September 2013 Media Thread

I recently finished an excellent online course from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Cochrane Collaboration titled Understanding Evidence-based Healthcare: A Foundation for Action. It talks about how to find a well-grounded answer to medicine-related questions and walks through using PubMed, reading, and understanding journal articles. It also talks about study design, biases, difference between specificity and sensitivity, and more.

Even if you've already gone through the Sequences, it's really helpful to see how the ideas can be applied.

I recommend tackling 1 module per session rather than doing 1 video per session to save time.

For the immortalists amongst us:

Dumb Ways to Die

I can't even get past the introduction:

1. your header should not take up an entire screen
2. "its", not "it's"
3. you capitalize 'i' when it's a pronoun
4. you punctuate the end of sentences, even in parenthetical comments
5. spaces are a Good Thing

You are the reason Paul Graham made that comment.

6. Line breaks should go in between paragraphs, not in between sentences in 
a paragraph. This is prose, not free verse.

I second Ben's recommendation for How to Think Straight about Psychology from last month.

Shadowplayers: The Rise And Fall of Factory Records by James Nice (who is also military history writer James Hayward). A history of the Factory Records label, by the man who's reissued large chunks of its catalogue over the past twenty years. A marvellous story if Manchester post-punk sounds like the sort of thing you'd be interested in. I have to go through it and redigest large chunks of it into Wikipedia. This is unduly difficult as for once in my life I've bought the physical paper item and it's a five hundred page brick, but at least I can use page numbers in the references.

I've put up a mirror of my book reviews if anyone is interested in seeing them all in one place.

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith: The Dictator's Handbook

Much liked this book, which is a sort-of modern version of Machiavelli's The Prince. Don't get fooled by its silly title, this book is the general-audience version of Bueno De Mesquita et al's selectorate theory, which describes any kind of power structure in terms of which groups leaders need to please (or can ignore!) in order to stay in power. It's a rather cynical theory, with leaders having staying-in-power as more or less their only goal, and they give a great many example; leaders in democracies and authocracies are more-or-less equivalent, it's only that the former needed to please many more people and thus are induced to play a bit nicer.

Of course, political science is a bit shaky, but the writers do have statistics and analysis (but one needs the more scholarly version of the theory for that) to back it up. Also, esp. Bueno De Mesquita is known for making quite accurate predictions of future events, more so than others. This gives some confidence, esp. against the common theme of theories that can predict anything.

With selectorate theory in hand, the book explains how we could look at e.g. foreign aid, international politics, to make it beneficial to leaders (democratic or not) to be better to their subjects, improve governance, freedoms etc. So, in the end, the cold, hard-nosed cynicism does point to some ways to make the world a better place...

Recommended. I'll be going to watch world events through these lenses, and see how wel it works.

I would have never guessed I will recommend a romantic movie, but here it is: Before Sunrise and the sequels Before Sunset and Before Midnight. (I haven't seen the third one yet, so the recommendation is for the first two.) I greatly enjoyed the movies, although I hate romantic movies in general. What was the difference? These movies are completely dialog-based. There is no long silence or dancing or such stuff; the protagonists are talking all the time, and they are irradiating high intelligence. Your frontal lobes will not starve while watching.

season one of Orphan Black: A very well-done right around the corner scifi setting, focusing on cutting edge biomodification and human cloning. The main character/s are all clones who were put up for adoption 20something years ago for unspecified purposes around the world who begin to find and interact with each other. The actress does an amazing job of playing similar but different versions of herself with different upbringings and capabilities. So far characters don't hold the idiot ball but are either legitimately fooled by conspiracies or make understandable mistakes.

Culture Shock, entertaining, though unfinished crossover between Harry Potter and Iain M. Banks' Culture, via r/hpmor.

I have a lot of great stories to recommend, and I tried to get a wide sampling of genres and authors. In no particular order:

Inviolate - A fiction of the DC Universe. Novel length. Complete. The base conceit is basically, "what would happen if Lex Luthor went sane?" It's a little bit like watching MoR Quirrell fight the entire DCU... with SCIENCE. The same author also writes Variant Strain, which is a Spiderman/Prototype story, novel length, ongoing. It's a very clever mix of the two source materials, and has a great deal of inside references to the Marvel universe while being mainly a retelling of a game with clever concepts and a pretty lousy plotline.

Fair Vote - A fiction of the Dresden Files, novel length. It's very interesting in that it's almost completely unrelated to any of the main characters in any of Jim Butcher's novels; everything in the book is almost entirely Original Content - which means that it's a great read both for fans of the series and for people who have never read a bit of it. The lack of connection to existing characters means that most people don't happen to stumble across this one - I think it has sixteen reviews in total, last time I checked. Definitely a fic which could use more recognition.

In Flight - A fiction of Fate Stay Night and Sekirei, novel length. Ongoing. I saw that Fate/Stay Night was mentioned in last month's thread; this is probably one of the best known fics including elements from it. Because it's a crossover fic, it does a lot of explaining setting elements, which makes it a pretty okay entry point into the series if you don't mind a few spoilers. It's action packed, and very, very funny. If you prefer a story without all the crossover and with a little less humor, you might want to try From Fake Dreams, which is a fairly well written variant of the 'time travel makes a character awesome' trope.

The Road To Cydonia A Ranma / X-COM fic. Trilogy length. Ongoing, but slow to update. Further crossovers with DCU through another author. This fic very successfully takes a very silly, heroic universe and throws it into the middle of one of the darkest tactical videogames ever written. There's a strong 'peanut butter and jelly' effect - watching the Ranma characters mature, and the X-COM universe become more epic, is very interesting. The story is also long, and crosses over with Lathis' The Titans and the Lost Boy, which is a Ranma / DCU fic. Altogether, it's probably several million words, all pretty enjoyable.

He Who Fights Monsters - a Rosario X Vampire fic. Novella length. Complete. A slightly gory deconstructionist fic of a story where the main character is a human sent to a school full of monsters. Instead of befriending them, he defends against them, with ... interesting results.

The Newest Challenger - A Street Fighter / Naruto crossover, novel length, nearly complete. The author, Kenchi, is (or claims to be) an amateur MMA fighter, which means that his hand-to-hand combat scenes are some of the most entertaining I've read anywhere. Also, the author is prolific, with about 3 to 3 and a half million words published so far. The stories are consistently funny, and action-packed; the one caveat that I would recommend is skipping any sex scenes, as they're not written to nearly the same level.

Read the City Watch series and I highly recommend.

If you liked George Orwell's 1984, I strongly recommend reading Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, which inspired it. According to Wikipedia, it was the first book banned in Soviet Union. Unlike 1984 it is less directly political; it describes a dystopian society based on "straw-Vulcan" rationality. (Also, Pet Shop Boys made a song about it.)

Charlie Stross' Laundry series, all of it. It's great. Rollicking spy novels about the world where Lovecraft is true. Very readable and enjoyable.

I just read Saturn's Children by Stross. Its set in a future where humanity proper has gone extinct and been replaced by robots that have fundamentally neuromorphic brains with approximations of Asimov's laws and some other safeguards hacked in. The main character and several aspects of the plot are heavily inspired by Heinlein's Friday. I strongly recommend it if and only if you like Heinlein and/or Stross'es other books.

Darconville's Cat is a linguistic masterpiece, very highly recommended. Garden, Ashes is another buried gem.

Pierre Cartier, A country of which nothing is known but the name, discusses the life and work of Alexander Grothendieck, who pioneered a massive research project into category theoretical mathematics, via John D. Cook.

Flash game: Socrates Jones: Pro Philosopher. The gameplay is similar to Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, but you instead debate famous philosophers in an attempt to understand morality.

It's pretty short and suffers from the "I know the correct answer here, but how did the author of the game intend me to indicate that" problem, but I found it fun and interesting nonetheless. It helps to keep the walkthrough at hand, so you can resort to it if you start getting frustrated. Even though the arguments were only addressed relatively briefly, I actually felt like I'd learned something. Liked the music, too.

Family Man is a thoroughly researched historical fiction/magical realism webcomic. Its about family (duh), 18th century academia, and a creepy town in Uberwald^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H the hinterlands of Germany. The main character a man struggling with beliefs that are, in his view, logically justified but emotionally unsettling, not to mention politically verboten. Also, it has someone literally flipping a table at their dissertation defense. The author has a more in depth intro here.

Individual webcomic strip:

Someone Dies