January 2014 Media Thread

Read and enjoyed "The Robot and the Baby", a fictional short story by computer scientist John McCarthy), after being linked to his webpage from EY's "Above-Average AI Scientists". Some on the Less Wrong IRC seemed to like it as well, so I went ahead and posted it here.

A reasonably accurate history of how the Christian bible was actually compiled, by Jim Macdonald on Making Light. Easy, enjoyable, entertaining and educational.

The SCP Foundation is a wiki filled with short horror fiction (that has recently become more widely known because of several games produced based on its content). Most of the entries are written as fictional reports/MSDS data-sheet-like information handouts by a bureaucratic organization that is focused on, basically, shutting mind-blowing horrors away from the bulk of civilization for fear that people would implode if they realized the world did not run on math. The problem being that not everything they're shutting away is a mind-blowing horror.

The articles are (or at least should be, in most circumstances) readable in any order or no order at all. The index is a passable place to start, and the wiki has decent quality control so nearly all of the articles are at least readable and grammatical, and a substantial fraction are downright bone-chilling. This is both a recommendation and an anti-recommendation. If you are easily emotionally affected by fiction, it is probably not for you.

Special mention, however, has to go to the recently created SCP-2333, which is an especially believable kind of horrifying when read through transhumanist eyes. (Jul vf vg gung rirelbar V qvfphff guvf negvpyr jvgu vf ubeevsvrq gung gur thl ng gur raq bs gur negvpyr unf gb yvir sberire, naq abar bs gurz ner ubeevsvrq jvgu gur snpg gung gur erfrnepuref nccneragyl pbqrq va gur bar-jrrx uneq yvzvg ba Fhcre Yvsrfcna ibyhagnevyl?)

[http://www.seinfeldscripts.com/seinfeld-scripts.html] has transcripts of all episodes of Seinfeld, and they are super funny. I tried watching some episodes as well, but at least for me I feel reading the scripts is more enjoyable (maybe because of faster pacing?).

Politics/religion:

• "The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy", Woodberry 2012 (excerpts; popular media coverage)
• "An Economic Analysis of the Financial Records of al-Qa'ida in Iraq", Bahney et al 2010; "$0.60 for cake: Al-Qaida [in Mali] records every expense"
• "The lost history of Helmand" (failed nation-state building project in Afghanistan which exemplifies Scott's Seeing Like A State)
• "The Lost World of the London Coffeehouse"
• "Secret without Reason and Costly without Accomplishment: Questioning the National Security Agency's Metadata Program", Mueller & Stewart 2014 (excerpts)
• "Aztec Political Thought" (the king as Enemy and Mocker, leader of a theatre state)
• "Hallucinated Gods" (on Julian Jaynes's book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind)
• "Thank God for Cancer"

Business:

• "Hatred and Profits: Getting Under the Hood of the Ku Klux Klan", Fryer & Levitt 2007 (discussion; excerpts)
• "Inside the World of the Double-Crossing Fake Hitman"
• "A Dolphin's Tale: The Story of GameCube" (history)
• "Death at the Summit" (Intrade)

Literature:

• "Dwarf Fortress: A Marxist Analysis" (discussion)
• "The Gooseberry Fallacy" (Russian literature & thoughts on the good life) "...But for Me, It Was Tuesday" (TvTropes)

Medicine:

• "Marijuana: Much More Than You Wanted To Know"
• "Aretaeus On Bipolar Disorder" (ancient-Greek/psychiatry comparison)
• "Beware Mass-Produced Medical Recommendations" (on vitamin D & niacin)

Statistics:

• "Bayes' Rule and the Paradox of Pre-Registration of RCTs"
• "Josef Urban on Machine Learning and Automated Reasoning"
• "Using deep learning to listen for whales"
• "Adversarial Bandits and the Exp3 Algorithm"
• "A Few Useful Things to Know about Machine Learning", Domingos 2012 (nice guide to 'common sense' - data cleaning, modeling, overfitting, bias/variance, combining models, representation & learnability)
• "The Median is Not the Message", Gould (on cancer survival and interpreting statistics)
• "Adventures in the Assessment of Animal Speed and Morality"
• "Posterior-Hacking"
• "Visualization Series: Using Scatterplots and Models to Understand the Diamond Market"

Technology:

• "A Future Of Pipes" (the future of cities and computing power: cooling is a big deal but not a defeater)
• "Auto Correct: Has the self-driving car at last arrived?"
• "Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning", Mnih et al 2013
• Command-line folklore: the sort --key trick
• "Mobile Computing Research Is a Hornet's Nest of Deception and Chicanery", Mickens (excerpts)
• "The Slow Winter", Mickens (excerpts)
• "The Night Watch", Mickens (excerpts)
• "The Graph of Math"

Rationality:

• Best of Rationality Quotes 2013
• "Lily Allen & decision theory" (Bitcoin)
• "Lullaby Language"

Misc:

• Subreddit: "Things Fitting Perfectly Into Other Things"
• Ship's cat
• Israel-related animal conspiracy theories

By modern standards, it's not the strongest story. But Robert Sheckley's Watchbird is interesting as an early treatment of the problem of UFAI.

