Links

Genetics:

• Everything Is Heritable:

  • “Genome-wide analysis identifies molecular systems and 149 genetic loci associated with income”, Hill et al 2019
  • “Predicting educational achievement from genomic measures and socioeconomic status”, von Stumm et al 2019
  • “Multivariable G-E interplay in the prediction of educational achievement”, Allegrini et al 2019 (little GxE but much rGE: “the environment is genetic”)

• Recent Evolution:

  • “A genome-wide Approximate Bayesian Computation approach suggests only limited numbers of soft sweeps in humans over the last 100,000 years”, Laval et al 2019 (“∼80 sweeps in average across fifteen 1000G populations when assuming incomplete sweeps only and ∼140 selective sweeps in non-African populations when incorporating complete sweeps in our simulations”; wonder what they all do?)

• Engineering:

  • “Extensive Mammalian Germline Genome Engineering”, Yang et al 2019 (media—“engineering 18 different loci using multiple genome engineering methods” in pigs; followup to Niu et al 2017)
  • “Functional Oocytes Derived from Granulosa Cells”, Tian et al 2019 (towards massive embryo selection/IES: cell→egg→mouse; “It got us thinking, what if we can utilize these granulosa cells? Since every egg has thousands of granulosa cells surrounding it, if we can induce them into pluripotent cells and turn those cells into oocytes, aren’t we killing two birds with one stone?”)
  • He Jiankui sentenced to 3 years prison in secret trial for CRISPR editing of babies (2 associates sentenced to 2 & 1.5 years)

AI:

• /r/AIDungeon: a subreddit for sharing AI Dungeon 2 games (a GPT-2-1.5b finetuned on RPG/text adventure stories eg “My Musical Troupe of Orcs Uses Music to Advance Orc Rights”)

• Matters Of Scale:

  • “Dota 2 with Large Scale Deep Reinforcement Learning”, Berner et al 2019 (blog; OpenAI final report on OA5, with many tips & tricks & glitches; cf Tencent’s 1v1 MOBA paper: “To train one hero, we use 48 P40 GPU cards and 18,000 CPU cores.”)
  • “Reformer: The Efficient Transformer”, Kitaev et al 2019 (blog; handling sequences up to length=64,000 on 1 GPU, which break GPT-2’s 1024 context window bottleneck & would be great for MIDI music generation etc; see also dynamic convolutions & Sparse Transformers)

• StyleGAN 2: “Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN”, Karras et al 2019 (eliminating the blob artifacts—this will make a nice upgrade for TWDNEv3)

Statistics/meta-science/mathematics:

• “Comparing meta-analyses and preregistered multiple-laboratory replication projects”, Kvarven et al 2019
• “The maddening saga of how an Alzheimer’s ‘cabal’ thwarted progress toward a cure for decades” (apropos of the latest blow to the amyloid hypothesis: amyloid does not even predict cognitive decline)
• “Snow Crystals”, Libbrecht 2019 (the complete monograph by the SnowCrystals.com man: the history of snow crystal studies, how to create & photography them, how they grow, how to simulate them…)
• “NP-complete Problems and Physical Reality”, Aaronson 2005
• “Do GRE scores help predict getting a physics Ph.D.? A comment on a paper by Miller et al”, Weissman 2019 (yes; the problems with the Miller GRE paper go well beyond just range restriction to conditioning on a collider and others)
• “Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors”, Alexey Guzey (Andrew Gelman discussions: 1/2/3/4; apologist: “I study sleep…I think they are within reason and justified by the important message he is trying to convey.” cf my Rosenthal review)

Politics/religion:

• “Animal welfare in Nazi Germany”
• “‘Shattered’: Inside the secret battle to save America’s undercover spies in the digital age”

Psychology/biology:

• “A Look Back at 2019: Progress Towards the Treatment of Aging as a Medical Condition”, Reason
• “A real-life Lord of the Flies: the troubling legacy of the Robbers Cave experiment” (manipulation & selective reporting)
• “Freedom From Fungus: Why Don’t Humans Have Chestnut-Style Blights and White Nose-Style Syndromes?”
• “Social context of shell acquisition in Coenobita clypeatus hermit crabs”, Rotjan et al 2010 (hermit crab bubble sort for vacancy chains; SciAm)
• “Instinctive sleeping and resting postures: an anthropological and zoological approach to treatment of low back and joint pain”, Tetley 2000 (idiosyncratic memoir/analysis of sleeping postures used by other primates/tribal societies)
• “Plumbing Stanley Kubrick”, Ian Watson 1999 (writer’s memoir of years working on A.I. Artificial Intelligence & coping with Kubrick’s eccentricities)
• “Audiogenic reflex seizures in cats”, Lowrie et al 2016 (not as amusing as YouTube videos would lead one to assume)

Technology:

• “href.cool: Links of the 2010s”, Kicks Condor (link compilation: selected subcultures, tech demos, viral content, and all things ’10s Internet—from the NSA to nyancat or SCP to space football)

• “Up and Then Down: The lives of elevators”, Paumgarten 2008 (elevator safety, technology, and economics)

• Ben Carlin: circumnavigated the world in a failed amphibious jeep (1948–1958)

• Why are modern computers so slow? “It’s the Latency, Stupid.”

