March 2015 Media Thread

I just finished Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston, cofounder of YCombinator. I strongly recommend it for anyone who is thinking about doing a startup. The book consists of a collection of interviews with company founders. Some of the interviewees were extremely successful; others achieved a good modest success quickly, followed by a buyout; and others seemed like they were on a path to success but then failed.

One clear message from the book is that taking VC money is very decidedly not always a good thing.

Another depressing trend was how many companies startup, expand, and do very well, then are bought out by BigCorp, which then fails to manage them correctly, so the product effectively disappears.

Reading Humans 3.0, by Peter Nowak. He plays around with recent social trends made possible by new digital technologies. It reminds me of Glenn Reynolds's book a few year back titled An Army of Davids. I guess I would characterize it as an exit ramp from regular thinking to the borders of transhumanism.

• Life in Our Phage World (review)
• Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities (website; review)
• Peopleware
• Japanese Love Hotels: A Cultural History (review)
• Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams
• Theological Incorrectness: Why Religious People Believe What They Shouldn't, Slone (review)
• Japan Edge: The Insider's Guide to Japanese Pop Subculture

The tale of Hodja Nasreddin by Leonid Solovyov, translated into English and available on Amazon. Based on folk tales. A story about a man who falls in love, saves people from being sold into slavery, rehabilitates the Thief of Baghdad and never ever surrenders, no matter the odds.

And he said he'd live forever.

And there's a Beast called Cat in it.

Lammas Night by Katherine Kurtz

Never judge a book from its trashy-ass cover. This one shines inside. The story is about a bunch of magick-users, wiccans, witches, neopagans using magic to keep Hitler from invading Britain in 1940. The point is, the author presents all these occult practices so logically, so believably, such a down-to-earth way that I almost started to doubt if it this kind of stuff may even really work. For a non-fiction work that would be considered a dark art, but for a fiction work, it is just being truly excellent at creating a suspension of disbelief.

Highly recommended for Eliezer as it can give ideas for HPMOR.

Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge. Near-future that felt very plausible, I think because it avoids being overly optimistic or overly pessimistic. And the plot threads converged very nicely.

• Palimpsests, Scholz & Harcourt (meh; Scholz's bits are good, Harcourt's are bad, and the whole is less than the sum of it parts, as interesting as some parts of the final section are)

Floornight is an original work in progress by nostalgebraist. It reminds me of Fine Structure in some ways.

• Dead Birds
• A State of Mind

I recently watched After The Dark, which has a very neat storytelling premise, but isn't actually that good.

It features a philosophy teacher running a thought experiment with his class of 18-year-olds on the last day of term, in which they're all given an identity and have to argue for their inclusion in a bunker to survive a nuclear holocaust and repopulate the human race. We cut between their classroom discussions and cinematic depictions of the scenarios they're role-playing.

It's not brilliantly done, and the sentiment it ends up pushing would give most LW readers an apoplexy, but it's an example of a film which I'd like to see done well.

Death Is Optional A Conversation: Yuval Noah Harari, Daniel Kahneman [3.4.15]

http://edge.org/conversation/yuval_noah_harari-daniel_kahneman-death-is-optional

The money quote:

KAHNEMAN: You seem to be describing this as something that is already happening. Are you referring to developments such as the plans to do away with death? That absolutely would not be a mass project. But could you elaborate on that?

.HARARI: Yes, the attitude now towards disease and old age and death is that they are basically technical problems. It is a huge revolution in human thinking. Throughout history, old age and death were always treated as metaphysical problems, as something that the gods decreed, as something fundamental to what defines humans, what defines the human condition and reality.

Even a few years ago, very few doctors or scientists would seriously say that they are trying to overcome old age and death. They would say no, I am trying to overcome this particular disease, whether it's tuberculosis or cancer or Alzheimers. Defeating disease and death, this is nonsense, this is science fiction.

But, the new attitude is to treat old age and death as technical problems, no different in essence than any other disease. It's like cancer, it's like Alzheimers, it's like tuberculosis. Maybe we still don't know all the mechanisms and all the remedies, but in principle, people always die due to technical reasons, not metaphysical reasons. In the middle ages, you had an image of how does a person die? Suddenly, the Angel of Death appears, and touches you on the shoulder and says, "Come. Your time has come." And you say, "No, no, no. Give me some more time." And Death said, "No, you have to come." And that's it, that is how you die.

We don't think like that today. People never die because the Angel of Death comes, they die because their heart stops pumping, or because an artery is clogged, or because cancerous cells are spreading in the liver or somewhere. These are all technical problems, and in essence, they should have some technical solution. And this way of thinking is now becoming very dominant in scientific circles, and also among the ultra-rich who have come to understand that, wait a minute, something is happening here. For the first time in history, if I'm rich enough, maybe I don't have to die.

KAHNEMAN: Death is optional.

HARARI: Death is optional. And if you think about it from the viewpoint of the poor, it looks terrible, because throughout history, death was the great equalizer. The big consolation of the poor throughout history was that okay, these rich people, they have it good, but they're going to die just like me. But think about the world, say, in 50 years, 100 years, where the poor people continue to die, but the rich people, in addition to all the other things they get, also get an exemption from death. That's going to bring a lot of anger.

Everything is heritable:

• "Genetic contributions to variation in general cognitive function: a meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies in the CHARGE consortium (n=53949)", Davies et al 2015 (excerpts)
• "Genetic influence on family socioeconomic status and children's intelligence", Trzaskowski et al 2014 (excerpts)
• "Comparative analysis of the domestic cat genome reveals genetic signatures underlying feline biology and domestication", Montague et al 2014 (commentary; complex behavioral traits can be modified by relatively small shifts in many genes)

Politics/religion:

• "What Politicians Believe About Their Constituents: Asymmetric Misperceptions and Prospects for Constituency Control" (excerpts)
• "The Deflationist: How Paul Krugman found politics"/"Paul Krugman Is Brilliant, but Is He Meta-Rational?"
• "Father, Son and the Double Helix" (Gender politics of maternity/paternity DNA testing in India.)
• Wittgenstein's "Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough"
• "North Korean border guards prefer married women?" (commentary)

Statistics/AI/meta-science:

• "50 Years of Deep Learning and Beyond: an Interview with Jürgen Schmidhuber"
• "Interpreting observational studies: why empirical calibration is needed to correct p-values", Schuemie et al 2012 (excerpts)
• "Large-Scale Simultaneous Hypothesis Testing: The Choice of a Null Hypothesis", Efron 2004

Psychology/biology:

• "The Trip Treatment: Research into psychedelics, shut down for decades, is now yielding exciting results"
• "Intelligence: Is it the epidemiologists' elusive 'fundamental cause' of social class inequalities in health?", Gottfredson 2004 (excerpts)
• "Low-dose paroxetine exposure causes lifetime declines in male mouse body weight, reproduction and competitive ability as measured by the novel organismal performance assay", Gaukler et al 2015 (excerpts)
• "There is Only Awe" (on Jaynes's Bicameral Mind Theory)
• "A Novel BHLHE41 Variant is Associated with Short Sleep and Resistance to Sleep Deprivation in Humans", Pellegrino et al 2014
• "Refugees of the Modern World: The "electrosensitive" are moving to a cellphone-free town. But is their disease real?"
• "How fast does the Grim Reaper walk? Receiver operating characteristics curve analysis in healthy men aged 70 and over"

Technology:

• "If the NSA has been hacking everything, how has nobody seen them coming?"
• "Freedom Zero" ("In the long run, the utility of all non-Free software approaches zero. All non-Free software is a dead end.")
• "The Well Deserved Fortune of Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin creator, Visionary and Genius"
• Project Iceworm
• "The Postmodern Ponzi Scheme: Empirical Analysis of High-Yield Investment Programs", Moore 2012 (excerpts)
• Reed Richards Is Useless

Economics:

• "Automation and Employment", Richard Posner
• "Does Affirmative Action Do What It Should?"
• "Brickyard Blues: Numbed by cold, pelted by rain, enduring smashed fingers and toes, poorly paid brick salvagers keep coming back for more"
• "How the recession turned middle-class jobs into low-wage jobs"

Philosophy:

• "What is Wrong with Our Thoughts? A Neo-Positivist Credo"
• "Scientists discover that atheists might not exist, and that’s not a joke"

subjectively, an octopus is probably something like an unruly parliament of snakes ruled by a dog.

Google wants to rank websites based on facts not links

The trustworthiness of a web page might help it rise up Google's rankings if the search giant starts to measure quality by facts, not just links.

...

Instead of counting incoming links, [Google's system for measuring the trustworthiness of a page] – which is not yet live – counts the number of incorrect facts within a page. "A source that has few false facts is considered to be trustworthy," says the team (arxiv.org/abs/1502.03519v1). The score they compute for each page is its Knowledge-Based Trust score.

The software works by tapping into the Knowledge Vault, the vast store of facts that Google has pulled off the internet. Facts the web unanimously agrees on are considered a reasonable proxy for truth. Web pages that contain contradictory information are bumped down the rankings.

J. E. Farnham. Unusual methods of antigen transport. - Grana. - 1986. - 25 (1):89-92. Available online. Not a conprehensive review, just a couple case studies, but (subjectively) beautiful. I wish TV medical shows were based on this kind of stuff.

What scares the new atheists The vocal fervour of today’s missionary atheism conceals a panic that religion is not only refusing to decline – but in fact flourishing

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/03/what-scares-the-new-atheists

Tiesto at the Bellagio

Exultant music and fountains

Every rational!Naruto fic I encounter keeps topping the preceding ones - I suspect my head will implode if I ever attempt to read the canon story at this point.

