June 2015 Media Thread

• Ava's demon is a somewhat experimental piece of web media, somewhere between webcomic and slideshow, that updates relatively slowly and I keep rediscovering and splurging on every couple of months. It doesn't get enough love and really should be more widely known. An incredibly pretty dystopia, with rather well thought through characters.

Whateley Academy is a superhero shared universe with strong world building, multiple quasi-rasionalist characters, and many characters who are irrational in ways that are sympathetic and believable rather than because they're holding the idiot ball. It is also chock full of witty dialog and big on queer characters, in particular many of the characters (including most of the protagonists) are some mixture of trans in the normal sense, intersex, or undergoing changes to there sexual characteristics as a side effect of their origin. I've gotten the impression that it is pretty similar to both Worm and Tales of the MU but don't know enough about those series to confirm this. -ETA also all the trigger warnings, seriously all of them.

Everything is heritable:

• "Meta-analysis of the heritability of human traits based on fifty years of twin studies", Polderman et al 2015 (excerpts)
• on the genetic basis of rat and mink tameness

Politics/religion:

• "Misperceiving Inequality", Gimpelson & Treisman 2015 (excerpts)
• "Land without Plea Bargaining: How the Germans Do It", Langbein 1979 (how the German legal system avoids our own reliance on plea-bargaining to send most defendants to jail without trial)
• "The Nitrous Oxide Philosopher"
• "The Science of Sex Abuse: Is it right to imprison people for heinous crimes they have not yet committed?"
• "Why the future won’t be genetically homogeneous"
• "Aged Heterogeneity: Fact or Fiction? The Fate of Diversity in Gerontological Research", Nelson & Dannefer 1992

Statistics/AI/meta-science:

• "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks"
• "Using N-of-1 Trials to Improve Patient Management and Save Costs", Scuffham 2010
• "Assessing Kurzweil: the results"
• "A survey of Bayesian predictive methods for model assessment, selection and comparison", Vehtari & Ojanen
• "The Nine Circles of Scientific Hell"
• "Leaving Office Feet First: Death In Congress", Maltzman et al 1996
• "Nuclear weapon statistics using monoids, groups, and modules in Haskell"
• "Flat Priors and Other Improbable Tales"

Psychology/biology:

• "Persistence of Long-Term Memory in Vitrified and Revived C. elegans", Vita-More & Barranco 2015 (excerpts)
• "The effects of oral iron supplementation on cognition in older children and adults: a systematic review and meta-analysis", Falkingham et al 2010
• "Historical Review and Appraisal of Research on the Learning, Retention, and Transfer of Human Motor Skills", Adams 1987
• "Programmer Interrupted"
• "E unibus pluram: television and U.S. fiction"
• 2,4-Dinitrophenol
• "What’s in a Color? The Unique Human Health Effects of Blue Light", Holzman 2010
• "Diving Deep into Danger"
• "Late Night Thoughts on Reading Scientology"

Technology:

• "Epigrams in Programming", Alan Perlis
• "Implications of Historical Trends in the Electrical Efficiency of Computing", Koomey et al 2011
• "How Much of the Web Is Archived?"
• "Actual Facebook Graph Searches"

Economics:

• "Overkill: An avalanche of unnecessary medical care is harming patients physically and financially. What can we do about it?"
• "The Insourcing Boom"; "The March of Robots Into Chinese Factories"
• "Jerven on Measuring African Poverty and Progress"
• "Online price discrimination: Conspicuous by its absence"/"Price Discrimination and the Illusion of Fairness"
• "On the front lines of humanity’s high-tech, global war on rats"
• "Smart Machines and Long-Term Misery", Sachs & Kotlikoff (excerpts); "The Ricardo effect in Europe (Germany fact of the day)"; "Four Futures: One thing we can be certain of is that capitalism will end"; "Has the ideas machine broken down?"; "The Post-Productive Economy"
• "Harder Choices Matter Less"

Philosophy:

• "The time resolution of the St Petersburg paradox", Peters 2011
• "The Space Child’s Mother Goose"

Fiction:

• "Man And The Echo"
• "Single-Bit Error"
• "Toward an Algorithmic Criticism", Ramsay 2003

Misc:

• "A Rockslide in Action: An Arch Falls into the Sea"

sd

This Video Will Make You Angry by CGP Grey is a great discussion on the meme-ic virility of controversial arguments.

https://youtu.be/GYQrNfSmQ0M Professor Stuart Russell - The Long-Term Future of (Artificial) Intelligence (May 22, 2015)
https://youtu.be/EX1CIVVkWdE ICLR 2015 Invited Talk: David Silver (Google DeepMind) "Deep Reinforcement Learning" (May 22, 2015)

ds

Montreuil prison study a Less Miserables fic in which M. Madeleine (Jean Valejean's name when he lived in Montreuil) and Inspector Javert decide to see what effect prison has on 'good men' (as in, not criminals).

Pokémon: The Origin of Species, by daystar721. I'm sure it's been suggested before (I only checked back through until January of this year), but it is an exceptionally interesting work of rationalist fiction in my mind; I've always been interested in Pokémon, so it's great to see something with a rationalist bent to it.

Introductory discrete math textbook (pdf) courtesy of MIT. I prefer it to Rosen, which is currently recommended in the MIRI research guide, although I think there exist students who would do better with Rosen's book.

(How to tell which book you should choose? Well, since this one is Creative Commons, and therefore free, I'd try this one. If you find it's not saying enough words per theorem, try Rosen. If you think it's saying too many words per theorem, try these lecture notes. A recommendation to LW's list of best textbooks is forthcoming, which will contain a complete discussion.)

