April 2015 Media Thread

Everything is heritable:

• "Eight thousand years of [human] natural selection in Europe", Mathieson et al 2015 (Khan)
• "The Fourth Law of Behavior Genetics" (GWAS hits replicate across populations; dominance genetic variation explains little of variation - most continues to be additive.)

Politics/religion:

• "Break-In at Y-12: How a handful of pacifists and nuns exposed the vulnerability of America's nuclear-weapons sites."
• "The Irish Slave Trade - The Forgotten "White" Slaves; The Slaves That Time Forgot"
• Breast attitudes in North & South Korea
• "Longevity of popes and artists between the 13th and the 19th century", Carrieri & Serraino 2005
• The redemption movement
• "The Lesson of Iraq"
• "Different modes of discourse"
• The iron law of oligarchy

Statistics/AI/meta-science:

• "Compliance with Results Reporting at ClinicalTrials.gov", Anderson et al 2015 (incentives matter)
• "The Mystery Machine: End-to-end Performance Analysis of Large-scale Internet Services" (commentary)
• "Many Labs 3: Evaluating participant pool quality across the academic semester via replication" (commentary)
• "p Values are not Error Probabilities", Hubbard & Bayarri 2003 (excerpts)
• "Most Published Research Findings Are False—But a Little Replication Goes a Long Way", Moonesinghe 2007
• "Understanding Bayes Theorem With Ratios"
• "Mice Fall Short as Test Subjects for Some of Humans’ Deadly Ills"

Psychology/biology:

• "Coincidental killers: We assume that microbes evolved to attack humans when actually we are just civilian casualties in a much older war"
• "The myopia boom: Short-sightedness is reaching epidemic proportions. Some scientists think they have found a reason why"
• "New Improved Lottery": the Premium Bond
• Nasal cycle (One thing I find interesting about the nasal cycle is that even though it's ultra-noticeable when you have a cold or stuffy nose, a lot of people seem to have either never realized that they have a cycle or assume it's a personal idiosyncrasy of their nose. Sort of the opposite of the typical mind fallacy.)

Technology:

• "Hacking the Papal Election"
• "In High-Tech Japan, the Fax Machines Roll On"
• the qanat/karez irrigation system in Turpan

Economics:

• "What's Changed about the Standard of Living? It's Complicated. But Hopeful."
• "Iceland Looks to Export Power Bubbling From Below"
• "In China, Families Bet It All on College for Their Children"
• "Assembling the Billing Block" (the power struggle behind film credits)

Philosophy:

• "The Great Filter - Are We Almost Past It?", Hanson 1998
• Moral anti-realism

Fiction:

• "The Cambist and Lord Iron" (discussion)
• "Extracts from the Club Diary" (Stross; Coffee steampunk, Mars, the end of the world) & "It Was All For The Tuna"
• "Unlock your Spock" (Star Trek poem for Leonard Nimoy)

http://chriskresser.com/a-beginners-guide-to-scientific-research

A good overview-- probably not a lot new for most people here, but I liked the bit about hypotheses that simply don't get considered.

Practice of Wisdom by Josh Kaufman. I don't quite agree with all the characterizations (prudence, in particular, has issues), but overall a concise description of many useful mental skills.

Ya‐Qin Hu , David Kay Ferguson , Subir Bera & Cheng‐Sen Li (2008): Seed hairs of poplar trees as natural airborne pollen trap for allergenic pollen grains, Grana, 47:3, 241-245. - They did it in a botany garden, which means that pollen diversity could have been higher than in an average street, but still... it's like, 'we serve any pollen in the city'.

Athanasios Damialis & Dimitrios Gioulekas (2006): Airborne allergenic fungal spores and meteorological factors in Greece: Forecasting possibilities, Grana, 45:2, 122-129. - the section 'statistical method' occupies about 1.5 pages; it would be cool if someone who can actually understand it chewed it out for people like me. Overall, this is one of those things that 'belong to the future'. The sheer monitoring needed to get that many datapoints seems to me unpracticable. Another one with flashy statistics is Hector L. D'antoni & Frank Schäbitz (1990): Pollen analysis for the generation of environmental hypothesis, Grana, 29:4, 295-300.

Annette Andersen (1985): Microfungi in Beds and their Relation to House-Dust Mites, Grana, 24:1, 55-59. - This one is so sweet. Two beds have been examined monthly over a year for the occurrence of viable micro fungi...

Michael S. Zavada , Stephanie M. McGraw & Melissa A. Miller (2007): The role of clothing fabrics as passive pollen collectors in the north‐eastern United States, Grana, 46:4, 285-291. - "Clothing may be a primary avenue of ingress that contributes to the contamination of indoor air quality at the workplace and the home."

Bernardus Speelberg , Egidius Panis & Jan G. R. De Monchy (1991): Reduction in skin test reactions to inhaled allergens during a 12 weeks stay in the alpine climate, Grana, 30:1, 155-160. - "...Thus a reduced exposure to airborne allergens may be one of the reasons why asthmatic patients benefit from a stay in the alpine climate."

E. Fernandez-Caldas , M. C. Swanson , J. Pravda , P. Welsh , J. W. Yunginger & C. E. Reed (1989): Immunochemical Demonstration of Red Oak Pollen Aeroallergens outside the Oak Pollination Season, Grana, 28:3, 205-209. - "Some authors have suggested that patients may suffer allergic symptoms not only from tree pollen but also from the leaves, leaf hairs, or sap, as well (Fonde 1935, Rudolph and Cohen 1932, Ostrov 1984). Our findings are consistent with this suggestion..."

Jean C. Emberlin , Jane Norris-Hill & R. H. Bryant (1990): A calendar for tree pollen in London, Grana, 29:4, 301-309. - "Although three years are insufficient to confirm the length of the reproductive rhythms, the patterns evident so far indicate that [birch] Betula and [oak] Quercus vary in phase with each other on a biennial basis, having both achieved peaks concentrations in 1987 and 1989. In contrast both [ash] Fraxinus and [plane] Platanus attained peak production in the intervening year. Other species such as [chestnut] Castanea, [beech] Fagus and [pine] Pinus seem to exhibit longer cycles which cannot be determined at this stage." - Someday, vacations will be planned using this kind of 'nature compatibility' forecasts...

• Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
• Liu's The Three-Body Problem
• Wildbow's Pact (review)
• The Accidental Space Spy (Thorsby; review)
• Hitmen for Destiny (Thorsby; TvTropes; this was good but not as good as The Accidental Space Spy, since the art remains as dire, Thorsby again indulges in an overly-long comedy-of-errors, and the monsters aren't quite as fascinating as the aliens in Space Spy, although on the plus side, it still has everything that I like about Thorsby (eg I loved the Mexican standoff with 2 possibly-loaded guns towards the end) with a more coherent and meaningful story.)
• Welcome to the NHK

Making my way through Maurice Druon's The Accursed Kings (currently on Book 4). It's a bit of historical fiction covering the plots and politicking that followed the reign of Philip the Fair of France and would eventually culminate in the Hundred Years' War.

I'm enjoying it. It paints an engaging portrait of medieval France and there are many historical footnotes giving context and explanations that would otherwise clutter the main text. The series moves at a decent pace and doesn't get bogged down in fluff.

I have just spotted that Marina and Sergei Dyachenko's Metamorphosis cycle is being translated into English. The first book is Vita Nostra; I would very much recommend it, especially to anyone that enjoyed Max Barry's "Lexicon".

Lee Kuan Yew: Hard Truths to Keep Singapore Going Of interest even if you don't care much about Singapore. Consequentialism in politics and economics.

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software is a wonderful book explaining how computers work. I've read the section on Computer Architecture in Gödel Escher Bach, but that did not stay in my mind. This book, however, explains how computers work from the most basic level; it starts with circuits and builds up! I have not finished it, but I'm over halfway and Petzold has built up a machine with memory and a calculator function, which can load items from memory and perform operations upon them.

At times it is a bit difficult to follow, but I think it has been written, overall, very well. I really have found it a fascinating book. Highly recommended.

I've been reading lately The dictator's handbook, which despite the name, is an analysis of politics in terms of game theory.
Although the tone is a bit sarcastic, it's very interesting and quite eye-opening to see how absurd situations arise in the context of politics when you mix rationality and self-interest.

Read Tyler Cowen's The Great Stagnation last week. It's not massively insightful if you're already familiar with the thesis, but it is a very short read, and fruitfully referenced.

Working my way through Torture and the Law of Proof. It's an account of the role of torture in European justice systems going back to medieval times. It starts at the end of the older system of trial by battle/ordeal where God would (presumably) decide the case and looks at the start of evidence-based trials.

It's interesting to see how torture "naturally" arose because the standards of evidence were so high--you couldn't be convicted except on the testimony of two witnesses or your own confession (note that a similar proviso is found in the US Constitution regarding treason). They came up with the idea of a half-proof, where a single witness or circumstantial evidence could be used to gain judicial permission to apply torture. The author notes that legal scholars of the day were very well aware of the possibility of false confessions and looks at the various methods used to attempt to minimize this and why they failed.

The main drawback for me is that the writing can be rather dry and academic.

• Sorel's Reflections on Violence (review)

I've just finished marathoning the first 1.5 seasons (to the current cliffhanger/hiatus) of Gravity Falls, and strongly recommend it. Supernatural mystery/horror/comedy, significantly darker than Disney usually gets. High levels of continuity; very strong art direction; near-HPMOR levels of foreshadowing/conservation of detail (I advise not reading about it beforehand as there was a similar hivemind-predictive-success of the biggest twist). Secret codes, cryptic Reddit AMAs, trolling creators with hand puppets, all the good stuff.

• Space Dandy (review)

• Project Nim:

  Thorough documentary on a 1970s scientific project in raising a chimpanzee as a human to get it to sign true language. The project was very well documented with photographs and footage, so with all the archival footage and retrospective interviews, we get a vivid sense of Nim and the people around him. Specifically, we get a vivid sense of everyone involved as having absolutely terrible judgment and the people involved as fanatical nurturists - why on earth would anyone expect such a thing to work? Why would chimpanzees have evolved true language when they never use that in the wild, and why would you expect any sort of objectivity from the involved personnel? Early on, the daughter of the foster-mother comments that "It was the '70s!"; which does explain a lot.

  It goes about as terribly as one expects: there is bitter infighting over who is Nim's 'real' parents, the footage of Nim 'signing' is quite weak (I know a little ASL myself, and I was deeply unimpressed by what we see Nim do - the teachers' claims about Nim communicating seem to be a hefty heaping of anthropormorphizing, reading into random gestures, and wishful thinking; a nice example of which is how one male teacher comments how Nim loved to play with cats and would "quiver" with excitement holding it, while later on, we see this 'quivering' is actually Nim trying to dry-hump the cats, and they eventually are taken away lest he kill them). As Nim gets bigger, it's less that he became human than his caretakers became chimpanzee: the original foster-mother and the new female teacher compete for who can play with and supplicate Nim the most, and Nim successfully dominates the two men involved while the women applaud and enjoy the dominance contests. (The project lead, Terrace, comments at one point that most of the staff turned out to be women.) The film-makers seem to try to draw a parallel by noting that Terrace slept with the first foster-mother before the project started and with one teacher during the project, but it doesn't work too well since Nim clearly won their hearts long-term. Unrestrained, with no other males to keep him in check, it predictably starts going all wrong - the female teacher in question recounts how Nim put ~100 stitches into her (I counted her enumeration), and then the project shuts down after he tears open her face.

  After which, of course, he goes back to the primate colony. The documentary & people lay it on thick how Nim is being terribly treated in this, but they're so compromised that it's impossible to take them seriously; I was baffled when they described him being sedated, to transport him safely back to the colony in a plane as quickly as possible, as being "a nasty thing to do. Very deceitful." Seriously‽ A growing male chimpanzee nearly killed his closest caretaker and that is your reaction to an entirely sensible measure, a completely irrelevant concern about deceitfulness, as if Nim were some sort of athlete whose competitor cheated? Similarly, a big deal is made of the locked collars on the chimpanzees at the colony... which turn out to be on the chimps so if one starts trying to chew your face off, you have a chance to defend yourself by grabbing the collar and holding them off.

  While at the primate colony, Nim's minimal signing skills seemed to degrade even further and the primates eventually start being used in medical experiments; rather than take it seriously and ask whether the medical experiments were scientifically & medically useful, the documentarians choose to simply show decontextualized injections. (With an approach like that, routine operations in a hospital would look like ghoulish crimes against humanity...)

  Finally, Nim winds up at a horse-rescue farm, where as a reminder of why Project Nim had to be terminated, we're told how he casually killed a dog one day and how, when the original foster-mother visited she, apparently still under many illusions, enters the cage to visit him and is attacked (one interviewee commenting, "The fact that he didn't kill her meant a lot, 'cause he could have." I see.)

• The King of Kong: fascinating in part because the stakes are so low, and the skullduggery so calculated; the access of the filmmakers to key players is so thorough that at times you're given a god's-eye point of view and it feels fictional (eg when you watch both sides of a telephone conversation happen).

Peter Watts on Person of Interest.

Misc:

• "classique d'amour～愛のクラスィーク" (Yoko Kanno; 「スペース☆ダンディ」O.S.T.2 Boobies Wonderland {2014}) [orchestral]
• "White House" (OGRE YOU ASSHOLE; Space Dandy OST 2 {2014}) [progressive rock] - ep 21 ED
• "Dandy's Fly" (Mountain Mocha Kilimanjaro; 「スペース☆ダンディ」O.S.T.2 Boobies Wonderland {2014}) [brass]
• "金色の玩具" (OGRE YOU ASSHOLE; 「スペース☆ダンディ」O.S.T.2 Boobies Wonderland {2014}) [progressive rock]
• "バブル・オブ・バブル" (OGRE YOU ASSHOLE; 「スペース☆ダンディ」O.S.T.2 Boobies Wonderland {2014}) [progressive rock]

Doujin:

• "Dreaming Shout" (livetune feat. NIRGILIS; 「と」 {2014}) [electronic/dance]

Kantai Collection:

• "飛龍の反撃" (TAMUSIC; 艦これメタル {C87}) [metal]
• "出撃・海原越えて" (TAMUSIC; 艦これメタル {C87}) [metal]
• "工廠ワルツ" (伊藤 翼; Kantai Philharmonic Orchestra {C86}) [orchestral]
• "南方海域を突破せよ" (伊藤 翼; Kantai Philharmonic Orchestra {C86}) [orchestral]

Touhou:

• "恋色マスタースパーク" (TAM×KEIGO KANZAKI; 東方バイオリンロック永-NAGARAE- {C87}) [instrumental rock]
• "竹取飛翔" (TAM×KEIGO KANZAKI; 東方バイオリンロック永-NAGARAE- {C87}) [instrumental rock]
• "月まで届け、不死の煙" (TAM×KEIGO KANZAKI; 東方バイオリンロック永-NAGARAE- {C87}) [instrumental rock]
• "千年幻想郷" (TAM×KEIGO KANZAKI; 東方バイオリンロック永-NAGARAE- {C87}) [instrumental rock]
• "Moonstruck Dance" (Maurits "ZEN" Cornelis, Tim Vegas feat. Chen-U; "Everflowering" Masterpieces of Hatsunetsumiko's 2011 - 2013 {R11}) [bossa nova?]
• "Innocent World" (Maurits "ZEN" Cornelis feat. Vivienne; BOUQUET -Grand Finale- {C84}) [ballad]
• "Silent Story" (Maurits "ZEN" Cornelis, Tim Vegas feat. 陽花; 'Re:Clockwiser & A Narcissus' {C81}) [house/Jpop]
• "悠久の舞 - Re Arrange -" (siva; Gensokyo St. Patrick's Day {K10}) [Celtic]
• "幻想郷セントパトリックスデイ" (siva; Gensokyo St. Patrick's Day {K10}) [Celtic]
• "レジェンドオブマナ" (siva; Gensokyo St. Patrick's Day {K10}) [Celtic]

Artists I've been Listening to Recently:

• The xx - "Stars"
• Nosaj Thing - "Heart Entire"
• Neon Indian - "Mind, Drips"
• Hammock - "Sinking Inside Yourself"
• Goldfrapp - "Deep Honey"
• Beck - "Guess I'm Doing Fine"

I'm going to recommend the Muv Luv series of visual novels. This is a military sci-fi story where the lead of a slice-of-life harem/romcom finds himself in a war-torn alternate timeline, and has to learn to pilot giant robots in order to fight alongside battle-hardened versions of the girls from his own world. There are 3 parts: Muv Luv (romcom), Muv Luv Unlimited (darker military focus), and Muv Luv Alternative (very dark military/war). Muv Luv Alternative is the #1 ranked VN on vndb.org, with an average score of 9.28. Apparently it's also the highest ranked on the equivalent Japanese site.

The series has many virtues, but also some major caveats.

I'll start with the good stuff:

• Amazing battle sequences - the animation is very advanced for a VN and the best battles are among some of the most tense and exciting I've experienced in any medium.
• Interesting exploration of duty and identity in the politics arc.
• Fun character interactions and humor.
• Many very emotionally compelling moments - this story made me cry more than any other I've experienced (for both happy and sad reasons).
• Pretty smart writing in general - characters don't obviously hold the idiot ball unless they're supposed to be idiots or are acting emotionally at the time.
• Great world-building with well thought-through military/technical elements.
• Great character development for the main character.
• Amazing, film-quality music (more so in Alternative).

Downsides:

• Extremely long overall - at least about 80 hours for the whole thing.
• The first part ("Muv Luv") is a very silly and fluffy romcom, and while it's often amusing, it's over-long and some parts really drag (ugh, the lacrosse). By contrast to Alternative's 9.28 average score and #1 ranking, this only got 7.14 and #476, and shouldn't really be skipped due to important character and plot setup.
• Only available in English via an old pirated version that requires some technical fiddling to get it to work (comes with a readme to explain this).
• Has gratuitous sexual/fanservice elements.
• Some of the tear-jerker moments may come across as heavy-handed or manipulative if you're not in the right mood for them.

Neutral elements:

• Not heavily decision driven - the main routes in Muv Luv are extremely obvious, and Alternative only has one route.
• The prose (and/or translation thereof) is quite simple and straightfoward, compared to eg Fate/stay night.

I wasn't sure whether to post about this because of the downsides, but I read it a couple of months ago and it's still on my mind enough to feel worth recommending. I'd strongly recommend it if you have the time to spare and like both military sci-fi and emotion-heavy stories.

Content warning: Explicit sex and violence.