July 2019 News
July 2019 Gwern.net newsletter with links on science and history; 1 book review; and 7 movie/TV series reviews.
This is the July 2019 edition of the Gwern.net newsletter; previous, June 2019 (archives). This is a collation of links and summary of major changes, overlapping with my Changelog; brought to you by my donors on Patreon.
Writings
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Gwern.net: tooltip popups for Wikipedia article summaries (
wikipedia-popups.js
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Media
Links
Genetics:
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Everything Is Heritable:
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“The Chinese National Twin Registry: a ‘gold mine’ for scientific research”, et al 2019 (includes 88 MZA)
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Emergenesis: “Genetics of Intellectual and Personality Traits Associated with Creative Genius: Could Geniuses Be Cosmobian Dragon Kings?”, 2014 (cf. Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity; Lykken et al 199232ya, “Emergenesis: Genetic Traits That May Not Run in Families”; Lykken 200618ya, “The mechanism of emergenesis”; Lykken 198242ya, “Research With Twins: The Concept of Emergenesis”)
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“Inequality in genetic cancer risk suggests bad genes rather than bad luck”, 2017 (previously)
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Recent Evolution:
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“Genetic contributions to variation in human stature in prehistoric Europe”, et al 2019 (phenotyping the graveyard)
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Engineering:
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“Thinking About the Evolution of Complex Traits in the Era of Genome-Wide Association Studies”, 2019 (review on additive complex traits: architecture, evolution, & selection)
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“The Promise and Price of Cellular Therapies: New ‘living drugs’—made from a patient’s own cells—can cure once incurable cancers. But can we afford them?” (on the history of CAR-T therapy)
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AI:
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‘Pluribus’: “Superhuman AI for multiplayer poker”, 2019 (Monte Carlo CFR “stronger than top human professionals in six-player no-limit Texas hold’em poker”; commentary)
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“How we built the Waifu Vending Machine” (HN; Sizigi Studios has launched a new online interactive GAN waifu generator, based in part on Danbooru2018; see also my StyleGAN/TWDNE writeups)
Statistics/Meta-Science:
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“The Big Crunch”, David Goodstein 199430ya; “1960: The Year The Singularity Was Cancelled”, Scott Alexander (on the end to post-WWII Vannevar Bushian exponential growth of academia & consequences thereof: growth can’t go on forever, and it didn’t. What we see now, a quarter of a century later, is the grim equilibrium.)
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“Ingredients for creating disruptive research teams”, Stefan Torges
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“Inhaling the spore: Field trip to a museum of natural (un)history”, Weschler 199430ya (on the LA Museum of Jurassic Technology)
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“Quantifying the evolution of individual scientific impact”, et al 2016 (no life-cycle effects on most-cited papers)
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“Super-centenarians and the oldest-old are concentrated into regions with no birth certificates and short lifespans”, 2019 (“a primary role of fraud and error in generating remarkable human age records”)
Politics/religion:
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T. Greer’s “The Scholar’s Stage” (Greer’s selection):
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“Notes on the Dynamics of Human Civilization: The Growth Revolution”
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“Vengeance As Justice: Passages I Highlighted in My Copy of Eye for an Eye”
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“Radical Islamic Terrorism in Context, part 1”, part 2; “ISIS, the Mongols, and ‘The Return of Ancient Challenges’”
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Ancient Greece:
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China:
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America:
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“Ominous Parallels: What Antebellum America Can Teach Us About Our Modern Political Regime”; “Shakespeare in American Politics”
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“Awareness vs. Action: Two Modes of Protest in American History”
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“Passages I Highlighted in My Copy of Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s”
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“Questing for Transcendence” (cf. MLP, 1984)
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“America Will Always Fail At Regional Expertise”; “American Policy Makers Do Not Read Books”; “You Do Not Have the People”; “What Cyber-War Will Look Like”
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Psychology/biology:
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“Scientists Are Giving Dead Brains New Life. What Could Go Wrong?” (“‘What’s happened, I’d argue’, says Christof Koch, the president and chief scientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, ‘is that a lot of things about the brain that we once thought were irreversible have turned out not necessarily to be so.’”; cf. cryonics)
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“Widespread associations between grey matter structure and the human phenome”, Couvy-et al 2019 (nice use of ‘morphometricity’/variance components to quantify total gray matter contribution to traits: Figure 1)
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“The influence of familial factors on the association between IQ and educational and occupational achievement: A sibling approach”, et al 2019 ( supplement)
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“Cognitive Consequences Of Iodine Deficiency In Adolescence: Evidence From Salt Iodization In Denmark”, 2019 (when the Danish government legalized iodized salt: d = 0.06 on GPA)
Technology:
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“Mother Earth Mother Board”, Neal Stephenson 1996 (“A 42,000-word, 3-continent spanning ‘hacker tourist’ account of the laying of the (then) longest wire on earth”)
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“High Tech Cowboys of the Deep Seas: The Race to Save the Cougar Ace” (extreme naval salvage—a surprising amount of computer modeling of the ships to determine how to safely refloat)
Economics:
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“Field experiments of success-breeds-success dynamics”, van de et al 2014 (only small ‘Matthew effects’ in popularity dynamics on Kickstarter/WP/Change.org/Epinions: randomness, not manipulability)
Philosophy:
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“Inverse Law of Scientific Nomenclature”, Scott Alexander (on the Nuwaubian Nation cult’s language delusion; see also sovereign citizen movement)
Misc:
Books
Nonfiction:
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Robert Bakewell and the Longhorn Breed of Cattle, Stanley 199529ya (review)
Film/TV
Live-action:
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Battle Angel Alita (2019; review)
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Invasion of the Body Snatchers (197846ya; review)
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Tron: Legacy (201014ya; a worthy followup to the original Tron: a colorful Daft Punk musical video meets Star Wars.)
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The Haunting (196361ya; review)
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Skyfall (201212ya)
Animated:
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Mobile Suit Gundam: Char’s Counterattack (198836ya; review)
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Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo (201212ya; review)
Music
Misc:
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“Derezzed” (Daft Punk & Avicii; Tron: Legacy Reconfigured {201113ya}) [electronic]
MLP:
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“The Place Where We Belong (Faulty Remix)” (Faulty {2019}) [electronic]