ArisKatsaris comments on December 2013 Media Thread

[ArisKatsaris]

Short Online Texts Thread

[gwern]

Technology:

• “Welcome to the Jungle” (CPU design and Moore’s law)

• Debian bug report #217243: “wget: Possibility to really reject files on recursive downloads” (serious gotcha everyone needs to know about if they are trying to spider with wget a site requiring cookies/​login, like, for example, a black-market forum)

• “Computational Complexity of Air Travel Planning” (excerpts)

• “RSA Key Extraction via Low-Bandwidth Acoustic Cryptanalysis”

• “You advocate a __ approach to calendar reform” (I always sigh when I have to deal with any date-time programming.)

• “Does Copyright Affect Creative Reuse? Evidence from the Digitization of Baseball Digest”, Nagaraj 2013 (excerpts)

• Baal (Impressive. A ring of child pornographers communicating securely via PGP & alt.anonymous maildrops, rotating keys regularly, where the bust only happened because a member was busted for non-ring-related problems and the only busted members were violating the Hushmail lesson by using a third-party service.)

• “How close would you have to be to a supernova to get a lethal dose of neutrino radiation?”

Science/​medicine/​statistics:

• “The Intelligent Plant: Scientists debate a new way of understanding flora” (also worth reading: “If a Lion Could Talk: Animal Intelligence and the Evolution of Consciousness”)

• “Embryo Selection for Cognitive Enhancement: Curiosity or Game-changer?”, Shulman & Bostrom 2013 (excerpts)

• “Were James Bond’s drinks shaken because of alcohol induced tremor?”, Johnson et al 2013

• “So depression is an inflammatory disease, but where does the inflammation come from?”, Berk et al 2013 (excerpts)

• “Change in Against Malaria Foundation recommendation status (room-for-more-funding-related)”

• Replication backlash

• “When Mice Mislead” (“Of Mice (Studies) and Men”)

• “The dangers of zero and one” (Fun example from genetics research of how even extremely weak priors are useful)

• “Do Certain Countries Produce Only Positive Results? A Systematic Review of Controlled Trials”, Vickers et al 1998 (excerpts)

• “China’s academic scandal: call toll-free hotlines to get your name published”

Writing:

• “Roomlore is the lore anent heavenly bodies such as stars, wanderers, moons, star clouds, star clusters, and starswirls, their bodily workings, and their gathering....” (written in Anglish)

• “Deadline” (science fiction story)

• Excerpt from The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien (Atomic theory proves that bicycles are plotting against us.)

• “Lady Yodo-Dono” (poem)

Politics:

• ‘Review of “The Rise of China vs. The Logic of Strategy” by Edward Luttwak’

• “David Walsh’s wisdom beats the odds ”

• “Snowden: Hero”

• “Good News You Might Have Missed in 2013” (Bill Gates reviews global health & poverty progress)

General:

• “Like I Was Jesus: How to bring a nine-year-old to Christ”

• “We Are All MsScribe” (sockpuppeting, fandom wars)

• Preference falsification

• “An opportunity cost model of subjective effort and task performance”, Kurzban et al 2013 (willpower; discussion)

• “Making a kangling for chöd” (An unexpectedly practical discussion by David Chapman of femur-flutes.)

• “100 Years Later, the Crossword Is Still the King of Puzzles”

Philosophy:

• “Discussions for information” (These are some of the reasons I’ve soured on discussion as a way of exchanging information and evaluating new stuff.)

• “Scott Aaronson interview on Philosophical Progress”