user had been trying to read pages through the *section popups* in Table of Contents! Perhaps it's [learned helplessness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness)? To quote [Paul Graham](https://paulgraham.com/oldlove.html "How To Do What You Love (Old Version)"): "If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to notice if you're doing it wrong.") - ["How to annotate literally everything"](https://beepb00p.xyz/annotating.html), karlicoss (comparison of tools for webpages, PDFs, e-ink readers, & books) - ["Computer-generated Floral Ornament Based on Magnetic Curves"](https://medium.com/@tokudu/computer-generated-floral-ornament-based-on-magnetic-curves-d77a3f206893), Anton Lopyrev ([video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWGp3Fc4P_Q "Interactive Floral Ornament Generator tutorial"); based on [Wong et al 1998](https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.75.2289&rep=rep1&type=pdf "Computer-Generated Floral Ornament") & [Xu & Mould 2008](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ccac/0394825b1a8ab9933f8ca3449e5b66a5a526.pdf "Magnetic Curves: Curvature-Controlled Aesthetic Curves Using Magnetic Fields")) - Tech trick: you can [link to a specific page number _N_ of any PDF by adding `#page=N` to the URL](/doc/cs/css/2007-adobe-parametersforopeningpdffiles.pdf#page=5 "Parameters for Opening PDF Files: You can open a PDF document with a command or URL that specifies exactly what to display (a named destination or specific page), and how to display it (using such characteristics as a specific view, scrollbars, bookmarks, annotations, or highlighting)") (eg. [this link](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.08053.pdf#page=13 "Megatron-LM: Training Multi-Billion Parameter Language Models Using GPU Model Parallelism: Appendix A: Text Samples") links to the text samples in the Megatron paper on page 13, rather than the first page) - ["SwarmCloak: Landing of a Swarm of Nano-Quadrotors on Human Arms"](https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.09874), Tsykunov et al 2019 ([video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2a4XrG_u3RE)) ### Economics - ["Universal Basic Income in the United States and Advanced Countries"](/doc/economics/2019-hoynes.pdf), Hoynes & Rothstein 2019 ### Fiction - [Giovanni Battista Piranesi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Battista_Piranesi) (his prints, particularly _Prisons_, have been enjoying something of a pop culture renaissance; eg. historical chronology conspiracy theorists now debate whether his Roman prints show the *real* Rome of his time---possibly not constructed by humans---and since falsely aged by a vast conspiracy, and whether _Prisons_ too might be a true depiction of reality) ### Misc - ["Issho Restaurant identity, by Dutchscot"](https://identitydesigned.com/issho/ "'Issho: Designed by Dutchscot, London', Designed 2018") (an elegant visual design inspired by Japanese [_kintsugi_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kintsugi)) - [[_The Public Domain Review_](https://publicdomainreview.org/about/)]{.smallcaps}: