The Physics of Information Processing Superobjects: Daily Life Among the Jupiter Brains by Anders Sanberg (1999) - paper discussing what computers up against the limits of physics might look like (skip to the end for some interesting examples)

August reading roundup; everything is heritable:

• "A Gene That Makes You Need Less Sleep?" (see "Heritability of Performance Deficit Accumulation During Acute Sleep Deprivation in Twins", "The Transcriptional Repressor DEC2 Regulates Sleep Length in Mammals", & "A Novel BHLHE41 Variant is Associated with Short Sleep and Resistance to Sleep Deprivation in Humans")
• How harmful is smoking during pregnancy - after controlling for the sort of people who would do that?
• "On the genetic architecture of intelligence and other quantitative traits", Hsu 2014
• "Not by Twins Alone: Using the Extended Family Design to Investigate Genetic Influence on Political Beliefs", Hatemi et al 2010 (excerpts)
• Smoking is heritable but not through shared environment
• "The Importance of Heritability in Psychological Research: The Case of Attitudes", Tesser 1993 (excerpts)
• "Inheritance of migratory direction in a bird species: a cross-breeding experiment with SE- and SW-migrating blackcaps (Sylvia atricapilla)", Helbig 1991 ("For blackcap warblers, the direction of migration is clearly innate, so crossbreeding a group of blackcaps who flew south for fall migration with a group that oriented westward resulted in offspring who flew in a southwesterly direction.")

Statistics/AI/meta-science:

• "Personal reflections on lessons learned from randomized trials involving newborn infants, 1951 to 1967", Silverman 2003 (9 out of 10 dead babies agree: even cherished 'obvious' beliefs must be tested by RCTs)
• "Publication bias in the social sciences: Unlocking the file drawer", Franco et al 2014 (Nature; Andrew Gelman; excerpts)
• "Better Estimation When Perfection Is Unlikely: A Bayesian Example"
• "The Lyme Wars: The Lyme-disease infection rate is growing. So is the battle over how to treat it.", "What Science Needs"
• "Mathematics in the Age of the Turing Machine", Hales 2013 (excerpts)
• "On the science and ethics of Ebola treatments", "Controlled trials: the 1948 watershed" (excerpts)
• "Academic urban legends", Rekdal 2014
• "In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal"

Psychology:

• "Metabolic costs and evolutionary implications of human brain development", Kuzawa et al 2014 (excerpts)
• "Lead exposure and behavior: effects on antisocial and risky behavior among children and adolescents", Reyes 2014
• "Bastards and Stereotype Accuracy"
• "How are conscientiousness and cognitive ability related to one another? A re-examination of the intelligence compensation hypothesis", Murray et al 2014 (excerpts)
• "Investigating America's elite: Cognitive ability, education, and sex differences", Wai 2013 (excerpts)
• "What Happens to Women Who Are Denied Abortions?"
• "Standard and trace-dose lithium: A systematic review of dementia prevention and other behavioral benefits", Mauer et al 2014
• