May 2015 Media Thread

Everything is heritable:

• "Measure for Measure: The strange science of Francis Galton" (on Galton, statistics, regression to the mean, and eugenics.)

Politics/religion:

• "A Cold War Conundrum: The 1983 Soviet War Scare"
• "Before you study public opinion, you wonder why policy isn't far better. After you study public opinion, you wonder why policy isn't far worse."
• "How Napoleon Chagnon Became Our Most Controversial Anthropologist"
• "Why Are There So Few Vegetarians? Most 'vegetarians' eat meat. Huh?"
• "The Live-and-Let-Live System in Trench Warfare in World War I"
• Flight and expulsion of Germans (1944-50)
• "Abraham Lincoln, Necromancer",

Statistics/AI/meta-science:

• "The Non-parametric Bootstrap as a Bayesian Model"
• "Crowdsourcing data analysis: Do soccer referees give more red cards to dark skin toned players?" (61 analysts examine the same dataset for the same research question to see how much variation in approach determines results; excerpts)
• "Using degrees of freedom to change the past for fun and profit"
• "The psychology of parapsychology, or why good researchers publishing good articles in good journals can still get it totally wrong"
• "Predictive modeling, data leakage, model evaluation"

Psychology/biology:

• "Genetics and the placebo effect: the placebome", Hall et al 2015 (excerpts)
• "CRISPR/Cas9-mediated gene editing in human tripronuclear zygotes"
• "Mice Fall Short as Test Subjects for Some of Humans' Deadly Ills"
• "Rising Plague"
• "Icing Organs: Why scientists are so near and yet so far from being able to cryopreserve organs"
• "Discrepancies between clinical and autopsy diagnosis and the value of post mortem histology; a meta-analysis and review", Roulson et al 2005 (excerpts)
• "When Daydreaming Replaces Real Life: Should elaborate fantasies be considered a psychiatric disorder?"
• "The Catastrophe: Spalding Gray's brain injury" (medical ethics, dereliction of duty)
• "The Price of a Stolen Childhood: When Nicole was a child, her father took pornographic pictures of her that still circulate on the internet"
• "The Last Magic Show: A Blind Brain Theory of the Appearance of Consciousness", Bakker
• "Nature makes no leaps"

Technology:

• "The Tail at Scale", Dean & Barroso 2013
• "Tacit Knowledge, Weapons Design, and the Uninvention of Nuclear Weapons", MacKenzie & Spinardi 1995
• "In High-Tech Japan, the Fax Machines Roll On"

Economics:

• Children are net losses to parents, even in peasant or hunter-gatherer societies.
• Arab slave trade
• Social impact bond
• "Deep Inside: A Study of 10,000 Porn Stars and Their Careers"
• "What Happened with LEGO: The price of a brick"
• "So You Discovered an Anomaly ... Gonna Publish It? An Investigation Into the Rationality of Publishing a Market Anomaly", Doran & Wright 2007
• "Superiority" (Arthur C. Clarke)

Philosophy:

• "Universal Love, Said The Cactus Person"
• Moral Anti-Realism

Fiction:

• "Birdless Country", by Burton Watson
• "The Garden of Proserpine"

http://lesswrong.com/docs/1995-mackenzie.pdf

The Grumpy Programmer - "RFIDs, Encryption, and Stop Rules... Oh My!" -- A bit rambly in the middle, but an interesting post on trying to get people to look past their cached thoughts.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/04/the-engineers-lament

Mostly about a rational look at what causes car accidents, and how car companies decide what's safe enough.

14 Ways Cognitive Biases Hamper Your Diablo Toon

It is actually titled "How Your Mind Screws with You in Games Like Diablo". Not novel material, but novel to see on a gaming website.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/11/overkill-atul-gawande

Overtesting and overtreatment in American medicine, and what's being done to have more sensible medical treatment.

Recent sequence on mathematical ability and Scott A. being bad at math (or is he?) reminded me of this short story (possibly nonfiction), which I recommend: Bad At Math by Alone a.k.a. The Last Psychiatrist. http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/03/bad_at_math.html

Barbie fucks it up again is a short article about how an attempt at feminist Barbie can turn up creepy and sexist.

The piece is hilarious, in a depressing way, and inspiring, as in "inspiring me to write a rational!Barbie fanfic".

"Civilized Life in the Universe". George Basalla.

A study of the history of the idea of intelligent extraterrestrial life, and how our [the European diaspora's] thoughts of it have never had much to do with extraterrestrials and instead have everything to do with ourselves. The notion is dissected for all its parts to be seen.

In the 1500s, the notion that the Earth and other planets were made of similar stuff lead to the supposition that if that is the case, perhaps they were inhabited too. The hot question was if Jesus also saved them or if we needed to send missionaries.

Percival Lowell at the turn of the 20th century thought he saw canals all over mars, and talked about how this indicated they had reached a socialist utopia.

Carl Sagan, perhaps steeped in the Barsoom books in his youth, held onto the notion of macroscopic living things on mars for quite some time. He also expounded on the idea that old civilizations might teach us how to avoid nuclear war.

These days, we talk about technological progress, the questionable assumption that it continues without bound in all cases but extinction, and 'where are they?"