  • “Keyboard Latency”, Dan Luu (Measuring how slow modern keyboards are—they differ a lot)
  • “Terminal Latency”, Dan Luu (How slow are terminal emulators? Kinda slow, and degrading badly under system load)
  • “Web Bloat”, Dan Luu (Bloated webpages interact badly with latency inherent to the Internet & the HTML/browser architecture; the mentioned Google anecdote was YouTube)
  • “Computer latency: 1977–2017”, Dan Luu; “Slow Software”, Ink & Switch 2018; “Typing with pleasure”, Pavel Fatin (total latency—where all the latency in the stack comes from)
  • “Local-first software: You own your data, in spite of the cloud”, Ink & Switch 2019 (Kleppmann et al 2019; apps & clients which do all work locally but use CRDTss for distributed synchronization with your other devices, eliminating networking latency)
  • “The Wheel of Reincarnation”, Norman Hardy (on Meyer & Sutherland 1968—“how many computers are in your computer?”)

• Christophe Plantin: mortgaged home to print the Plantin Polyglot Bible for the King of Spain to prove he wasn’t a heretic—but he was, a Familist; it is an elegant text, using multi-lingual drop caps & a parallel layout of the 6 texts

• “The Floppy Toast”, Buttersafe (PEBKAC)

Economics:

• “How a cabal of romance writers cashed in on Amazon Kindle Unlimited”

Philosophy:

• “Two Arms and a Head: The Death of a Newly Paraplegic Philosopher”, Atreus 2008 (memento mori—one of the saddest things I have ever read, this is the suicide note of a grad student crippled in a motorcycle accident; not entirely reasonable, but what is reasonable to expect of a man in unreasonable circumstances? Original forum thread; comments; cf “How Do People Communicate Before Death? Insights into the little-studied realm of last words”/who by slow decay…)

  • “In praise of self-deprecation”, Wislawa Szymborska 1976; “The Kingfisher”, Mary Oliver 1990 (House of Light); “Conversation with Jeanne”, Czesław Miłosz 1984 (Provinces 1991)

• “Hypothermia” (how security researcher Moxie Marlinspike almost died of hypothermia & drowning in the San Francisco Bay while simply moving his catamaran boat to save docking fees)

• When a white horse is not a horse (Ceci n’est pas une pony.)

Books

Nonfiction:

• ‘Small multiples’ show change across variables.
  Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative, Tufte 1997 (less of a hodge-podge than Envisioning Information, Tufte walks through, as usual, graphs: how to show multiple versions of things, such as 4D data, on 2D paper? Key case studies are John Snow’s cholera maps of infections vs location vs time, the Challenger disaster’s obscuration of problems vs temperature over the course of Space Shuttle launches, stage magician diagrams of tricks, which illustrate change over time; Tufte then considers showing parallel versions which differ in some abstract dimension; then graphs which must show change in both space & time, such as sunspots or Saturn’s rings, representing Tufte’s usual concept of “small multiples”; in a final section, Tufte highlights favorite art pieces of his which are diagrammatic or symbolic in some sense akin to the foregoing chapters. As usual, a pleasure to read, and it furnished some examples for my page on rubrication too.)
• Surprisingly entertaining if not immediately useful. The Elements of Typographic Style (third edition), Bringhurst 2004 (I decided to read this based on Rutter’s web version of it; Bringhurst is unexpectedly amusing—I wish I cared about anything as much as Bringhurst cares about typography. No comparison is too strong to condemn a typographical sin: editing fonts, for example makes it “easy for a designer or compositor with no regard for letters to squish them into cattle trains and ship them to the slaughter”—with another author, one would assume the Holocaust connotations were unintentional, but with Bringhurst… Like Rutter, there is a great of material on ratios and page layout which smacks of numerology, but that can be skipped easily, and the rest of the material is useful. The book itself is, of course, nice typographically, exemplifying the use of sidenotes, and although he surprisingly doesn’t cover it at length (like he does what seems like everything else), he even provides two nice examples of rubrication for my page.)
• A deeply dishonest harbinger of the Replication Crisis. Experimenter Effects In Behavioral Research, Rosenthal 1976 (long review; consider also Rosenthal’s own description in “Citation Classic”)