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9915682/1/The-Last-Christmas

Rational!Munchkin!Santa meets neutral!genie!elves.

The recommendation may have been from here originally but I can't find it now: To The Stars - incomplete, set in the far future of the Puella Magi Madoka☆Magica universe, contriving to shape the plot and tone into something resembling Starship Troopers (or more likely Old Man's War). I find the way it forces a fantasy story into quite hard sci-fi rather interesting; there are places where you can see the strain, but mostly it works well, and the characters strike a good balance, developed from but solidly rooted in their canon originals. I will say it's not that well written - the phrasing is distinctly clunky at times - but for me the plot, characters and especially the worldbuilding were good enough to shine through.

Rational!Munchkin!D&Dfic

Currently reading Hard Reset 2: Reset Harder. It's better than the original Hard Reset. In fact, I'd say it's the best time-loop fic I've read since Time Braid.

I have an author recommendation: Rathanel. His stories are noteworthy in that all his characters feel like they have agency. While not explicitly rationalist, many of his characters do a good job at weighing evidence and updating their beliefs throughout the stories. Also, (and I'm not quite sure how to phrase this) his worlds feel like they operate on a rational rule set, as opposed to the plot driven rules which many stories seem to follow. He has two series, both in the Naruto-verse.

In The Empty Cage the main character is a demon (the 9 tail fox) who is posing as a human (Naruto). The character is interesting in that he has his own set of non-human morals. There is a spin off story, Swapping the Cage, in which this character is inserted into the canon universe.

Naruto: Ramen Days is a VideoGame!Naruto story. It's written in first person, in the perspective of Canon!Naruto, as he goes through the time travel-like loops of a video game. It has an interesting juxtaposition between a world where rational behavior is optimal (and there are many intelligent characters), and a main character who is really not smart.

I reread Discovery of France because I liked it so much the first time (review).

Reading through Worm, an original novel posted in serial form over about two years, after Eliezer's fervent recommendation in the HPMOR author's notes. It's a single novel of about 1,750,000 words. And it's brilliant. It's the story of a world with superheroes, with a teenage girl as the viewpoint character. Tropes reminiscent of Miracleman.

Reread Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. Highly recommended, it has most everything I like about cyberpunk in a modern day real world setting. Without losing the Gibson world-building, world-building as a collage of interesting ideas and perspectives on things.

When I first read it, I thought this was his best book, right up until the end of chapter 37, I disliked chapters 38+ about as much as the epilogue of HP: Deathly Hallows. (And with similar belief that the book would be far better with those pages removed.)

Since then I've re-read the Bridge Trilogy, and read the sequels to Pattern Recognition. And this time I didn't find the ending frustration at all. Maybe because I could see the shape of things to come, or because I had different expectations.

The metaphor that struck me is that the structure of this book is like a certain kind of origami; much folding and unfolding, leaving you - just before the climax - with a flat sheet of paper covered in creases. Then all of a sudden it crumbles up, or seems to, but in actuality it all comes together in a new and unexpected shape.

This interview with Max Gladstone was linked to on Yvains blog last month and on its strength I picked up the first two books in his craft sequence - Three Parts Dead and Two Serpents Rise Its "magicians are like lawyers/economists" premise and urban fantasy parts are very well done, and there are a decent few jokes that probably only those with some legal training will spot. The plot of the first book is a bit simple (the bad evil guy who we are told on first meeting is bad, turns out to be evil - and also reads like a less impressive Quirrel from HPMOR) however the second in the series has so far avoided the "clear bad guy" in favour of a more nuanced, Princess Mononoke style arrangement (which I hope continues until the end).

Descending order:

• I finished Umineko back in September but only yesterday finished writing a review.
• New Legends (SF anthology; review)

I just watched Neon Genesis Evangelion. If you haven't seen it yet, it lives up to its reputation.

I read and enjoyed The January Dancer. I think the top amazon review is fair; the prose is florid, the pace ponderous, and the characters flat. But the story and universe are very engaging, and the ending came together superbly.

I very much liked The Melancholy of Mechagirl, a short story collection, particularly the last entry; while the treatment of AI is probably too soft for many here, I liked the balance it struck between human-relatable and at the same time quite alien.

I just finished Neon Genesis Evangelion. If you haven't seen it yet, it lives up to its reputation.

