January 2014 News
Welcome to the January 201411ya edition of the Gwern.net mailing list; the previous edition was December. If you do not want to receive these monthly emails, there is an unsubscribe link at the bottom.
The purpose of this mailing list is to be a summarized version of the site RSS feed (which lists every patch, no matter how small), overlapping with my Changelog page, but in a push/
Writings
Darknet markets
I have begun systematically spidering all operational darknet markets
General:
Haskell Summer of Code: 2013 review
Statistical:
font/
number size & table of contents background AB test finished, with consideration of value of interactions
Radiance:
diff of “Radiance” and part I of Radiance
Site:
Media
Links
Politics/
“The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy”, 2012 (popular media coverage; rebuttal showing that missionary choices of location were not random: et al 2018)
“An Economic Analysis of the Financial Records of al-Qa’ida in Iraq”, et al 2010; “$0.60 for cake: Al-Qaida [in Mali] records every expense”
“The lost history of Helmand” (failed nation-state building project in Afghanistan which exemplifies Scott’s Seeing Like A State)
“Aztec Political Thought” (the king as Enemy and Mocker, leader of a theatre state)
“Hallucinated Gods” (on Julian Jaynes’s book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind)
Business:
Literature:
“The Gooseberry Fallacy”: on ‘living like a dead man’ (Russian literature & thoughts on the good life & the moral imperative of economic growth; applicable to the anti-humanism in contemporary environmentalism & leftism)
“…But for Me, It Was Tuesday” (TvTropes)
Medicine:
“Aretaeus On Bipolar Disorder” (ancient-Greek/
psychiatry comparison) “Beware Mass-Produced Medical Recommendations” (on vitamin D & niacin)
Statistics:
“A Few Useful Things to Know about Machine Learning”, 2012 (nice guide to ‘common sense’—data cleaning, modeling, overfitting, bias/
variance, combining models, representation & learnability) “The Median is Not the Message”, Gould (on cancer survival and interpreting statistics)
“Adventures in the Assessment of Animal Speed and Morality”
“Visualization Series: Using Scatterplots and Models to Understand the Diamond Market”
Technology:
“A Future Of Pipes” (the future of cities and computing power: cooling is a big deal but not a fatal problem)
“Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning”, et al 2013
“Mobile Computing Research Is a Hornet’s Nest of Deception and Chicanery”, Mickens
“The Slow Winter”, Mickens
“The Night Watch”, Mickens
Rationality:
Misc:
Books
Nonfiction:
The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field, Jacques Hadamard (194580ya; review)
The City of Falling Angels, Berendt (200025ya; review)
Six Memos For The Next Millennium, Italo Calvino (198540ya)
Fiction:
Diaspora, Greg Egan
I Am A Cat, Natsume Soseki
Manga:
Oyasumi Punpun (see TvTropes; dark and depressing—worth a reread but not sure I can bring myself to do it)
Film/TV
Film:
Computer Chess (great world-building for a plot that did not deserve it)
Anime:
Music
Touhou:
“上海tea” (堕悪祭怪&昼; ‘⇔LIGHT’ {R5}) [electronic]
“パンザマスト (instrumental)” (“o ben to box”; miskyworks {C82}) [instrumental]
“けろけろハッピー” (堕悪祭怪&昼; ‘XXXXX EX STAGE R-21’ {C78}) [trance]
“イケナイ子守唄” (堕悪祭怪&昼; ‘いやしサンドバッグ’ {東方不敗小町5}) [trance]