Everything Is Heritable:

• “The behavioral, cellular and immune mediators of HIV-1 acquisition: New insights from population genetics”, Powell et al 2020

• “The transcriptional legacy of developmental stochasticity”, Ballouz et al 2019 (media; whence the nonshared-environment? Identical-quadruplet armadillos allow estimating how much is due to random prenatal transcriptome differences: a lot!)

• “Childhood Adoption and Mental Health in Adulthood: The Role of Gene-Environment Correlations and Interactions in the UK Biobank”, Lehto et al 2019 (genetic confounding in adverse outcomes for adoptees)

• “Is population structure in the genetic biobank era irrelevant, a challenge, or an opportunity?”, Lawson et al 2020

Recent Evolution:

• “The Evolution of Sex Ratio Distorter Suppression Affects a 25 cM Genomic Region in the Butterfly Hypolimnas bolina”, Hornett et al 2014 (remarkable real-world demonstration of Fisher’s principle: a parasite caused a 100:1 female:male sex ratio, which after a century of stasis, collapsed to 1:1 in 5 years once a resistant mutant immigrated)

“A Step Toward Quantifying Independently Reproducible Machine Learning Research”, Raff2019 (blog)

Robot startup Covariant.ai releases details: in warehouse deployments, >95% picker success, ~600 items/hour (real-world success of DRL robotics from BAIR alumni & Abbeel, using a relatively exotic mix—imitation learning + sim2real + transfer learning + meta-learning + fleet-learning—for high performance in robot arms picking up many kinds of objects)

“Transformers as Soft Reasoners over Language”, Clark et al 2020 (“deep learning can’t reason”)

Matters Of Scale:

• Turing-NLG: a 17b-parameter LM, showing the usual log-linear gains from increasing parameters (1.5× T5 & 2× MegatronLM) trained using ZeRO (user-friendly library for splitting a single model across GPUs & then replicating that across the cluster, scaling to 100b parameters & planning for 1000b; competitor to Mesh-Tensorflow)

• “A Constructive Prediction of the Generalization Error Across Scales”, Rosenfeld et al 2019 (smooth power-law scaling of NN performance with data & model size across many architectures & datasets; see previously Hestness et al 2017/Shallue et al 2018/McCandlish et al 2018/Kaplan et al 2020; found via TR on OA, which confirms OA is all-in on the scaling thesis and is working on a multimodal followup to GPT-2, presumably trained with model parallelism on a cluster, like Turing-NLG using ZeRO¹)

• “REALM: Retrieval-Augmented Language Model Pre-Training”, Guu et al 2020 (blog; learning to query all of WP for question-answering; combo with T5 pending)

• “Growing Neural Cellular Automata: Differentiable Model of Morphogenesis”, Mordvintsev et al 2020 (HN; training tiny CNNs to coordinate as cellular automata to create complex damage-resilient global patterns, fun)

“Explorable Explanations” (a gallery of interactive scientific visualizations/simulations, curated by Nicky Case; subreddit)

“How the Horrific1918 Flu Spread Across America: The toll of history’s worst epidemic surpasses all the military deaths in World War I and World War II combined. And it may have begun in the United States” (the Spanish flu & government censorship); “A Sea Story”, William Langewiesche2004 (the sinking of the MS Estonia & the psychology of survival among horror)

“This Is Why Your Holiday Travel Is Awful: The long, sordid history of New York’s Penn Station shows how progressives have made it too hard for the government to do big things—and why, believe it or not, Robert Caro is to blame” (tragedy of the anticommons in infrastructure)

Propaganda Due

“The reality and evolutionary significance of human psychological sex differences”, Archer2019 (graph of differences); “Greater male than female variability in regional brain structure across the lifespan”, Wierenga et al 2020

“Typologies of Extreme Longevity Myths”, Young et al 2010; “Was Jeanne Calment the Oldest Person Who Ever Lived—or a Fraud? Some researchers have cast doubt on the record of the celebrated supercentenarian” (update on the fraud accusations: Novoselov & Zak’s claims appear to not be holding up, but unfortunately, also no progress on blood testing, and so the mystery remains)

“A simple procedure for the long-term cultivation of chicken embryos”, Auerbach et al 1974; “A Novel Shell-less Culture System for Chick Embryos Using a Plastic Film as Culture Vessels”, Tahara & Obara2014 (DIY artificial wombs)

“Physical activity and weight following car ownership in Beijing, China: quasi-experimental cross sectional study”, Anderson et al 2019 (no effect of car ownership on weight; it’s a pity more regulations aren’t randomized)

“Perceptual convergence of multi-component mixtures in olfaction implies an olfactory white”, Weiss et al 2012

“In the 1970s, the CIA Created a Robot Dragonfly Spy. Now We Know How It Works.” (reflective eyes for remote laser microphone eavesdropping, powered by an engine running on lithium nitrate crystal fumes, and the operator controlled flying using infrared lasers to heat a bimetallic strip & adjust wings)

“‘The intelligence coup of the century’: For decades, the CIA read the encrypted communications of allies and adversaries” (2 leaked internal histories lay bare exactly how the CIA/BND backdoored Crypto AG to achieve global penetration for ~40 years, obfuscating weak designs & subsidizing marketing to gain users)

“All the money in the world couldn’t make Kinect happen: For a moment a decade ago, the game industry looked like a very different place” (oral history of Microsoft’s bold but ultimately failed experiment in revolutionizing UI using the Kinect motion-tracking device)

“Old CSS, New CSS”, Eevee (HN; why is web programming so screwed up? a history of worse-is-better from 1995_30ya to now)

“Predicting the outcome of roulette”, Small & Tse2012

“Lawrence Bragg’s role in the development of sound-ranging in World War I”, Van der Kloot2005 (artillery sound-ranging)

“Judge Judy Is Still Judging You: For more than 20 years, Judith Sheindlin has dominated daytime ratings—by making justice in a complicated world look easy” (the long and lucrative career of Judy Sheindlin’s Judge Judy)

“Anesthetizing the Public Conscience: Lethal Injection and Animal Euthanasia”, Alper2008 (see also inverse p-zombies/anesthesia awareness, pain & learning, and Dennett’s1978 “Why You Can’t Make A Computer That Feels Pain”)

“A Martian Sends a Postcard Home”, Craig Raine 1977_48ya (canonical Martian example of defamiliarization)

“In 1964_61ya, with Seven Up! Michael Apted stumbled into making what has become the most profound documentary series in the history of cinema. 55 years later, the project is reaching its conclusion.” (regrets & reflections as Apted tries to finish Up, one of the longest-running documentary film projects ever)

“The fascinating and ego-killing existence of human wormholes” (on the brevity of contemporary history, especially when compared to histories like ancient Egypt where the millennia roll on… A history of humanity in 10 words: “nothing much happened for a long time; then everything happened.” cf. “Timeghost”)

“The Great Buenos Aires Bank Heist: They were an all-star crew. They cooked up the perfect plan. And when they pulled off the caper of the century, it made them more than a fortune—it made them folk heroes” (they tunneled into vault from city sewers, staged an armed robbery to distract police, dammed the sewer, & escaped with the loot on Zodiacs while spreading fake evidence; as often with perfect crimes, the only flaw was a woman scorned)

“Visions of the Future” (JPL-sponsored Art Deco poster series advertising travel in the Solar System & to exoplanets)

The Hye Ch’O Diary: Memoir of the Pilgrimage to the Five Regions of India, Hyecho, translated by Yang et al 1984 (review)