August 2014 Media Thread

I'd put them in fiction book myself, or other media. Also, this comment belongs in 'Meta Thread'.

The Metropolitan Man is finally complete. If you still haven't read it and you're on this site, I recommend you do. You likely won't regret it.

This story was recommended in the last two media threads:

June

July

THE TECHNO QUEEN (capitals) (thunder). I've spent the last month reading Worm fanfics and this is definitely the finest so far. Up there with The Goblin Queen.

Turnabout Confusion is a Daria fanfic that portrays Lawndale High as being as full of Machiavellian plotters as HPMOR!Hogwarts is. Each student is keenly aware of their role in the popularity food chain, and most are constantly scheming on how to advance on it. When Daria and Quinn exchange roles for a few days on a spontaneous bet, they unwittingly set a chain reaction of plots and counterplots, leading to a massive Gambit Pileup that could overturn completely the whole social order of the school…

Part One: We All Fall Down.

Part Two: All the King's Horses.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. Very famous book, and worthy of its reputation by the looks of things. About halfway through at the moment. Something I did not know before reading the preface was that Kuhn was a grad student in theoretical physics.

Induction: Processes of Inference, Learning and Discovery by Holland et al. This is a collaborative interdisciplinary work that straddles computer science, psychology and philosophy of science. It's almost 30 years old now, but I still found that I gained some perspective by reading it. One of its most important arguments is that induction should be viewed as a pragmatic rather than syntactic process, i.e. you won't get a working theory of induction without putting a spotlight on agents' goals and how they influence the hypothesis space and categorisations of the agent.

• 2014 COPSS anthology, Past, Present, and Future of Statistical Science (review)
• Pioneers of Soviet Computing, Malinovsky 2010 (review)

• How to Read a Book was not particularly useful to me, except for the suggested reading list at the end.
• Clear and Simple as the Truth was interesting.
• The Ode Less Travelled was good.

Greatly enjoyed Peter Singer's Practical Ethics. Covers his positions on various political issues, including a non-crazy discussion of race and intelligence, and the ethical implications thereof. I think Singer has been recommended here before, but to reiterate: he's a preference utilitarian consequentialist philosopher whose style and clarity of analysis is very Less-Wrong-esque, but he engages directly with the philosophical tradition. Both the meta- and object-level analysis are well worth reading.

Edit: In particular, if you're interested in how philosophers think and talk about the orthogonality thesis and some related practical matters, his final chapter is an exceptionally lucid starting point. Singer also gets bonus coolness points there for discussion of the actual (disclaimer: 1978) research on psychopathy, and its relation to the concept of normativity.

Reza Aslan's Zealot. It's a life and times of Jesus. I am not qualified to judge the story he tells; I would be interested to see comments from anyone who is. The story is of a messianic zealot, of a sort that were common in those days, from the poor and obscure village of Nazareth, who wandered around preaching a message of deliverance for the Jewish people to happen in this world, not the next. He eventually came up against the Roman powers in Jerusalem, who immediately executed him for sedition, as they did all of his sort. The label "King of the Jews" on the cross was not a recognition of his divine status, but the charge against him. The only thing that distinguishes him from other failed messiahs (of whom Aslan mentions a good many) was that his movement survived his death and grew.

Aslan passes on the question of whether the resurrection actually happened, but identifies it as the key idea that transformed the movement into one that would spread across the world. Without the resurrection, Jesus is just another false messiah, the crucifixion being the proof of his falsity. Aslan declares the resurrection to be "not a historical event" and to lie "outside the scope of history", which seems like fudging. The paucity of sources may make it inaccessible to historical inquiry, but in fact, either something of the sort happened or it did not. Other messiahs were executed and that was the end of them. Somehow, in Jesus' case, the idea of the resurrection took hold and gave his followers hope for the future of what he had started.

