Misc thoughts, memories, proto-essays, musings, etc.

In late November 2016, my Acer laptop broke and also corrupted the encrypted filesystem on the SSD, which apparently due to design decisions is very easily broken. Because I had been changing my backup strategy to use an new encryption key and had been lax about my manual backups, this made the most recent encrypted backups undecryptable as well, causing data loss back at least 2 weeks. I review how all this came to pass despite my careful backups, and my countermeasures: a new higher quality laptop, making backups of encrypted filesystem headers as well as the contents, and buying faster external drive enclosures.

Key lesson: if you use LUKS-encrypted Linux filesystems, know that they are super-fragile! You should backup a copy of the LUKS header (by running a command like sudo cryptsetup luksHeaderBackup /dev/sda5 –header-backup-file luks-header.bin.crypt) to avoid the header becoming corrupted & all data destroyed.

Quickies
Non-Existence Is Bad
Celebrity Masquerade Game
- Requirements
- Preparation
- Playing
  - Beginning
  - Middle
  - End
  - Prizes
Pemmican
Rock Paper Scissors
Backfire Effects in Operant Conditioning
On Being Sick As A Kid
On First Looking Into Tolkien’s Tower
Hash Functions
Icepires
Cleanup: Before Or After?
Peak Human Speed
Oldest Food
Zuckerberg Futures
Russia
Conscientiousness And Online Education
Fiction
- American Light Novels’ Absence
- Cultural Growth through Diversity
- TV & the Matrix
- Cherchez Le Chien: Dogs As Class Markers in Anime
- Tradeoffs and Costly Signaling in Appearances: the Case of Long Hair
  - Boorus: Revealed Preferences
- The Tragedy of Grand Admiral Thrawn
- On Dropping Family Guy
- Pom Poko’s Glorification of Group Suicide
- Full Metal Alchemist: Pride and Knowledge
- A Secular Humanist Reads The Tale of Genji
Economics
- Long Term Investment
- Measuring Social Trust by Offering Free Lunches
- Lip Reading Website
- Good Governance & Girl Scouts
- Chinese Kremlinology
  - Against Collapsism
- Domain-Squatting Externalities
- Ordinary Life Improvements
- A Market For Fat: The Transfer Machine
- Urban Area Cost-Of-Living As Big Tech Moats & Employee Golden Handcuffs
  - The Seen and the Unseen
  - External Links
Psychology
- Decluttering
- Optimizing the Alphabet
- Multiple Interpretations Theory of Humor
- Efficient Natural Language
- Cryonics Cluster
  - Reductionism Is the Common Thread?
- Lighting
- Possible Amazon Mechanical Turk Surveys/experiments
Technology
- Somatic Genetic Engineering
- The Advantage of an Uncommon Name
- Backups: Life and Death
- Measuring Multiple times in a Sandglass
- Powerful Natural Languages
- A Bitcoin+BitTorrent-Driven Economy for Creators (Artcoin)
- William Carlos Williams
- Simplicity Is the Price of Reliability
- November 2016 Data Loss Postmortem
- Cats and Computer Keyboards
- How Would You Prove You Are a Time-Traveler From the Past?
- ARPA and SCI: Surfing AI (Review of Roland & Shiman 2002_22ya)
- Open Questions
- The Reverse Amara’s Law
- Worldbuilding: The Lights in the Sky Are Sacs
- Remote Monitoring
- Surprising Turing-Complete Languages
- North Paw
  - Purchase
  - Conclusion
Leaf Burgers
Night Watch
- Liminality
Two Cows: Philosophy
Venusian Revolution
Hard Problems in Utilitarianism
Who Lives Longer, Men or Women?
Politicians Are Not Unethical
- Revealed Moralities
  - A Priori Rates
- Why?
- Investigating
  - Uses
Defining ‘But’
On Meta-Ethical Optimization
Alternate Futures: The Second English Restoration
Cicadas
No-Poo Self-Experiment
Newton’s System of the World and Comets
Rationality Heuristic for Bias Detection: Updating Towards the Net Weight of Evidence
Littlewood’s Law and the Global Media
D&D Game #2 Log
- “Bearer Bonds (Cash On Delivery)”
Highly Potent Drugs As Psychological Warfare Weapons
Who Buys Fonts?
Twitter Follow-Request UX Problems
The Diamond Earrings
Advanced Chess Obituary