The best one yet is The Waves Arisen. Everyone is very sensible, shadow cloning is more broken than ever, and patiently listening to giant slugs pays off in the end.

Yurikuma Arashi (8 episodes in). From the creator of Utena and Penguindrum[1]; romance/drama with a lot of... weirdness. And bears. Has this repetitive structure where a lot of it calls back to itself; the first three episodes are slow but after that it becomes very gripping, with some really clever surprises that seem obvious in retrospect. Has just the right level of pretentiousness; lots of "what is love?" themes and a lot of what I'm told is metaphor but have no problem enjoying on the object level. Lots of fanservice but it usually manages to seem artistic about it.

[1] Though I'm not sure how much stock to put in that; I disliked Penguindrum, my friend liked it, and we both like Yurikuma Arashi.

Mushishi. A relaxing and atmospheric anime series consisting of episodic, folk-tale-esque stories set in a slightly mystical old Japan where a man travels the countryside dealing with problems caused by insect-like spirits. The stories are generally really tightly written and satisfying with an above-average level of rationality for the subject matter. Several times I felt that the story was going somewhere dumb, only to be pleasantly surprised by the actual outcome. Also quite unpredictable in the sense that good, bad, and ambiguous outcomes are all common.

Touches on horror tropes often but I didn't find it scary (and I'm quite sensitive to horror). Also suitable for those who don't like typical anime tropes - it's quite serious and doesn't feature boob-falling reaction-face type shenanigans.

• Cowboy Bebop (no attempt at a review because come on, I'm not that arrogant)

Finally got around to watching Tatami Galaxy. Found it a very pleasing take on the Groundhog Day closed timelike curve genre; a nice exploration of the idea that blaming external circumstances and even individual seemingly pivotal decisions is not enough to explain poor outcomes.

Saenai Heroine no Sodatekata.

It's an anime about... making a game... that appears fully congruent with the contents of the anime...

In short, it seems to be a metacircular anime. It's worth watching because of the way it plays with tropes, and the origin of those tropes; it's marginally annoying in that many of the tropes it plays with are of the harem genre. There may be something more going on in the background, but I haven't watched enough to tell. It may be especially interesting to people who have long experience with japanese animation.

The first episode is fully representative, so I'd recommend having a look if the above appeals.

Artists I've been listening to recently:

• Tycho - "See"
• Funkadelic - "Maggot Brain"
• Owsey - "She Who is Afraid to Explore Potential"
• Bonobo - "Terrapin"
• Animal Collective - "My Girls"

Misc:

• "Lufthan" (Magyar Posse; We Will Carry You Over The Mountains) [postrock]
• "Sobe(Original Mix)" (Jordan F) [electronic]

Doujin:

• "秋桜の終わりの季節によせる抒情詩〜ピアノとオーケストラのために〜" (masaki kawasaki; AD:PIANOⅢ {C87}) [electronic/instrumental]
• "Too much for a nightcap" (Casket; Musicatlas P. II {M3-34}) [Celtic]
• "Home" (Kaname Shigeyoshi; AD:PIANOⅢ {C87}) [instrumental]
• "Sicureada" (ジャージと愉快な仲間たち; Musicatlas P. II {M3-34}) [folk]
• "満たされた時" (もふ@ feat. In The Blue; merrow -in the blue Vocal Collection- {M3-34}) [vocal]

Touhou:

• "Wanna be free" (Rei Shimizu; Cafe de Touhou 6 {C87}) [jazz]
• "Brilliant Girls" (Okawa Tomoya; Cafe de Touhou 6 {C87}) [jazz]
• "地獄でお茶を" (sisimai-3go; Cafe de Touhou 6 {C87}) [jazz]
• "The Eternal Steam Engine" (あきやまうに; Thermonuclear Titan Hisoutensoku ~ Touhou Hisoutensoku ORIGINAL SOUND TRACK {C77}) [orchestral]
• "The Eternal Steam Engine" (Kou Ogata; 東方Projectごちゃまぜアイリッシュ風プレ版楽曲CD {R10}) [folk]
• "Temperature Difference" (deitarabotchi feat. senya; The time my thoughts turned into history {C87}) [electronic]
• "Viva Evolution Introduction" (sumijun feat. 長尾ちえみ; Viva Evolution {C87}) [Jpop/electronic]
• "Don't let you down" (sumijun feat. 長尾ちえみ; Viva Evolution {C87}) [Jpop/electronic]

Steelwing - Point of Singularity

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2exXBdU-6a4

I'm honestly surprised the band (I did not search for the song) was never mentioned here.

Powered by Osteons is about applied archeology, pretty cool stuff written very well.

Includes reviews of Bones.

Apologies for the delay this month. Yesterday I failed to notice that February was over.