Links

Genetics:

• Everything Is Heritable:

  • “Genomic Prediction of Complex Disease Risk”, Lello et al 2018 (followup to Lello et al 2017: lasso for improved GWASes of many disease traits in UKBB)

  • “Polygenic Risk Scores for Prediction of Breast Cancer and Breast Cancer Subtypes”, Mavaddat et al 2018

  • “Genetic variation in health insurance coverage”, Wehby & Shane2018

  • “It Runs in the Family: A Study of Political Candidacy Among Swedish Adoptees”, Oskarsson et al 2018

  • 23andMe GWAS on ice cream flavor preferences (overlap with chocolate preference GWAS)

• Engineering:

  • “China Shrinks From the Gattaca Age”; He Jiankui under house arrest? (see also: Wired, and previously, “China’s crackdown on genetics breaches could deter data sharing” & highly fragmented competing datasets—why does China continue to abdicate genetics leadership?)

  • “In vitro breeding: application of embryonic stem cells to animal production”, Goszczynski et al 2018 (a review of & proposal to start IES in cattle)

  • “The Missing Response to Selection in the Wild”, Pujol et al 2018 (possible reasons for failure of the univariate breeder’s equation in wild populations)

  • “In vitro gametogenesis and reproductive cloning: Can we allow one while banning the other?”, Segers et al 2018 (no)

  • “The Fertility Clinic That Cut IVF Prices in Half” (IVF doesn’t have to be nearly as expensive as it is)

  • “Rescue of American chestnut with extraspecific genes following its destruction by a naturalized pathogen”, Steiner et al 2017 (success of GMO & cross-bred blight-resistant American chestnut trees expected in next 1–2 decades after a century of work)

  • “Genetically Modified People Are Walking Among Us” (the history of mitochondrial transfer)

AI:

• “BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding”, Devlin et al 2018 (blog; “The Illustrated BERT and ELMo (How NLP Cracked Transfer Learning)”)

• “A general reinforcement learning algorithm that masters chess, shogi and Go through self-play”, Silver et al 2018 (expanded Alpha Zero paper; link compilation)

• Reward hacking examples in AI (previously, Lehman et al 2018)

• “Human-level performance in first-person multiplayer games with population-based deep reinforcement learning”, Jaderberg et al 2018b (blog)

• “StyleGAN: A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks”, Karras et al 2018 (video; source; ProGAN’s successor: new style-transfer arch, more controllable, halves error for even more photorealistic faces with much-improved hair/eyes/backgrounds. ProGAN was already hard for humans to distinguish at much above chance levels, StyleGAN may knock it down to near-chance now. For kicks, compare StyleGAN’s samples to the original 2014 GAN faces 4 years ago.)

• “MetaMimic: One-Shot High-Fidelity Imitation: Training Large-Scale Deep Nets with RL”, Le Paine et al 2018

• “An Introduction to Deep Reinforcement Learning”, Francois-Lavet et al 2018 (DQN, PG, exploration, benchmarking, POMDPs, transfer & meta-learning, multi-agent RL)

• “Differentiable Image Parameterizations: A powerful, under-explored tool for neural network visualizations and art” (feature visualization & style transfer in 3D; an answer to the VGG/style-transfer anomaly—checkerboard artifacts?)

• “Go-Explore: a New Approach for Hard-Exploration Problems”, Ecoffet et al 2019 (preliminary announcement; discussion)

Statistics/Meta-Science:

• Clair Patterson’s clean-room innovations, reducing bias in chemistry, led to his anti-lead crusade

• “A Rational Choice Framework for Collective Behavior”, Krafft2017 (large noisy/mimicking human groups can approximate distributed Bayesian inference for Thompson sampling, as a kind of particle filtering)

• “Exploration in the wild”, Schulz et al 2018 (Deliveroo dataset: 1,613,967 meal orders 30,552 restaurants by 195,333 customers)

• “Causal language and strength of inference in academic and media articles shared in social media (CLAIMS): A systematic review”, Haber et al 2018

• “Information Theory [its early history]”, Aftab et al 2001 (on psychology of innovation & computational constraints)

• “The Unfavorable Economics of Measuring the Returns to Advertising”, Lewis & Rao2015

• “The war over supercooled water”

• Nash equilibria and strategies in ‘Mafia’/‘Werewolf’ games

• “Poisson clumping” (why rare events can happen in ‘clusters’ even if there is no trend)

• On the spinach/iron leprechaun

Politics/religion:

• “The Mao Mango Cult of 1968 and the Rise of China’s Working Class”; “China’s curious cult of the mango”

• “Axes of Evil”: the DMZ tree murders

• “Things I Learned By Spending Five Thousand Years In An Alternate Universe” (online micro-nations)

• “The Case For Cthulhu”, RMP

Psychology/biology:

• “Academic achievement across the day: Evidence from randomized class schedules”, Williams & Shapiro2018

• “Clusters of Individual Experiences form a Continuum of Persistent Non-Symbolic Experiences in Adults”, Martin2013 (minimal and mostly negative effects of enlightenment-like experiences on cognition & daily life; see also “Words”)

• “Catnip, Valerian, Honeysuckle and other cat-attractant plants”, Hartwell2008

• OKCupid blog archives of online dating analyses

• “Psychedelic Turk: A Platform for People on Altered States of Consciousness” (truly diverse polling or worker groups)

• “Night Vision: The forgotten theory of dreams that inspired Vladimir Nabokov”

