October 2014 Media Thread

A fantastic short on existentialism: The missing Scarf

• Agalloch - The Serpent and the Sphere - Excellent black metal. Beautiful melodies, blood-curdling vocals, and atmosphere up the wazoo.

• Behemoth - The Satanist - Excellent death metal. Like most people, my favorite song is Ora Pro Nobis Lucifer. The end of the album is better than the beginning.

Any love for metal on LW?

The War of the Worlds, by Jeff Wayne. Prog rock/ochestral. It sounds like the recording of a stage musical, but as far as I can tell the audio is all that ever existed.

Touhou:

• "Poison Body" (TAM; Namida no Touhou Komoriuta {R10}) [classical]
• "Love-Colored Master Spark" (TAM; Namida no Touhou Komoriuta {R10}) [classical]
• "Love-Colored." (Crazy Berry feat Ichigo; OSUSHI PROJECT 1 {C86}) [jazz/vocal]
• "Far East Fruits"%20-%20K2%20SOUND.ogg) (K2 SOUND; 詩夏 Si-ka {C84}) [instrumental]
• "櫻の樹の下には (Border of Life)" (sisimai-3go; Tomodachi {R10}) [instrumental]
• "自制的な喜怒哀楽 (Cosmic Mind)" (sisimai-3go; Tomodachi {R10}) [instrumental]
• "櫻の樹の下には (Border of Life)" (sisimai-3go; Tomodachi {R10}) [instrumental]
• "Transparent" (Aizawa; Silver Scenery {C86}) [instrumental rock]
• "Phantom Ensemble" (CROW_S CLAW; THE FLAMES OF THE INFERNO {R10}) [instrumental rock]
• "竹取飛翔 ～ Lunatic Princess (2nd Spell -Fullmoon-より)" (xi-on; 東方志奏 Ex2 Spell -Regeneration- {R10}) [instrumental rock]
• "東方妖々夢 ～ Ancient Temple (5th Spell -Changing Times-より)" (xi-on; 東方志奏 Ex2 Spell -Regeneration- {R10}) [metal]
• "幻想の永遠祭 - 空の帰り道 ～ Sky Dream" (埼玉最終兵器 & Aether; Silent Stratosphere {R10}) [metal]
• "Dressed-Up Shadow" (Tim Vegas feat. 陽花; DANCE with WOLVES {C86}) [dance]
• "Twinkle" (ena feat. peЯoco; デジウィ DREAM {C86}) [Jpop]

Kantai Collection:

• "Sailing to the Horizon" (Yuri Yuzriha; 艦これパラドクス {C85}) [house]
• "Shigure 2nd Remodel Celebration!" (R E S T I A feat. Yumi Tanibe {24 Oct 2013}) [trance]

Doujin:

• "誰かの幸せ" (櫻井アンナ; 不思議の国の音哲樂 夢語り篇 {C86}) [vocal]

Vocaloid:

• "Hard-Disk Hide and Seek" (Avanna; nostraightanswer (Kenji-B); Hard​-​Disk Hide and Seek) [electronic]

Everything is heritable:

• "Uncovering the Hidden Risk Architecture of the Schizophrenias: Confirmation in Three Independent Genome-Wide Association Studies", Arnedo et al 2014 (press release; excerpts)
• "Common genetic variants associated with cognitive performance identified using the proxy-phenotype method", Rietveld et al 2014; supplementary information (Rietveld et al 2013 hits replicate some more; discussions: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
• "Substantial SNP-based heritability estimates for working memory performance", Vogler et al 2014 (excerpts)

Politics/religion:

• "World population stabilization unlikely this century", Gerland et al 2014 (excerpts)
• "Growing Up Sexually in Europe"
• "School Desegregation and Black Achievement: an integrative review", Wortman & Bryant 1985 (publication bias: "The 31 studies found to be acceptable [by our statistical criteria for our meta-analysis] contained only two published articles."!)
• "Going, Going, Gone..." (The dilemma of polio research - amelioration vs cure - as a paradigm for aging.)
• Buddhist warrior monks

Statistics/AI/meta-science:

• "ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge", "What I learned from competing against a Convolutional Network on ImageNet" (neural networks near parity with trained humans on ImageNet: "Based on the sample of images I worked on, the GoogLeNet classification error turned out to be 6.8% (the error on the full test set of 100,000 images is 6.7%). My own error in the end turned out to be 5.1%, approximately 1.7% better.")
• "How to critique claims of a "blood test for depression" - Mind the Brain" (summary)
• "World values lost in translation"
• "At what sample size do correlations stabilize?", Schönbrodt & Perugini 2013 (excerpts)
• "Yes We Canities! A quantitative analysis of the graying of Barack Obama's hair"
• invoking spirits to control coin flips (p<0.05): Bakan 1966

Psychology:

• "Solitary in Iran Nearly Broke Me. Then I Went Inside America's Prisons. We throw thousands of men in the hole for the books they read, the company they keep, the beliefs they hold. Here's why."
• "MH's book review of Deafness, Deprivation, and IQ (Braden 1994)", "The study of deaf people since Braden (1994)"
• "Induction of self awareness in dreams through frontal low current stimulation of gamma activity", Voss et al 2014 (causing lucid dreaming through tACS)
• "Towards Reliable Storage of 56-bit Secrets in Human Memory", Bonneau & Schechter (tricking website users into memorizing secure passwords via spaced repetition)
• "Iodine and the Renaissance: Will history turn full cycle?" (commentary)

Technology:

• SMBC: the falling problem
• The Codeless Code: Case 96: "Stateless" (can you spot all 3 FP concepts used?)

Economics:

• "Dire Warnings by Big Tobacco on E-Smoking" (example of Bootleggers and baptists)
• A Second Look at a wooden bench (Joy in the merely real.)
• "How much damage can a 6 year-old possibly do? An analysis of the cost of raising a child like Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes"

Philosophy:

• "The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering"
• "On the Pedagogical Motive for Esoteric Writing [in Western Philosophy]", Melzer 2007; "Appendix: a chronological compilation of testimonial evidence for Esotericism"

Misc:

• survival of the flattest: "Viroids: Survivors from the RNA World?", Flores et al 2014 (excerpts)
• Gong farmer
• "The World's Heaviest People" ("...A contemporary poet has him declare that he aspired to end his days 'on my back, lying on my many rolls of fat, scarcely uttering a word, taking labored breaths, and eating my fill', for of all the ways a man might die, an excess of luxury was the only truly happy death.")
• "How (not) to communicate new scientific information: a memoir of the famous Brindley lecture", Klotz 2005

When reading up on A survey of anti-cryonics writing I tried to follow up on a link and got to the

Institute for Evidence Based Cryonics

which has some more up to date information about what is or is not possible in cryopreservation. As that isn't linked prominently on LW yet. Here it is.

Following the Phoenix is an absolutely excellent "single-/dual-point-of-departure spinoff" from HPMOR, starting from HPMOR's Chapter 81.

I have found it very good reading; it really feels very original-flavor, as if it's what Eliezer could have potentially chosen to write instead of the path he chose to take.

And Then I Thought I Was a Fish. After a bad LSD trip, a 20-something student can't sleep for two weeks, and as a result of the drug, the sleep deprivation, or both, he goes into psychosis. After a few months in this state, which include brief institutionalization which he ends by learning to fake recovery, he spontaneously wakes up sane one day. This is a first-hand account of the entire story, written 10 years after the fact. The author has very specific memories of what it felt like to be insane, which he's able to share convincingly. He tells us about his friends, roommates, crushes. He interviews people who interacted with him at the time and reports their impressions.

I couldn't put this book down. It's very well-written and utterly fascinating.

I just finished Red Plenty by Francis Spufford, which I bought because of this review on Slate Star Codex. It was a thoroughly enjoyable and interesting mix of history and fiction about the Soviet Union in the late 1950's and early 1960's, when it was actually plausible to hope that politicians and scientists could get central planning right and build an economy that provided a first-world standard of living to everyone. (Spoiler alert) it doesn't work out, and Red Plenty gives you a good look at how and why it failed.

I'm not usually a person given to intense patriotic emotions; I don't get choked up when "The Star Spangled Banner" is played or anything. But as an interesting side effect of reading this book, I love America a lot right now. I'm in the mood of people who get off planes and kiss the ground.

Nicholas Wade's Troublesome Inheritance: I need to write a real review, but I was mostly disappointed. He spends far too little time building the case for the pervasive influence of genes on variation in almost all human behaviors and traits, and far too much time on broad speculations about the rise of civilization, and if you're interested in that, you'd be way better off just reading the books he's summarizing like Pinker's Better Angels.

Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes. Tamim Ansary is not trying to give an objective report of historic events; instead he tells stories about people and events that shaped Muslim thought. This includes episodes about Mohammed and the Quran, the reception of Greek philosophy, various rulers, and interactions with neighbouring groups and empires. The book is an easy read and gives a compact overview of the Islamic world. I recommend it for those who don't know much about Islam and want to get an introduction into the narrative of this religion.

I'm just about done with Michael Herr's Dispatches), a war correspondent's view of Vietnam circa the Tet Offensive.

It's about the opposite of objective journalism: first-person, tightly focused, episodic, vividly emotional and impressionistic. And it does that very well. I'm getting the feeling that it might have been responsible for the particular shade of hellish Kafkaesque insanity that we associate with the Vietnam War after films like Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket; in fact several episodes and characters seem to have been composited into those movies. In a modern context, unfortunately, that strips the book of some of its potential impact; if you have a passing knowledge of Vietnam in modern pop culture, it's not going to be showing you much that you haven't already seen.