An earlier version of the book corresponds to these videos lectures, which I find to be excellent, as far as lectures go.

• Drift into Failure, Dekker (review)

Log Horizon

If you liked the anime, you will likely find that this is better. If you felt that the anime was flawed, you may well find that the book is not, or not in the same way.

The story is slow, with a great deal of explanations and musings, especially in the beginning; it's trying to paint an entire world, and that shows. It is the sort of thing that is very difficult to adapt to an animated format. The book, however, was well worth the read.

Only the first volume is out yet, the second to come in July.

• Ready Player One, Cline 2011 (review)
• A Shropshire Lad, Housman 1896 (review)
• Floornight, nostalgebraist (recommended on SSC; overall cool - interesting concepts and developments and various bright spots compensate for some of the issues like pacing and wooden writing)

Not a media report or recommendation, just an observation on the reactions to two particular pieces of fiction. Spoilers ahoy for Gravity and Interstellar if anybody cares.

The reactions by popular science commentators to two films, Gravity and Interstellar, fascinate me. Not their interpretations of artistic merit (oh god how arguments between the two sets of fans get out of hand), but what they chose to criticize in a nitpicky way.

When Gravity came out, Neil Tyson and other scientific commentators were extraordinarily fast to start complaining about stretched-through-the-breaking-point orbital mechanics, lack of cooling undergarments, relative velocities being too low, etc. Such commentary dominated their discussion of the film.

When Interstellar came out, it was beloved by many of the same commentators, praising it's portrayal of general relativistic physics. But this movie contained almost exactly the same errors as Gravity multiplied in scale by more orders of magnitude than I can figure out - once they get through the wormhole they lose any and all sense of scale and energy and size and logic-in-spacecraft-design.

I have been trying to figure out why there was such a large difference in nitpicking reactions. The only reason I can think of that makes any sense is that it was an implicit reaction to the fact that Interstellar explicitly mythologized space as the grand destiny of humanity, while Gravity was 'merely' a drama-in-space treating space as a place you go to do things you can't do on earth which will kill you horribly when things go wrong, without any implicit mythologization. One was just a movie that happened to be in space and use space as an evocative metaphor for human events, while the other was explicitly a 'rah rah humans rah rah progress rah rah the grand destiny of mankind' pep rally mythologizing space and interstellar expansion to a massive degree.

What does this say?

• Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun (romantic-comedy, heavier on the comedy; runs through the standard shoujo tropes like an extraordinarily dense love-interest and a school 'prince' and crossdressing, but is saved from mediocrity by giving ample time to the other characters, and its quasi-meta device of the love-interest himself being a shoujo mangaka which allows subversion of and commenting on the cliches in question. In particular, protagonist Sakura Chiyo is a great character: ridiculously cute designs and faces (good since as protagonist you'll be seeing a lot of her), new seiyuu Ari Ozawa turns in possibly the best sarcastic narrator since Haruhi's Kyon, and Sakura reminds us that it is possible to be kind and feminine without being dumb or a doormat.)

Ex Machina. A story about AI that was about as realistic as is reasonable to expect from a Hollywood movie, made by people with an actual clue about the subject matter.

• _Pumping Iron_ (1977 propaganda-documentary about American bodybuilders; it follows a young Arnold Schwarzenegger last competition and some rivals. It's interesting to watch Schwarzenegger before he became really famous, the insouciance with which he treats everyone & basks in admiration & blows off any slightly onerous obligations like his father's funeral and calculating choices sabotaging his rivals & self-promoting, as he prepares to jump ship to an acting career, his only apparent qualification the volume of his muscles. (I should note that the Wikipedia article for PI notes that it's a bit controversial whether or not the funeral thing happened, but nevertheless, Schwarzenegger is clearly trying to build an image.) I'm not familiar with bodybuilders but they come off during the competition as freakish: so muscular that they often pass into the repulsive and I stared fascinated at the flexing meat on display. Of course, PI is a very successful puff piece aimed at glamorizing bodybuilding - doesn't go anywhere near any questions of health issues or the steroid abuse although everyone is of course juicing like crazy, or into any details about how bodybuilders can get so large or what motivates them to do this, aside from one interview segment touching on childhood bullying, which had an almost Charles Atlas vibe.)

Touhou:

• "Old Fantasia" (Sound of Swing; In Walked Cat's {C86}) [jazz]
• "恋と水と石炭と" (ししまい三号; 大楽符 {C77}) [classical]
• "水彩人形" (ししまい三号; 大楽符 {C77}) [classical]
• "空の間に間に" (ししまい三号; 大楽符 {C77}) [classical]
• "Dazzling You" (Maurits"禅"Cornelis feat. Vivienne; Origin of Love {C87}) [jazz]
• "少女綺想曲" (TAM×KEIGO KANZAKI; 東方バイオリンロック永-NAGARAE- {C87}) [instrumental rock]
• "エクステンドアッシュ" (TAM×KEIGO KANZAKI; 東方バイオリンロック永-NAGARAE- {C87}) [instrumental rock]
• "月見草" (TAM×KEIGO KANZAKI; 東方バイオリンロック永-NAGARAE- {C87}) [instrumental rock]

Kantai Collection:

• "鎮守府の序曲" (伊藤 翼; Kantai Philharmonic Orchestra {C86}) [orchestral]

Got introduced to Noize MC (sic) - Russian rap / hip hop. Not even always political. Sometimes they sing in English. Their music videos can be pretty trippy.

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