Links

Genetics:

• Everything Is Heritable:

  • ⁠“Behavior Genetic Research Methods: Testing Quasi-Causal Hypotheses Using Multivariate Twin Data”⁠, Turkheimer & Harden2014

  • ⁠“How genome-wide association studies (GWAS) made traditional candidate gene studies obsolete”⁠, Duncanet al2019 (apropos of ⁠SSC on Borderet al2019⁠ revisiting the candidate-gene & gene-environment debacles)

• Engineering:

  • full genome synthesis of E. coli: 4 million base-pairs⁠ (media⁠)

  • ⁠The majority of SK police quarantine dogs are now clones

  • “Birth of clones of the world’s first cloned dog”⁠, Kimet al2017 (“We’ll always have Snuppy⁠. Here’s looking at you, pup.”)

AI:

• ⁠“Adversarial Examples Are Not Bugs, They Are Features”⁠, Ilyaset al2019 (‽)

• “Meta-learning of Sequential Strategies”⁠, Ortegaet al2019; “Reinforcement Learning, Fast and Slow”⁠, Botvinicket al2019; “Meta-learners’ learning dynamics are unlike learners’”⁠, Rabinowitz2019; “Ray Interference: a Source of Plateaus in Deep Reinforcement Learning”⁠, Schaulet al2019 (Bayesian RL⁠ interpretations of meta-DRL & why DRL is so sample-inefficient)

• “GROVER: Defending Against Neural Fake News”⁠, Zellerset al2019 (training a GPT-2-1.5b on news articles to generate super-realistic fake news: ⁠online demo; oddly, GROVER can also do fanfiction/riddles/poetry)

• “EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks”⁠, Tan & Le2019 (a simple architecture design trick to get new ImageNet⁠ SOTA at a fraction the model size; ⁠comments⁠)

• “Speech2Face: Learning the Face Behind a Voice”⁠, Ohet al2019 (really?)

• ⁠SOLAR: “Model-Based Reinforcement Learning from Pixels with Structured Latent Variable Models”⁠, Zhanget al2019; ⁠VICE-RAQ: “End-to-End Deep Reinforcement Learning without Reward Engineering”⁠, Singhet al2019 (highly sample-efficient robot arm training)

• Bruteforcing Breakout⁠ (optimal play by depth-first search of an approximate MDP⁠ in an optimized C++ simulator for 6 CPU-years, which is possible because ⁠your computer is faster than you think⁠; crazy gameplay—like ⁠chess endgame tables⁠, a glimpse of superintelligence)

Statistics/Meta-Science:

• “Objecting to experiments that compare two unobjectionable policies or treatments”⁠, Meyeret al2019

• ⁠Life On the Infinite Farm⁠, Schwartz2018 (Hilbert’s farm)

Politics/religion:

• How Soviet centralized economic planning led to the near-extinction of whales, for no particular reason

• ⁠“Medieval Monogamy”⁠, Betzig1995

• “The Apostate: Paul Haggis vs. the Church of Scientology”⁠

• ⁠“‘This place is pryson’: review of Hermits and Anchorites in England, 1200–1550, ed Jones”⁠

• “A Modern History of Satanic Panic in South Carolina”

Psychology/biology:

• “Invisible Designers: Brain Evolution Through the Lens of Parasite Manipulation”⁠, Del Giudice2019 (⁠SSC; is the complexity of brains largely accidental complexity, protective obfuscation against parasites, including design features like literally poisonous neurotransmitters?)

• “The Family That Feels Almost No Pain: An Italian clan’s curious insensitivity to pain has piqued the interest of geneticists seeking a new understanding of how to treat physical suffering”⁠ (more fodder for my backstop essay⁠)

• “The Hype Cycle of Working Memory Training”⁠, Redick2019

• “Strange-face illusions during eye-to-eye gazing in dyads: specific effects on derealization, depersonalization and dissociative identity”⁠, Caputo2019 (media⁠; only sort of works for me)

• “My Brother Tom’s Schizophrenia”⁠

• “An astounding, one-of-a-kind trove of stories and drawings reveals what life was like for young men growing up in rural 19^th-century America”⁠ (on the Nelson Brothers’ Colonial America paracosm⁠, “the Big, Long, and Round Continents”)

Technology:

• “How Complex Systems Fail”⁠, Cook2000

• “SpaceX Launches 60 Starlink Internet Satellites Into Orbit”⁠

• ⁠Rivest’s LCS35 time-lock crypto puzzle has been broken 15 years ahead of schedule by 2 different groups⁠ (⁠HN⁠; background on time-lock crypto⁠)

• RIP: FBI has seized Deep Dot Web and arrested its administrators⁠ (⁠indictment⁠; ⁠mirrors of select DDW pages⁠)

• ⁠“The Lost Picture Show: Hollywood Archivists Can’t Outpace Obsolescence—Studios invested heavily in magnetic-tape storage for film archiving but now struggle to keep up with the technology”⁠

• ⁠“The Paris Compressed-Air Network” (cf. ⁠“The Paris Pneumatic Clock Network”)

• ⁠“Dictionary of Numbers, Putting numbers in human terms” (a browser extension for replacing large numbers in text with familiar quantities, Fermi-estimate-style)

Economics:

• “The Optimistic Thought Experiment”⁠, Thiel⁠ 2008_17ya (globalization, bubbles, technological progress, & survivorship bias)

• “The making of Amazon Prime, the Internet’s most successful and devastating membership program: An oral history of the subscription service that changed online shopping forever”⁠

• ⁠“Shady Numbers And Bad Business: Inside The Esports Bubble”

Fiction:

• ⁠“Killing Rabbits”⁠, Miroslav Válek (WWII/Cold War/vegetarianism etc; from ⁠One Hundred Years of Slovak Literature: An Anthology⁠, ed Chrobakova2000)

• ⁠“Case Study: Anime Music Videos”⁠, Milstein2007

Film/TV

Live-action:

• Sicario⁠ (2015; cruelly perfect)

• Terminator 2⁠ (entertaining but aside from great style, has little substance; I spent much of the time thinking about how ‘cheap’ the liquid metal special effects look now but how cutting-edge & excruciating those special effects were to pull off in 1991_34ya: ⁠“The tech of Terminator 2—an oral history”)

• Dialogues des Carmélites⁠ opera (review⁠)

• Laura⁠ (1944_81ya; film noir murder mystery which benefits from sharp dialogue and casting, even though the culprit turns out to be precisely who you would guess a few minutes in and can hardly be considered to be a ‘mystery’)

• Pokémon Detective Pikachu⁠ (2019; ⁠review⁠)

• It Follows⁠ (2014_11ya; ⁠review⁠)

Animated:

• Children Who Chase Lost Voices⁠ (2011_14ya; ⁠review⁠)

Music

Touhou⁠:

• “きらめきの谺” (Foxtail-Grass; ‘つきよがたり。’ {R15}) [folk]

• ⁠“乱 -Ran-”⁠ (Stack; 第14回博麗神社例大祭 会場限定おまけCD {R14}) [rock]

• ⁠“Till The Next Journey”⁠ (Ringing Volcano; A Wolf and Gensokyo {R14}) [folk]

• ⁠“The Cattail’s Head”⁠ (Ringing Volcano; A Wolf and Gensokyo {R14}) [folk]

• “A Pub” (Ringing Volcano; A Wolf and Gensokyo {R14}) [folk]

• ⁠“The Ray of Light”⁠ (NAGI☆ feat. Vivienne; Increase Beat {R14}) [pop]

MLP:

• ⁠“The Daring Explorer”⁠ (Jyc Row; ⁠Jyc Row Orchestral Compilation Vol. 3—SOLAR⁠ {2018}) [instrumental rock]

• ⁠“478,000 Miles (Shining Forth)”⁠ (loophoof; ⁠Rebirth⁠ {2018}) [house]

• ⁠“Heir of the Moonlight (EnsionD remix)”⁠ (EnsionD & Synthis feat. FritzyBeat {2018}) [trance]

Doujin:

• “エヴリデイドリーム” (c-hicken; My Secret Cute {M3-39}) [acoustic]