I'd recommend it if you liked Generation Kill but are too young to have seen the 80s wave of war movies, or for people that like emotional intensity in their journalism. If you're looking for a more historical or less conventional approach, though, this isn't the place to find it.

2312) by Kim Stanley Robinson, the author of Red/Blue/Green Mars (which I did not read).

The protagonist, Swan Er Hong, is probably the single most annoying character in recent memory, more so even than Catelyn Stark of GoT (in the books, not the show). Despite being 130 odd years old, she is mostly driven by impulses fitting for a 13 year-old. She is also bossy, short-tempered and not very smart. Whether this is intentional is not clear to me, probably not. Fitz Wahram, a diplomat, who is much more reasonable, is under her spell and often goes out of his comfort zone for her, with considerable risk to his life and health.

This book is a rare case where I wish for the main character to bite the dust already.

Oh, and the long scientific ruminations by the author, judging by the parts close my area of expertise, physics and quantum computers, are total rubbish.

I put down the book when it describes Swan's more stupid antics, and pick it up again when I have nothing else to read.

Economies of Force by Seth Dickinson

A very interesting sci-fi story touching on AI and automation.

This is a repost from last month's thread, because I posted at the end of the month and it had low exposure.

I once read a transhumanism short story by Isaac Asimov but have forgot the title and short story collection it was in, I'm trying to find this story again. The plot summary goes as such: A retired businessman is reminiscing about the frontier days of cognitive enhancement where 'chipped' professionals were a high value rarity and his firm was so lucky to have the opportunity to interview two at the same time and he had to choose which one to hire. A key limiter to the 'chipping' was that those professionals were ten times as smart for one tenth the productive lifespan, meaning early onset of senility and retirement. The retired businessman laments that the current generation of 'chipping' is so dialed down and legislated that they are nothing special.

If this rings a bell and you can give me a title to this short story, you will have my eternal gratitude.

• Dunant's Blood and Beauty (historical fiction: early history of the Borgias; interesting time period + mediocre writing = decent but not great book)

• Troupes:

  • Renaming of the Birds (review)
  • The Fountain (review)
  • The Simple Men (review)

Sora no Woto. The K-On! archetypes are traumatised child soldiers in an uneasy-interwar-period in bizzaro alternate Switzerland, and they have a pet owl. Scenery is amazing.

Anime:

• Steamboy (decent Victorian steampunk with a wholesome Ghibli sort of vibe)
• Arakawa under the Bridge x Bridge (review)
• Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat in Space (o.0)

(WTF alert)

I have been (just) watching FOKUS TV channel (the Polish one), there was a short (5min) documentary about cryonics (apparently part of an US documentary movie). Paraphrasing from memory, we learn that cryonics serves to preserve the deceased bodies, because cryonic people believe that one day it will be possible to extract frozen cells and clone the persons preserved. The most famous body is that of Ted Williams, his son wants to clone the best baseball player one day.

I know how to fix to make it more watchable for me. It needs a real story arc where the super-smart characters, who do the equivalent of putting out fires set by sort-of smart people not quite on their level, realize that several of these fires show the handiwork of a super-smart arsonist, or a team of arsonists, like a terrorist group comprising several Professor Moriarty-like geeks. Identifying and confronting these people then becomes the focus of the rest of the series.

In Team Moriarty I'd throw in some super-smart people from ethnic groups not well-known in the West to give the show a 21st Century cosmopolitan flavor. (The series does take place in L.A., after all.) They probably should make the alpha Moriarty a Russian, a not uncommon ethnicity for villains in Hollywood these days.

I've been catching up on Person of Interest. The first season is kind of a slog, but it gets much better after that. The most recent episode explicitly discusses AI Friendliness and AI-box problems.

Interview with Max Gladstone

He wrote Three Parts Dead, a legal procedural fantasy in which gods are made of contracts.

The interview includes his thoughts about breaking past what you think of as obvious (with reference to Bujold's "The Borders of Infinity") and a suggestion that if your first thought when you're inventing a character is something from central casting, it makes sense to start changing features.

The When Diplomacy Fails 30 episode series on the July 1914 crisis that ignited WW I. Each of the first 28 episodes covers the events of a single day.

Pathologic - called a pandemic simulator, a game about battling death itsealf, the most nonconventional game of 2005 made by Russian Studio Ice-Pick Lodge, is running a Kickstarter campaign for the remake.

For those who don't speak Russian, the hree-part article named 'Butchering Pathologic' by Quintin Smith on Rock, Paper, Shotgun (p. 2, p. 3) is recommended for acquaintance with the game. Yes, probably instead of playing the game itself, because the English translation it got was the one no game deserves, let alone this one. This time, with the remake, developers want to do it right.

LAST MOMENT NOTICE: Kickstarter campaign is ending today, 8 hours to go! (sorry)

Just an FYI for the interested: Homestuck has returned after a yearlong hiatus.