It's never been about them. It's always about us - what we care about at that particular moment.

"The science of evil" by Simon Baron-Cohen.

A social, neurophysiological and psychological exploration of tabooing "evil" and substituting it with "empathy erosion".

Intriguing, disturbing, eye-opening, depressing. This book is kicking me in the guts pretty hard and I'm loving every minute of it. You'll start to see mild psychopaths everywhere ;)

• The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays, Simon Leys

Finally got around to starting The Tale of Genji. Decent start, might give an update once I've gotten further along.

• The Sagas of Icelanders

• Atama Yama: curious short story about a greedy miser who grows a small sprout on his head apparently as punishment, is annoyed by the even smaller visitors to the tree, and then apparently drowns while trying to get rid of it. The story isn't much, but it's much more interesting to listen to the narrator recite it to the traditional music and watch the eccentric animation.
• Ben-to: waste of time. Interesting concept which doesn't go anywhere, on top of which the fights are repetitive and unimaginative (if you've seen one you've seen all, as they are all lazy battle-royales and punches which could be, and probably were, clip-arts), they are entertaining neither as realistic nor shonen-superpowered nor parodies, and the series winds up spending most of its time, apparently, on mean-spirited mockery of fujoshi, yuri fanservice, and twincest. Only 2 positive aspects come to mind: the character Sen Yarizui is not, surprisingly, yet another Rei/Yuki-doll-knockoff character; and the final arc is a little more insightful about the nature of competition than expected.

• Cinderella 2015: this was more interesting than I had expected. What it seems to be aiming at is a polished, straight/non-revisionist telling of the classic Cinderella story (without the narcissism of Frozen and its instantly-dated tone-deaf snark), but with a minimalist approach to magic and comedy (the animals are only minor elements) with all the romanticism and exaltation of traditionally feminine virtues implied, and a low-key but consistent effort at rationalizing and embedding the fairy-tale into a plausible world (a sort of 1700s England/Italy/France-hybrid small kingdom). For example, the wicked stepmother is indeed wicked and enjoys her small cruelties, but has motives beyond pure malevolence for the mistreatment (aware of her daughters' fecklessness, if she doesn't find them a match, they're doomed); or while Cinderella is escaping from the palace, the prince plausibly orders a pursuit and the coachmen trip a portcullis on their way out to block pursuit, resolving a common objection. The rest of the movie is executed as competently as one expects of a top-tier Disney live-action film: the dresses are naturally almost hyperreal, the settings are overstuffed pastoral of almost Thomas Kinkade-caliber, and Cate Blanchett & Lily James hold down their parts well (the former to simmer and emote, and the latter to be brainless & beautiful - although I will never understand why they did not dye her eyebrows blond as well, a contrast which distracted me in almost every scene). All in all, pretty good and has probably cemented Cinderella's status as a major part of the Disney princess-industry for another generation.
• Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb (2014); an attempt to do a little worldbuilding in providing a backstory for all the antics, and close the franchise (temporarily?) with a theme of maturing and passing on the baton, closing the loop with the first movie; unfortunately it comes off as completely stale, with no gags we didn't get tired of in the first two movies.

It's probably worth mentioning that Avengers: Age of Ultron jumps on the Lets-Be-Afraid-of-Artificial-Intelligence bandwagon. I think it's safe to say there's a bandwagon now.

Doujin:

• "Lost my music" (TAM, Gensou Gakudan, Satoru Kousaki; Suzumiya Haruhi no Kyouen {2007}) [classical]
• "Rider / The Distant Sea and Holy Land" (TAM×Aruna Ryuki; Fate Violin Zero {M3-29}) [instrumental rock]

Touhou:

• "少女" (KD feat.瑶山百霊; SEEKING {C81}) [trance]
• "少女 -Ryutsuki Version-" (暗猪 feat.流月; SEEKING {C81}) [trance]
• "鏡に映らない闇 ～sorairo no tabi～" (暗猪 feat.流月; SEEKING {C81}) [vocal]
• "月笹船" (Jersey to Yukaina Nakamatachi; 涼風至 {C86}) [folk]
• "Bom dia" (だ feat. ごんだくたー; TOHO BOSSA NOVA {R9}) [bossa nova]
• "Bonus Track" (うんちく商事; Land der Illusionen {TK10}) [orchestral]
• "Eastern Mystical Dream ~ Ancient Temple" (うんちく商事; Land der Illusionen {TK10}) [piano]
• "IQ69" (Sound of Swing; In Walked Cat's {C86}) [jazz]
• "Afternoon tea in Tunisia" (Sound of Swing; In Walked Cat's {C86}) [jazz]

Kantai Collection:

• "全艦娘、突撃！(艦隊決戦アレンジ)" (TAMUSIC; 艦これメタル {C87}) [metal]
• "母港" (TAMUSIC; 艦これメタル {C87}) [metal]
• "昼戦〜戦乙女の行進〜" (伊藤 翼; Kantai Philharmonic Orchestra {C86}) [orchestral]

Vocaloid:

• "Yume Rockets" (Miku; OKUMEIKIBOUNOTOKYOTOZAIJYUU; Virtual Songs {2009}) [electronic/Jpop]