February 2016 Media Thread

Garakowa: Restore the World

It's a movie about a suspiciously humanlike pair of anti-virus AIs, and their attempt to protect a backup archive of human history from destruction at the hands of sapient viruses. It's compressed a bit more than would be ideal, but otherwise well done.

Practically anything else I could say about it would be a spoiler, so I won't. What happened to humanity? Why are they there? Where do the viruses come from? You'll need to watch it to find out.

The story is also interesting due to the central Friendliness failure being novel, fairly plausible, and extremely disturbing.

• Trailer 1
• Trailer 2

The Mind Illuminated by John Yates is my new favorite meditation instruction book. Has lots of modern neuroscience grounding, completely secular, and presents a very detailed step-by-step instruction on going from not having a daily meditation habit going to attaining very deep concentration states.

Hot Earth Dreams, by Frank Landis.

http://www.amazon.com/Hot-Earth-Dreams-climate-happens/dp/1517799392

46 page sample available here. https://heteromeles.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/hot-earth-dreams-sample1.pdf

Ecology type writes about the likely shape of the next 400,000 years given the fossil fuel pulse of carbon we are producing, the natural cycles the Earth is subject to over that timescale, and how ecological realities have responded to crazy events in the past and human effects in the present. Short version: We will whipsaw up potentially all the way to Eocene level temperatures over a few hundred years, with seas responding in kind over a thousand or two years during which coastlines will be in flux and coastal infrastructure will be very difficult, and then slowly return to the current icehouse climate as geological equilibrium reasserts itself and plunge into another normal ice age some time between 200k and 400k years from now, the Earth's flora and fauna and civilizations getting a one-two punch from the big sudden excursion.

This kind of thorough exploration of a topic is very interesting to me and has inspired me to resume work on my astrobiology writing now that my ridiculous semester is done, such that another post is finally coming soon...

Everything is heritable:

• "Improved CRISPR–Cas9: Safe and Effective?": "High-fidelity CRISPR–Cas9 nucleases with no detectable genome-wide off-target effects"/"Rationally engineered Cas9 nucleases with improved specificity"
• "Shared genetic aetiology between cognitive functions and physical and mental health in UK Biobank (n=112151) and 24 GWAS consortia", Hagenaars et al 2016
• "Top 10 Replicated Findings From Behavioral Genetics", Plomin et al 2016
• "The Muscular Dystrophy Patient and Olympic Medalist with the Same Genetic Disorder"
• "Genetically low vitamin D concentrations and increased mortality: Mendelian randomisation analysis in three large cohorts", Afzal et al 2014

Politics/religion:

• "Once Upon a Jihad" / "Experiencing Ecstasy: How Bad It Is to Be 20 Years Old"
• "Introduction to the Economics of Religion", Iannaccone 1998
• "The Pilot's Tale: At Sea with 90,000 Tons of Diplomacy"
• "Systems, Not Sith: How Inter-service Rivalries Doomed the Galactic Empire"
• "Boss Rail: The disaster that exposed the underside of the boom"
• "Why China should celebrate Columbus Day"

Statistics/AI/meta-science:

• "Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search", Silver et al 2016 (excerpts)
• "The Top A.I. Breakthroughs of 2015" (omits residual learning)
• "Gradient-based Hyperparameter Optimization through Reversible Learning", Maclaurin et al 2015
• "Recognizing and Localizing Endangered Right Whales with Extremely Deep Neural Networks"
• new /r/DecisionTheory subreddit
• "Why do we Sometimes get Nonsense-Correlations between Time-Series? A Study in Sampling and the Nature of Time-Series", Yule 1926 ("the ratio of Catholic vs Protestant marriages correlates r=.95 with the English death rate")
• "Comparison of evidence on harms of medical interventions in randomized and nonrandomized studies", Papanikolaou et al 2006 (How often does correlation=causation? excerpts)

Psychology/biology:

• "A Look Back at 2015 in Longevity Science"
• "Bayesian Belief Polarization", Jern et al 2009
• "Stupider Than You Realize"
• "The philosophical case against sleeping in"
• Frog battery
• "Using Neurotechnologies to Develop Virtues - A Buddhist Approach to Cognitive Enhancement"
• "Be Happier"

Technology:

• "Google releases detailed intervention rates - and the real unsolved problem of robocars"
• "The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work", Rogaway 2015
• "These Tricks Make Virtual Reality Feel Real: Realistic digital spaces need delusions as much as they need detail"
• "Dead reckoning and the exploration explosion"

Economics:

• "Does High School Algebra Pass a Cost-Benefit Test?"
• When will corporations defect (Schneier's Liars and Outliers)
• "Interview: John A. List"
• Jonathan Wild

Philosophy:

• "Technology will destroy human nature"
• "Lord Russell meet Lord Russell"

Fiction:

• "The Star Gauge" of Su Hui

What really happened when NASA faced a "The Martian" like situation.

A short on the FAI problemset: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0PuqSMB8uU ("Rick and Morty - Keep Summer Safe")

I strongly recommend JourneyQuest. It's a very smartly written and well acted fantasy webseries. It starts off mostly humorous but quickly becomes more serious. I think it's the sort of thing most LWers would enjoy. There are two seasons so far, with a third one coming in a few months if the Kickstarter succeeds

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVORGr2fDk8&list=PLB600313D4723E21F

The Present: A heartwarming short animation of a boy and his dog: https://vimeo.com/152985022

Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies

Cost-Effectiveness Analysis (CEA) in Health: The ICER Man Cometh (Version 1) playlist

Cost-Effectiveness Analysis (CEA) in Health: The ICER Man Cometh (V2)

Improving the Health, Safety and Well-Being of Young Adults

Infotainment and implicit attitude hacks

Dirty diaries: 12 feminist porn films produced with substantial support from the Swedish government

Immortal Habits- Tove Lo vs. Marina And The Diamonds (Mashup)

★ U.S. Armed Forces - We Must Fight - President Reagan (HD) 2015 ★

Dmx The Rain

The PURPOSE - Motivational Video

The Hero In You - Motivational Video

Awreeoh, Go head

Jetta - I'd Love To Change The World

Julien Blanc & Teal Swan Teach You How To Find The Feel-Good That’s Already In You

SELF DISCIPLINE - Motivational Video 2016

I Wanna Lick You From Your Head To Your Toes

Awreeoh, it's my turn now

Lil wayne's words of wisdom

Inspiring words from Kanye West

Lil Wayne, Drop the World

Lil Wayne six foot

Through Hell

Robert Greene on being self-reliant

Game Of Thrones - Chaos Chaos is a Ladder

Moment of Clarity

twenty one pilots vs Melanie Martinez - Soaped Out (Mashup)

Marina and the Diamonds & Melanie Martinez - Teen Idle vs Play Date (mashup)

Marina and the Diamonds: Porn is good for the soul

Mother Earth Remixes ft. RHCP, Joe Budden, Busta Rhymes - Fire vs. Snow (Hey Oh) Mashup

edit: wow, is this the first downvoted media thread post? Guess I wont share my love for dizzee rascal! I thought I lifted my game. In the past I got caught up in getting off on the reactions I was getting, rather than what I originally got into posting for: what can I share. That's the theory Julian from RSD has about his fall from grace and I reckon I've committed sins in the same vain. I hope I mature from that like he seems to have.

Can i change all this with a blog post? no. rsdtyler was portrayed as the bad guy in the game, millions of people read that, can he change even that with a blog post? he says no, he can't, in a video. so instead he dropped that mental function of self image..this will help me focus on the action itself, not the self image circuitry. And despite being one of the most vilified groups of people...they have all these videos of them having fun all the time. Karma is unpredictable reinforcement schedule. And it’s approval. Of course things are going to go wrong!

Billions: Show about the war between a hedge fund billionaire and the U.S. Attorney. Recommended for anyone that likes dramatized power plays. It's House of Cards meets Wall Street.

Touhou:

• "ねこまたアキアート" (水橋ゆっきー; Tea Hakugyokurou {C88}) [classical]
• "Lunatic Eyes" (Setsugen; So-ran-e-maki {R12}) [classical]
• "Emotional Skyscraper" (Setsugen; So-ran-e-maki {R12}) [classical]
• "Deaf to All but the Song" (Setsugen; So-ran-e-maki {R12}) [classical]

Doujin:

• "灼耀の内声 -Inclusion Inner Light-" (Morrigan feat. Lily; Citla re:verse -其歌は真言顕す欠片と為りて- {C88}) [orchestral/choral]
• "天照大御神-AMATERAS SYSTEM-" (Morrigan feat. Lily; Citla re:verse -其歌は真言顕す欠片と為りて- {C88}) [orchestral/choral]

How to save a life

Limetown is a faux-NPR docudrama about a secret laboratory town, similar to Oak Ridge, TN. Reporter Lia Haddock starts out trying to piece together the story of how all of Limetown's residents suddenly disappeared, and then she gets sucked in to a rabbit hole of fringe science. It has exceptionally high production values (particularly compared to the other podcasts in this review), but sadly only six episodes were made, with a second season still in vapourware.

The Black Tapes is in the middle of its second season. Alex Reagan starts out making a podcast on paranormal activity and runs across the Strand Institute, a Randi-style debunking shop. Its president, Dr. Richard Strand, keeps his unsolved cases in the titular black VHS cases. (No word on where he gets them.) While it starts out monster-of-the-week, it quickly (and unsurprisingly) gathers up the loose ends into an overarching mythos by the end of the first season. The second season is widely held to be slightly better than the first season.

Tanis is a spin-off of The Black Tapes, in its first season. Producer Nic Silver studies "the last true mystery" in this Information Age: Tanis, a wandering phenomena currently in the Pacific Northwest that either grants you all your dreams or unleashes your greatest nightmare. Sadly, Nic has this thing where he tends to ask questions by repeating the last few words of the previous sentence. Otherwise the mythology is much richer and way more consistent -- this is The Invisibles to TBP's Promethea.

The Message is a downright bizarre 6-episode commerical for a non-consumer General Electric product. It makes less than any conceivable amount of sense.

Firewatch is an exploration game/visual novel set in Shoshone National Park. You play a bearish guy with heartbreaking relationship problems who's decided to become a fire lookout to escape the aforementioned problems.

The park is very pretty; the narrative oscillates between Lost and Sleepless in Seattle, though not in the worst possible way. It's very short -- maybe 4 playable hours, which is a little short for $20.

The Witness is a Myst-like puzzle/exploration game with vaguely rationalist and/or humanist overtones, by the creator of Braid. All puzzles are mazes; however, there are a wide variety of maze mechanics. I managed a somewhat minimal ending condition after ten hours or so of game time.

Not recommended for the color-blind or hearing impaired. (One subsection is devoted to mazes depending on either modality, and color discrimination is needed almost throughout, particularly in the endgame.)

I recently started playing The Talos Principle. I'm just at the first "stage", so I don't know how the game evolves, but it's about a robot whose creators have been evolving for quite some times (its software is version 99, while around you can find notes from versions 10, 11, etc.), and they present themselves as Elohim.
Mechanics-wise, it bears some resemblance to Portal, where you need to manipulate objects around an environment to solve puzzles and collect tiles that allow you to progress.
The graphics is OK (cute, but not at the level of say The vanishing of Ethan Carter), and the learning curve is smooth.
I suspect it's strongly about FAI, with a role reversal (you are the AI, the humans are god). It has a very high playability and I suspect every LWer would enjoy it.

• The momentum chrome extension start screen photo collection.
• Windows lock screen photo access point
• Lovely optimism: The effectiveness of your torture obeys the law of diminishing marginal utility!
• Realistic kissing simulator to get over the fear of kissing