I watched several Charlie Chaplin films. They're so old that you can watch them for free on youtube, and they're hilarious.

In descending order of enjoyment:

• The Gold Rush
• Modern Times
• The Great Dictator
• The Kid
• City Lights

While I have to applaud Steven Moffat for his ambition in creating such a complicated time travel plot over 3 years, I can only be disappointed in the overall resolution to the Eleventh Doctor's story arc. Even though you can spend days listing the plot holes, I'd be okay with them if the interactions between the characters actually made much sense or if we were given reason to care about them. River is annoying and Clara is boring. That's not to say it was all bad - the Doctor is a consistently great character and the Amy/Rory arc was satisfying, and watching Tennant, Smith and Hurt's Doctor's play off each other in the 50th Anniversary episode was amazing.

If you didn't spend time drawing diagrams to figure out where exactly in each other's timelines everyone is, you'll be consistently confused from the beginning of Series 6 onwards. If you do spend the time to figure out what's going on, the payoff isn't worth it.

For those of you who haven't watched Sherlock and don't feel like committing to the whole miniseries, I recommend A Scandal in Belgravia as the only episode you need watch, as it's by far the best of them. It's a good adventure story, has a very entertaining romance wrapped in, and it plays like a self-contained film.

Horrendous quantities of BBC CBeebies Bedtime Stories. My daughter demands one every night before bed. The books are generally well-written for children's stories; some have dreadful readers, but the interesting bit is when they get a high-powered actor in to do one. ('Cos are you going to say no to the gig reading stories to kids? Of course you're not.) Patrick Stewart is a regular.

• Aku no Hana: dropped after a few episodes, couldn't stand the rotoscoping
• A Christmas Story/National Lampoon: Christmas Vacation: watched with family. The former was pretty good. The latter, though, had some good jokes but was generally mediocre and strained, and a product of its time.

I watched 'Oz the Great and Powerful'. I really liked the pro-innovation / science-inventory / mind-over-might themes.

Saw the first two episodes of Intelligence. The show is of average quality, but the idea of having a chip like that in my brain makes me drool. I want my augmentations, dammit.

I've been listening to Random Access Memories, an album by Daft Punk. I've found it quite useful for getting into a "flow" state while working, and I enjoy listening to the music recreationally, as well.

Misc:

• Raiders of the Lost Ark, "End Credits" (John Williams) [orchestral]
• "I Saw Three Ships", (King's College Cambridge) [Christmas carol]

Giants (recommended if you like Explosions in the Sky or El Ten Eleven; I particularly liked "While the Ages Steal"):

• "A Near-life Experience" (Demo) [post-rock]
• "The Sleep of a Laboring Man" (Demo)
• "Berlin Rooftop" (Demo)
• "Under The New Sun" (They, The Undeserving)
• "Steps In Static Progression" (They, The Undeserving)
• "The Palace Stands In Its Proper Place" (They, The Undeserving)
• "Withered Life- Communal Rhythm" (They, The Undeserving)
• "While The Ages Steal" (Old Stories)
• "At Last, Ashore" (Old Stories)
• "O' Tide" (Old Stories)

Touhou:

• "流体、ライフサイクル instrumental (Fluid, Life Cycle)" (o ben to box; miskyworks {C82}) [instrumental]
• "パンザマスト (instrumental)" (o ben to box; miskyworks {C82}) [instrumental]

Vocaloid:

• "echoes_teha" (声になる; HKGrecords) [trance/vocal]
• "vanishing_しじみ" (声になる; HKGrecords) [electronic/vocal]
• "小規模な世界の私_ぴすた" (声になる; HKGrecords) [Jpop]

Excellent Indie Album: Jim Guthrie's Takes Time.

Metal Machine Music by Lou Reed is what to put on headphones at work when the sales guys are yammering away at top volume (yay open plan!). It is literally nothing but noise, an hour of multiple layers of feedback. Reed was quite into the amphetamines at the time, and literally intended the album as a musical version of speeding off your nut. It's possibly one of the greatest musical trolls of all time. Of course, it's been vastly influential with people who like horrible noise music. The whole album's up on YouTube.

http://spikejapan.wordpress.com/

This is an amazing blog about Japan. Sadly, no longer updates.

Through the quote threads and references elsewhere on the site, I find I enjoy LW's taste in (short-to-medium-length) poetry. Can I have recommendations for more?

I didn't mention this last month, though you did the same thing then, but I would have preferred it if had you followed the guidelines mentioned above of "If you think there should be a thread for a particular genre of media, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month."

That having been said, I suggest a Comics subthread, or even a "Comics & Animation" subthread, so that non-Japanese comics wouldn't need be grouped separately.