Those followers continued to meet, led by James, Peter, and John. First among these was James, brother of Jesus. But then Paul had some sort of conversion experience, joined the movement, and then fought bitterly with its leaders to take it over and take it in a new direction, one more palatable to the Roman authority. The very idea of Jewish deliverance from oppression was eliminated, the kingdom was declared to be not of this world, Jesus' death was firmly placed on the heads of the Jews, Pilate was whitewashed (the whole trial account in the Gospels, Reza says, is clearly fiction), James in Jerusalem was marginalised in favour of Peter in Rome, the original emphasis on justice for the poor and upholding of the Jewish law faded away, and modern Christianity began to be created.

• The Age of Spiritual Machines - Ray Kurzweil, outdated but thought provoking.
• My Stroke of Insight - Jill B Taylor, a TED talk-ish book on neuroscience for the masses.
• I am a Strange Loop - Douglas Hofstadter, GEB without the dialogues and focused on consciousness.
• The Signal and the Noise - Nate Silver, makes a good case for Bayes' theorem without showing the theorem.
• Social Engineering: the Art of Human Hacking - Chris Hadnagy, rehashes Cialdini's Influence, describes some neat techniques, and includes some pseudoscience. Still nice intro to social engineering despite the author being a pentester, not a writer.

• The Causal Angel - Hannu Rajaniemi, Conclusion to the Quantum Thief trilogy. I enjoyed it maybe 80% as much as the first book.
• Anvil of the Stars - Greg Bear, sequel to the The Forge of God.

Spellbound by Ru Emerson.

This is a retelling of Cinderella, and it's notable for sensible characters (some bad emotional habits, but they're thinking about what they're doing a lot of the time). There's care taken with practical details-- no matter how much of a hurry you're in, you still need to get the horse ready to be ridden.

I also liked it because some of the scary bits were distinctively scary.... and there's a quite an unusual take on the prince searching for the mystery woman.

• The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly - Sun-mi Hwang, touching contemporary fable.
• Nightfall - Isaac Asimov, old enough to be cliche and predictable despite being original for its time.
• A Song of Ice and Fire (1-5) - G R R Martin, took a while to read and addictive. Stays interesting if he explores a character you can relate to.
• Guards! Guards!, Going Postal, and Making Money - Terry Pratchett, fun Discworld novels.

• Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic
• Poul Anderson's Brain Wave
• Zelazny's A Night in the Lonesome October
• Paolini's Eragon (review)

I recently picked up the (commercial; I understand there are fan translations in the wild) English translations of the Witcher books by Andrzej Sapkowski as airplane reading, partly because I found the games interesting but poor at explaining background but mostly because I'd woken up at 5 AM to catch my flight and didn't have the bandwidth to keep slogging through the dense mock-Elizabethan prose of The Worm Ouroboros.

The series is subversive fantasy with a heavy dose of folktale influence, somewhere between Gregory Macguire's books and A Song of Ice and Fire in tone, and while it doesn't add much to that subgenre that I haven't seen before, it does pull it off competently and from a perspective I'm not used to. (I suspect this latter has something to do with its Polish origins.) It does hew a little too close to genre convention in places; there are good narrative reasons to have nonhumans running around, for example, but not to pull in the full D&D-style demihuman panoply. On the other hand, it's unusually good at grounding its genre: nations fall and are created, for example, over periods of a few decades rather than staying static for Tolkienian centuries or millennia. Monsters are treated as rare and dangerous animals rather than unique aberrations. Individual martial skill is valuable but easily neutralized by luck or fatigue or weight of numbers. Magicians approach their craft more as scientists than as sages or superheroes. It's a fairly refreshing take and I'd like to see more of it.

The weakest point's probably the translations tapped for Kindle, which are noticeably inconsistent and pretty clunky in places. Characterization's competent but nothing to write home about.

• There is a new Robin Hobb out as of today (in the UK, anyway), "Fool's Assassin". An automatic buy on the strength of the previous novels for me; will report further once I have finished it.

Knights of Sidonia is a 13 episode (so far) series about space pilots in the far future who defend their generation ship from alien attacks. I really enjoyed the dark atmosphere (huge image) and the show-not-tell world-building. Sidonia, while probably not as strange as it really would be (some aspects are a bit contemporary-Japan-in-space), still feels like a different enough place to be interesting. The pure-CGI graphics worked well for me, though some people find the CGI characters a bit offputting. The action was also quite exciting at times. The only major weakness I felt is that the main character is rather bland, though by the end he's slowly improving, which brings hope for him in the upcoming sequel.

There is an English-dubbed version available on Netflix for those who have access.

Anime from the current season:

• Terror in Resonance is a kind of reverse Death Note without the magic
• Aldnoah Zero is shaping up to be a Code Geass-alike, although the timescales for the alternative history are implausible enough to jolt one out of suspending disbelief occasionally.

• Maoyuu Maou Yuusha (I found it relatively interesting and the harem antics not as bad as expected; Spice and Wolf is still better, though)

Oh no I cocked that one up. I wanted to copy-paste this under "Meta", as audio-books aren't listed yet. I thought to retract this post meant to delete it entirely. Captain?

Technology:

• On the n-body problem's useless solution
• "Inside a Startup's Plan to Turn a Swarm of DIY Satellites Into an All-Seeing Eye" (see WP: ultimately launched some satellites, was acquired by Google)
• "Harnessing human computation: Luis von Ahn helped save the internet from spammers. His larger quest is to put internet chores to productive use"
• "Inside The Immortality Business: Thanks to a small but devoted core of true believers and an infusion of Silicon Valley research funds, the once-revered, much-reviled science of cryopreservation may itself be coming back from the dead. Welcome to Alcor, where death is merely a temporary setback."

Economics:

• How Wizards of the Coast distributed equity as a startup
• Libertarians against recycling
• "Labor's Declining Share of Income and Rising Inequality"
• When should the Devil keep his deals? a game-theoretic approach

Fiction:

• 2001 in anime reviewed (an excellent year for anime, as it gave us: Animation Runner Kuromi, Cat Soup, Cowboy Bebop: Knockin' on Heaven's Door, FLCL, Fruits Basket, Haré+Guu, Metropolis, Millennium Actress, Princess Arete, Read or Die OVA, & Spirited Away.)
• "Harry Potter Fanfiction Data (Most popular characters, publishing rates, etc)" (I would not have guessed that fictions starring Daphne & Harry were the most popular.)

Misc:

• Long hair
• Wanted: walrus lodger

Everything is heritable:

• "Genes Take Charge, and Diets Fall by the Wayside" (there's also a recent Spanish study showing very high heritability of BMI, like most such studies, but since the fulltext is in Spanish there's no point in linking it)
• "Not by Twins Alone: Using the Extended Family Design to Investigate Genetic Influence on Political Beliefs", Hatemi et al 2010 (excerpts)
• "Chimpanzee Intelligence Is Heritable", Hopkins et al 2014 (excerpts)
• "Genetic Variation Associated with Differential Educational Attainment in Adults Has Anticipated Associations with School Performance in Children", Ward et al 2014 (Rietveld et al 2013's 3 SNP hits for intelligence are starting to replicate; excerpts)
• "The genetics of investment biases", Cronqvist & Siegal 2014 (excerpts)
• "Genetic Relations Among Procrastination, Impulsivity, and Goal-Management Ability: Implications for the Evolutionary Origin of Procrastination", Gustavson et al 2014

Politics/religion:

• "ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World" (very impressive historically-accurate in-browser simulation of the logistics of the ancient Roman Empire. My only regret is that I can't think of any situation in which I actually need an exact calculation of how much it would have cost to get from Londinium to Rome during winter while avoiding the Atlantic. But some of the graphs showing cost-distances between Rome and the provinces are pretty interesting, as are some of the disparities)
• "Differences in negativity bias underlie variations in political ideology", Hibbing et al 2014 (excerpts; mass media)
• Dinosaur Comics on the lyrics of "La Marseillaise"
• "Political Extremism Is Supported by an Illusion of Understanding", Fernbach et al 2013 (excerpts)
• "Toward a theory of revolution", Davies 1962 (excerpts)
• "Paying Kidnapping Ransoms, Europe Bankrolls Qaeda Terror" (incentives matter)
• "How Hijackers Commandeered Over 130 American Planes - In 5 Years": the golden age of hijacking
• "NSA-proof encryption exists. Why doesn't anyone use it?"
• "Inside the United States: GlobalPost goes inside the United States to uncover the regime's dramatic descent into authoritarian rule and how the opposition plans to fight back."
• Saint Guinefort: greyhound & patron of sick children
• Dr Seuss and the Cold War
• "The Blurb I Wish I'd Had"
• "Nakatomi Space" (Die Hard as conceptual art/philosophy)
• "Welcome to the Future Nauseous"

Statistics/AI/meta-science:

• "Teachers and Income: What Did the Project STAR Kindergarten Study Really Find?"
• "The Small Schools Myth"
• "Online Controlled Experiments at Large Scale", Rohavi et al 2013 ("One interesting tidbit is that Bing found that every 100ms faster they deliver search result pages to searchers yields 0.6% more in revenue (which is a similar result to an old Amazon test).")
• "What does randomness look like?" (the classic statistics examples of Poisson distributions like V-bombs falling on London)
• "How Not to Be Misled by the Jobs Report" (Depicts the sampling error associated with each estimate by providing an animation showing repeated draws assuming the point-estimate is the ground truth. Good for showing you how easily 'patterns' show up with a few data points.)
• "Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures", Breiman 2001 (excerpts)
• Distributed vectors for image recognition from textual descriptions
• "Future progress in artificial intelligence: a poll among experts", Müller & Bostrom 2014
• "HeartMath Considered Incoherent"
• "Deep impact: unintended consequences of journal rank", Brembs et al 2013 (meta-science)

Psychology:

• "Humans are not automatically strategic"
• "Pre-Crastination: Hastening Subgoal Completion at the Expense of Extra Physical Effort", Rosenbaum et al 2014 (NYT)
• Poincaré on intuition in mathematics
• "Does incubation enhance problem-solving? A meta-analytic review", Sio & Ormerod (excerpts)
• "It Takes Guts To Do Research" (on Oppenheimer & missed opportunities)
• "Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind", Wilson et al 2014 (excerpts)
• OkCupid experiments demonstrating shallowness in dating
• "On the trail of the elusive successful psychopath"
• "Cannabis, IQ and socio-economic status in the Dunedin data - an update"
• "Alcoholism in Antarctica"
• Suicide is highest in spring
• "Character amnesia...whereby experienced speakers of East Asian languages forget how to write Chinese characters previously well known"

Replication in social sciences

The Originist by Orson Scott Card.

This may be the best science fiction story I have ever read, nudging Egan's Wang's Carpets out of first place. By best, I mean a high concentration of sparkly ideas, and in the case of the Card story, reasons to be fond of the human race-- and there's a metalevel, because a lot of the story is about the good we get from having mental models of each other, and the story is Card trying to channel Asimov.

It has none of the character torture which makes a lot of Card's fiction squicky to me.

I read it in Maps in a Mirror, and I can't vouch that the online version is complete or correct. On the other hand, I want to improve the odds of the story getting read.

If you're a Card fan, you may want to get the hardcover edition-- it's got some stories which are mentioned as not being included in the paperback edition.

The resource leak bug of our civilization

Narcose - 13 min.

Deep water freediving exposes its practitioners to a form of narcosis, which induces several symptoms, among which a feeling of euphoria and levity that earned this phenomenon its nickname of “raptures of the deep”. The short film relates the interior journey of Guillaume Néry, the apnea world champion, during one of his deep water dives. It draws its inspiration from his physical experience and the narrative of his hallucinations.

