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.)
Basically, but they were willing to settle for someone who would pretend to be a walrus for a few hours each day in exchange for free rent. A pity it’s gone, it was fairly funny even if I have to doubt its veracity.
“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)
“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)
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
What about constructing a decent fantasy-world economics? ;)
What about constructing a decent fantasy-world economics? ;)
An alt-historical fic maybe, but you’d have to input an entire world of data to construct a fantasy world. Seriously, the world in ORBIS is amazing: they have detailed geographical tiles of land/shore/water/various-routes, water current speed in both direction, fees for each point to point, variation in fees by time of year… You’d spend more time constructing your world in ORBIS than it would take to write your novel with some reasonable guesses as to plausible economics.
Yeah, realistic worlds are not necessarily optimized for being entertaining. That’s why fiction exists, after all—because we’re not satisfied with nonfiction.
“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).”)
“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.)
Serious question, do you naturally find high quality media the most entertaining or did you train yourself to make better use of your leisure time? I can’t exactly define high quality media but I would say that all of those links are higher quality than youtube and online video games for instance.
I specifically quit video games to try to force myself to more important stuff. I do spend time on Youtube (as you can see from my music comments), but mostly for music which can be put in the background.
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.
Short Online Texts Thread
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
The walrus lodger add is down; could you explain what the add was for exactly?
I mean…
Did someone want a walrus as a lodger?
Basically, but they were willing to settle for someone who would pretend to be a walrus for a few hours each day in exchange for free rent. A pity it’s gone, it was fairly funny even if I have to doubt its veracity.
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”
What about constructing a decent fantasy-world economics? ;)
Truly remarkable though...
An alt-historical fic maybe, but you’d have to input an entire world of data to construct a fantasy world. Seriously, the world in ORBIS is amazing: they have detailed geographical tiles of land/shore/water/various-routes, water current speed in both direction, fees for each point to point, variation in fees by time of year… You’d spend more time constructing your world in ORBIS than it would take to write your novel with some reasonable guesses as to plausible economics.
I know of at least one author who did exactly that (not with Orbis though). Predictably, the outcome was pretty boring.
Who was that?
Yeah, realistic worlds are not necessarily optimized for being entertaining. That’s why fiction exists, after all—because we’re not satisfied with nonfiction.
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”
Gwern, are you human?
Serious question, do you naturally find high quality media the most entertaining or did you train yourself to make better use of your leisure time? I can’t exactly define high quality media but I would say that all of those links are higher quality than youtube and online video games for instance.
I specifically quit video games to try to force myself to more important stuff. I do spend time on Youtube (as you can see from my music comments), but mostly for music which can be put in the background.
That okcupid link is really worth checking out… if you want to be depressed about humanity.
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