November 2019 News
November 2019 Gwern.net newsletter with 2 essays, links on PGD and AI scaling, disappearing polymorphs, and The Public Domain Review; 2 opera and 1 anime reviews.
November 2019’s Gwern.net newsletter is now out; previous, October 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
-
Gwern.net: reverse citation links now available in popups via Jose Luis Ricon’s new Semantic Scholar search engine (which prioritizes reviews/meta-analyses which cite a given paper)
Media
Links
Genetics
-
Everything Is Heritable:
-
“Rare Genetic Variants Associated With Sudden Cardiac Death in Adults”, et al 2019 (important use-case for population screening & embryo selection; previously: et al 2016 )
-
“Genome-wide association study identifies 49 common genetic variants associated with handedness”, et al 2019
-
“Metagenomic analysis of a blood stain from the French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat (1743–501793231ya)”, de et al 2019
-
-
Engineering:
-
“Search-and-replace genome editing without double-strand breaks or donor DNA”, et al 2019 (prime editing competitor to CRISPR; media: Science, Wired)
-
“A single combination gene therapy treats multiple age-related diseases”, et al 2019
AI
-
“MuZero: Mastering Atari, Go, Chess and Shogi by Planning with a Learned Model”, et al 2019 (tree search over remarkably simple learned latent-dynamics model reaches AlphaZero level; plus beating both of the previous model-free (R2D2) & model-based (SimPLe) ALE SOTAs; NNs are lazy and can do more if you just train them right. This should move your beliefs closer to ‘Bitter Lesson’/Schmidhuber-style paradigms of simplicity & scaling. It will be interesting to see if MuZero can perhaps provide the equivalent of Zero for more complex environments: if it can roll out imagined abstract Go & ALE games, it can also roll out StarCraft II games…)
-
Matters Of Scale:
-
OpenAI releases GPT-2 1.5B trained model & detection tools (paper, with interesting appendices on generating ideological text; GPT-2-1.5b web interface)
-
“When will computer hardware match the human brain?”, Moravec 1998
-
“High Fidelity Video Prediction with Large Stochastic Recurrent Neural Networks”, et al 2019 ( videos; realistic 128px video generation by simply scaling up RNNs)
-
“XLM-R: Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale”, et al 2019 ( blog; 2.5 TB text for training translations into 100 languages)
-
-
“Learning to Predict Without Looking Ahead: World Models Without Forward Prediction”, et al 2019 ( paper)
-
“Talking Head Anime from a Single Image”, Pramook Khungurn (one-shot creation of ‘Virtual Youtuber’-style CGI talking heads from a single source image, allowing eg. video⟺CGI-head transforms of live webcams; replaces hand-coded CGI models with a learned differentiable DL model…)
-
AI Dungeon 2: “My Musical Troupe of Orcs Uses Music to Advance Orc Rights” (sample dialogue with a GPT-2-1.5b finetuned on text adventures)
Statistics/Meta-Science
-
“bioRxiv: the preprint server for biology”, et al 2019 (the growing success of bioRxiv)
Politics/religion
-
Did psychologist David Rosenhan fabricate his famous 197351ya “Being Sane in Insane Places” mental hospital exposé? (Nature review; on the Rosenhan experiment; interesting to consider 1975’s criticisms in light of this)
-
“Orchestrating false beliefs about gender discrimination”: what did the famous ‘blind orchestra audition’ study show? (Gelman commentary)
Psychology/biology
-
“Towards a ‘Treadmill Test’ for Cognition: Reliable Prediction of Intelligence From Whole-Brain Task Activation Patterns”, et al 2018 (r = 0.68)
-
“Mechanisms of Scent-tracking in Humans”, Porter et al 200618ya (video; see also “Poor Human Olfaction is a Nineteenth Century Myth”, 2017)
-
Disappearing polymorphs (Ice-Nine in real life): “Disappearing Polymorphs Revisited”, et al 2015; “Disappearing Polymorphs”, Dunitz & Bernstein 199529ya; glycerine & ethylene diamine tartarate (EDT) (1950) examples (Lowe commentary; IAPAC archives on the Norvir incident)
-
“Who is the real Dice Man? The elusive writer behind the disturbing cult novel” (the followers inspired by The Dice Man turn out to be more interesting than the author; see also Yes Man)
-
How a con man got Afghani princess Fatima into the White House, part 2 (on Stanley Clifford Weyman; Atlas Obscura)
Technology
-
“Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later”, Vitalik Buterin
-
“They Might Never Tell You It’s Broken” (HN; the 1% rule strikes again: if you don’t file that bug report or tell someone their website is broken, probably no one will—a truth I have learned time and again, for my stuff as well. For example, on TWDNE, or a few days after reading this, I learned a user had been trying to read pages through the section popups in Table of Contents! Perhaps it’s learned helplessness? To quote Paul Graham: “If you think something’s supposed to hurt, you’re less likely to notice if you’re doing it wrong.”)