La pratique de l’apnée en grande profondeur expose les apnéistes à un phénomène de narcose, appelé aussi « ivresse des profondeurs ». NARCOSE relate l’expérience et le voyage intérieur du champion du monde d’apnée, Guillaume Néry, lors d'une descente en grande profondeur. Le film s'inspire de son expérience physique et du récit réel de ses hallucinations.

• Gravity (great; the technical criticisms are overblown)
• The Wild Geese (for a classic movie about mercenaries, pretty dumb)
• Tea with Mussolini

Finally showed the seven-year-old Star Wars this afternoon. (DVD Greedo-shot-first version, not that she gives a hoot.) She was delighted. Her previous reference for all the stuff in it is Angry Birds Star Wars. Culture! It's important!

I would not recommend watching Persecuted in theaters. However, I would recommend later acquiring it, preferably in some fashion that does not pay the filmmakers (paying for it would just encourage more films of this type). It looks like it would be fun to invite some humanist/liberal friends over, make popcorn, and poke fun at it MST3K-style.

Note: film is about evangelical Christians persecuted by a Evil Liberal Establishment. If you are deconverted, please do not watch it alone. It will just make you angry.

• The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
• Once Upon a Time in the West
• My Name is Nobody

Highly recommend all three.

Suits): first 3 seasons are on Netflix. "Legal" Will Hunting, complicated by the the prohibition against practicing law without a law degree, no matter how good you are and how many tests you pass. (It's as logical as prohibiting someone from working for Google because they do not have a B.Sc.)

Excellent through the first 1.5 seasons, with good amount of humor, movie references, interesting and comprehensible legal cases. Downhill after that, with all kinds of complications, increasingly caricature-like description of some characters, unbelievable (in a bad way) plot twists. Still funny. Probably worth watching just for the dialog.

Several new or recent SF&F shows:

• Under the Dome) -- explores some interesting issues of isolated small towns, the SF aspect is totally superficial. Meandering plot. Decent acting. Also good for eye-candy if you like the actors. I am guessing that the Dome will stay up for as long as the show's ratings allow.

• Extant) -- Halle Berry gets mysteriously pregnant by her former boyfriend's ghost while on a long solo space mission, and has to deal with her android child once back. Then it gets worse. Way worse. There is already a government conspiracy and there will be evil aliens shortly, I'm sure. The show is as ridiculous as it sounds. Not recommended unless you are a Halle Berry's fan. Well, they do explore the issue of AI integration into the society, but it is not done well at all.

• The Lottery): basically Children of Men serialized, poorly. Annoying plot holes everywhere. Another government conspiracy, a cynical president, an evil head of a shady agency, just pick a trope and you have it. None of what the characters do makes any sense. If you like political drama, House of Cards is infinitely better.

• The Grand Budapest Hotel
• Fantastic Mr. Fox

Both fantastically written by Wes Anderson.

Last time I asked for some advice about Vocaloid and ended up with two tracks I really like:

Utata-P ft. 結月ゆかり - "There's Supposed to Be a Cheat Code for Happiness" (electronic/dance)

Azuma feat. Yuzuki Yukari - 夢魅鳥 - Yumemidori (rock/pop)

edit: fixed second link.

Explosions in the Sky:

• "Your Hand in Mine (piano cover)", rmadlal

Touhou:

• "はるのおと ―同声合唱とピアノのための―" (RD-Sounds feat. Meramipop; itazura {R10}) [vocal]
• "Fingertip Chocolate" (Autobahn feat. senya; Ano Hana Sakuya {R10}) [vocal]
• "Tea Funk" (Thj.Quartet; Jazz Funk Vol.2 {R10}) [jazz]
• "Midnight Bird" (Sanokan; 東方ぴあのとりお {R10}) [jazz]
• "Nights Return (Stirring an Autumn Moon)" (Komso; Touhou DTM -Decade Toho Music- {R10}) [trance?]
• "ストライクウィッチ (Love-Colored Master Spark)" (Komso; Touhou DTM -Decade Toho Music- {R10}) [orchestral]
• "厄神様の通学路" (ばんし; 厄神days {R11}) [instrumental]
• "今日もくるくる" (ばんし; 厄神days {R11}) [instrumental]
• "ひらり厄神様" (ばんし; 厄神days {R11}) [instrumental]
• "深夜のレトロスペクティブ天気予報" (Xe; Bracing Sky Blue {R11}) [house/folk]
• "月を仰ぎて虫時雨(2014remix)" (Xe; Bracing Sky Blue {R11}) [house/folk]
• "空の帰り道 ～ Sky Dream" (Marasy; 幻想遊戯＜星＞ {R11}) [classical]
• "感情の摩天楼 ～ Cosmic Mind" (Marasy; 幻想遊戯＜星＞ {R11}) [classical]
• "法界の火 (Fires of Hokkai)" (Marasy; 幻想遊戯＜星＞ {R11}) [classical]
• "Merry Christmas Wr. Nightbug" (狐夢想; 東方VGM {R11}) [instrumental]
• "Lonely Monster in the Desolation #0" (RD-Sounds; 望 {R11}) [instrumental rock]
• "encourager" (RD-Sounds & Meramipop; 望 {R11}) [vocal]
• "BonusTrack (Eternal Steam Engine)" (Toy; 協奏符「拾遺物語」 {R11}) [symphony]
• "彼の世に嬢の亡骸" (Tokyo Active NEETs; Touhou Bakuon Jazz 5 {C85}) [jazz]
• "disharmonized love - T.V.High Time Remix" (Tim Vegas feat. SYO; XXX {C85}) [electronic]
• "DESIRE DREAM - FELT Remix" (NAGI☆ feat. itori; XXX {C85}) [electronic]
• "CONFINED INNOCENT - MZC Curl of Groove Remix" (Maurits Cornelis feat. A~YA; XXX {C85}) [vocal]
• "GOLD - K's 'Dive into the Dream' Remix" (Coro feat. itori; XXX {C85}) [trance]

God is an Astronaut:

• "A Moment of Stillness"
• "A Deafening Distance"
• "Fireflies and Empty Skies"
• "Forever Lost"
• "Fragile"
• "Suicide by Star"
• "When Everything Dies"
• "Beyond the Dying List"
• "Sunrise in Aries"
• "Sunny Banks Of Sweet Deliverance"
• "Loss"
• "No Return"
• "Post Mortem"
• "Shadows"

Neotropic - Whiter Rabbits - The first 9 songs are her album White Rabbits and the rest are remixes.

Welcome to Night Vale - free to download, previously recommended here. The news is amusing, the weather segments are enjoyable if you have somewhat eclectic musical tastes and the hosts crush in Carlos the dreamy scientist is something to root for. I just finished episode 18.

WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE is a twice-monthly podcast in the style of community updates for the small desert town of Night Vale, featuring local weather, news, announcements from the Sheriff's Secret Police, mysterious lights in the night sky, dark hooded figures with unknowable powers, and cultural events.

Turn on your radio and hide.

Written by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor. Narrated by Cecil Baldwin. Music by Disparition. Logo by Rob Wilson

Social Networks and Evolution: a great Oxford neuroscience talk. I will also shamelessly push this blog post that I wrote about the connection between the work in the lecture and Jared Diamond's thesis that agriculture was the worst mistake in human history.

The Moire Eel - move your cursor around and see all the beautfiul, beautiful moire patterns.

• Peeking in on Pact, the serial the author of Worm is currently writing, was arguably a mistake: compulsively catching up ate almost a week, I advise the reader to be prepared for that before venturing in. Pact feels more tightly paced and plotted than early Worm often was, is every bit as compelling and its punches are, if anything, harder.