Fiction:

• Well-intentioned but fatally self-undermined. String of Beads: Complete Poems of Princess Shikishi, Shikishi trans. Sato 1993 (review)

Film/TV

Live-action:

• Recommended samurai movies.
  Rurouni Kenshin 2012/Rurouni Kenshin: Kyoto Inferno 2014/Rurouni Kenshin: The Legend Ends 2014 (Less a trilogy than a movie + duology sequel, this live-action adaptation of the popular Rurouni Kenshin manga/anime, familiar to many Americans from its years as an Adult Swim staple; as Kenshin is so anime, I postponed watching it, fearing it would adapt badly and exhibit the worst tendencies of Japanese live-action movies—bombastic over-acting, sketchy SFX, fish-out-of-water J-pop singers & implausibly effeminate male leads plagiarized from Final Fantasy, that sort of thing. (One would rarely accuse Hollywood movies of being subtle and sophisticated, but in comparison to many Japanese movies…) The first movie is the weakest, with cartoonish villains and an unconvincing casting of Sanosuke Sagara (although to be fair, the casting of Saitō Hajime is great). But the duology is much more striking: with Shishio as a proper antagonist, the fights come to life and live-action permits a heightened sense of realism & horror which offsets the ‘animeness’ of the source material—the opening sequence of Kyoto Inferno truly dramatizes Shishio’s ideology that this world is a hell where the strong eat the weak, and scenes like that offset the threats to suspension of disbelief that the (toned down but still improbable) swordplay present. The production values are high, and scenes often elegant; the fight scenes are of high caliber as well. Worth watching for non-fans, as long as you enjoy action movies, although if you are pressed for time, you might skip the first one: you can probably infer everything you need to know from context or skimming Wikipedia.)

Animated:

• A satisfying finale—good but not great.
  MLP:FiM: season 9 (s1–8 review; the final season of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic; while it never regained the online buzz it had early on in 2013 or so, the series kept on trucking, and racked up 222 episodes & a movie, in addition to the various spinoffs. It’s not quite over—instead of the expected full reboot with a new cast, Hasbro appears to launching a new series Pony Life which will keep the Mane Six but go all-comedy in a chibi style, & although details are scarce I doubt I’ll bother—but the main mane thing is over, so to speak. So how does it cap the series? It’s… fine. Like most of the later seasons, it’s good but not great. There’s a relative dearth of catchy songs, and many episodes are disconnected from a more ambitious plot. A few loose ends are tidied up which didn’t really need it (did we really need another Daring Do episode, fun as they are, instead of dealing with Applejack’s parents?) but more are left dangling. The occasional callbacks of characters like Quibble Pants or Weird Al’s Cheese Sandwich can’t hide the lack of inspiration in most episodes. The climax is fun as the villains demonstrate the power of evil friendships, but then the resolution is the same tired laser-beams deus ex machina: could the writers really not think of any way to have their evil friendship collapse naturally, thereby demonstrating its flaws compared to true friendship? That disappointment is partially offset by the final episode including the best song of the season, and a flashforward epilogue to answer various questions while illustrating Twilight Sparkle’s character development in a huge nostalgia trip. It would be difficult for any fan to come away too angry about the ending. It could have been much worse. Good episodes: “Sparkle’s Seven”, “Between Dark and Dawn”, “The Last Laugh”, “Daring Doubt”, “The Big Mac Question”, “The Last Problem”.)
• ??? Owarimonogatari (a puzzling entry in the oft-puzzling Monogatari series: the tables are turned as Koyomi must investigate someone afflicted by an oddity: himself, although he doesn’t realize it, as he investigates a seriously mentally-ill classmate, Sodachi, who turns out to have an extensive history with him that he is amnesiac about. This is interesting and Sodachi gets some great lines, but it’s unclear why this interlude exists. Owari fills in a great deal of backstory on Koyomi, like his love of mathematics—except who knew any of this backstory needed filling in? Certainly I don’t recall wanting an explanation for that, or indeed that he had any deep love for mathematics… I took a look at some fan discussions but found little about Sodachi or whether she becomes important later on, so maybe she doesn’t ever. Owari awkwardly transitions to the ongoing Shinobu arc stemming from Onimonogatari, covering the other half of the story from Nekomonogatari Black/White, and info-dumping even more, explaining why Koyomi encounters all these oddities in the first place. At this point, the whole Monogatari universe has become complicated enough I feel I need to restart from the beginning because I’m not sure what any of this means.)¹

Music

MLP:

• “Heartfire” (John Kenza; Compass Rose {2017}) [house]

Doujin:

• “Cute Swing” (Mihoney; {2019}) [house]