• “Treasure Hunting”

• “Locomotion is not a privilege after birth: Ultrasound images of viviparous shark embryos swimming from one uterus to the other”, Tomita et al 2018

• “Human Tails: Ownership and Control of Extended Humanoid Avatars in VR”, Steptoe et al 2013

• “Sex, Steroids, And Arnold: The Story Of The Gym That Shaped America”

Technology:

• “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework”, Engelbart 1962 (background for The Mother of All Demos)

• David Denkenberger interview on “ALLFED” (research into radical strategies for food production in case of global agricultural disaster to prevent mass starvation)

• “11 Forgotten Women who Invented the British Industrial Revolution”

• “The Instant Pot of the 1600s Was Known as ‘the Digester of Bones’: The pressure cooker led directly to the invention of the steam engine”

• “DRAM’s Damning Defects—and How They Cripple Computers: An investigation into dynamic random-access memory chip failure reveals surprising hardware vulnerabilities”

• “A Breakthrough for U.S. Troops: Combat-Ready Pizza”

• “Before Envelopes, People Protected Messages With ‘Letterlocking’: For centuries, senders used folds, slits, and wax seals to guard correspondence from prying eyes”

• Some Google search examples

Economics:

• “Uber insiders describe infighting and questionable decisions before its self-driving car killed a pedestrian” (Challenger redux)

• “Prime & Punishment: Dirty dealing in the $175 billion Amazon Marketplace” (the tactics used in seller wars)

• Deku-shrub & Besa Mafia: “The unbelievable tale of a fake hitman, a kill list, a darknet vigilante… and a murder”

• “Demon Underneath: John DeLorean and the invention of the future” (on John DeLorean; the thin line between automobile conman & visionary, and hustling & felonies—Elon Musk, if he were much more incompetent & unlucky)

• “Just Desserts: Sandy Jenkins was a shy, daydreaming accountant at the Collin Street Bakery, the world’s most famous fruitcake company. He was tired of feeling invisible, So he started stealing—and got a little carried away.” (remarkably shabby & unimaginative ways of spending the bezzle)

• “The fixed 5-cent price of Coca-Cola1886–1959”

Fiction:

• “The Cowboy Hávamál”, Crawford2012

• “‘Tattúínárdǿla saga’: If Star Wars Were an Icelandic Saga”, Crawford2010

• “The Tatooine Cycle”, Donn Bó2015 (if Star Wars were an Irish epic)

Misc:

• “The World in Its Extreme: It is the hottest place in the world, and the driest. It is home to thriving commerce and to desperate, hopeless poverty. It is the Sahara, an eternal source of fascination and terror”:

  After the radiator coolant was gone, the Belgians started sipping gasoline. You would too. Call it petroposia: Saharans have recommended it to me as a way of staying off battery acid. The woman wrote that it seemed to help. They drank their urine. She reported that it was difficult at first, but that afterward it wasn’t so bad.

  The boy was the weakest, and was suffering terribly. In desperation they burned their car, hoping someone would see the smoke. No one did. They killed their son to stop his pain. Later the husband cut himself and the wife drank his blood. At his request she somehow broke his neck with a rock. Alone she no longer wanted to live. Still, the Sahara was fabulous, she wrote, and she was glad to have come. She would do it again. She regretted only one thing—that she had not seen Sylvester Stallone in Rambo III. Those were her last lines. The family’s remains were found later, and returned to Tamanrasset.

• “Please Take The 2019 SSC Survey”

Books

Nonfiction:

• Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays, Richardson2001 (see also Richardson2010)

• The Midas Paradox, Scott Sumner (review)

Fiction:

• An Artist of the Floating World, Kazuo Ishiguro 1986 (strikingly like The Remains of the Day, and successful for similar reasons)

• The Buried Giant, Ishiguro2015 (review)

• Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, Ishiguro (inoffensively meandering short stories about musicians and failing or succeeding)

• The Alehouse at the End of the World, Allred2018 (peeked into as part of Christmas book exchange; dropped after 50 pages & skipping forward to check. Painfully unfunny and then descends into dirty-old-man skeevishness where he writes endlessly about sex in a manner nauseating enough to make one want to take a vow of celibacy. I’ll stick with Neil Gaiman, thanks.)

Film/TV

Live-action:

• They Shall Not Grow Old, 2018 (review)

Animated:

• Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (review)

• Coco (review)

Music

MLP:

• “Wandering (Sweet Apple Acres)” (Equestria Electric Symphony Orchestra {2018}) [country]

• “Winter Wrap Up (Symphonic Metal Cover)” (Rockin’Brony {2018}) [instrumental rock]

• “Alone” (Tre; Scraps {2017}) [pop]

• “Your Kindness” (ertrii {2018}) [house]

• “Another Way” (Lorris; Lollipop {2017}) [electronic/synthwave]

• “Changes” (StealingShad3z feat. GhostXb; Recollections {2018}) [Alt. Rock]

• “Step! Buck! Leap! Touch!” (Mane in Green; Recollections {2018}) [folk/Celtic]

• “Train Bells” (Wandering Artist; Recollections {2018}) [orchestral]

• “Not Much to Miss” (4EverfreeBrony feat. EileMonty; Recollections {2018}) [pop]

• “Spearmint” (Viricide Filly; Lollipop {2017}) [electronic]

• “Giggles & Gumdrops” (4everfreebrony; Small Horses and Other Stuff) [acoustic]