-
“How to annotate literally everything”, karlicoss (comparison of tools for webpages, PDFs, e-ink readers, & books)
-
“Computer-generated Floral Ornament Based on Magnetic Curves”, Anton Lopyrev (video; based on et al 1998 & 2008)
-
Tech trick: you can link to a specific page number N of any PDF by adding
#page=N
to the URL (eg. this link links to the text samples in the Megatron paper on page 13, rather than the first page) -
“SwarmCloak: Landing of a Swarm of Nano-Quadrotors on Human Arms”, et al 2019 ( video)
Economics
Fiction
-
Giovanni Battista Piranesi (his prints, particularly Prisons, have been enjoying something of a pop culture renaissance; eg. historical chronology conspiracy theorists now debate whether his Roman prints show the real Rome of his time—possibly not constructed by humans—and since falsely aged by a vast conspiracy, and whether Prisons too might be a true depiction of reality)
Misc
-
“Issho Restaurant identity, by Dutchscot” (an elegant visual design inspired by Japanese kintsugi)
-
-
“Made in Taiwan? How a Frenchman Fooled 18th-Century London” (WP)
-
“Exquisite Rot: Spalted Wood and the Lost Art of Intarsia” (WP)
-
“‘O Uommibatto’: How the Pre-Raphaelites Became Obsessed with the Wombat”
-
“Mesmerising Science: The Franklin Commission and the Modern Clinical Trial”
-
“Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno” (WP: Smart, Jubilate Agno; Lee’s “Jubilate Agno, 1975” is a modern homage to the Jeoffry cat poem; I am also reminded of “Caliban Upon Setebos”)
-
“Illustrations of Madness: James Tilly Matthews and the Air Loom”
-
image collections:
Books
Nonfiction
-
Private Wealth in Renaissance Florence, Goldthwaite 196856ya (review)
Film/TV
Live-Action
Animated
-
Porco Rosso (rewatch; the kinship with The Wind Rises is even more apparent now, but Porco Rosso IMO works better because it doesn’t try to force an answer. Anno half-seriously criticized it for being a Miyazaki self-insert fic where he’s the hero and the center of a love triangle, to boot, but maybe that’s not so bad; the beauty of seaplanes, who travel between the sea and sky, at home in both, is enough to justify it.)
-
The Tatami Galaxy (rewatch)
-
Ushio and Tora (revival of a shonen classic; thematically shows its age but, having only been familiar with the ’90s comedy OVA, I didn’t realize how dark it would get)
Music
MLP
-
“My Legacy For You” (Scraton; Eternal {2019}) [house]
-
“The End of Seasons” (Wandering Artist feat. Velvet R. Wings; Eternal {2019}) [orchestral]
-
“Bliss” (AJ Young & loophoof; Eternal {2019}) [dubstep]
-
“Second Prances (MrMehster Remix)” (Etherium & MrMehster feat. Nicole Carino; Eternal {2019}) [electronic]
-
“Luna’s Lullaby” (Yellow Tune feat. Truss; Eternal {2019}) [trance]
-
“Make It Special (Finale Mix)” (Foozogz; Eternal {2019}) [electronic]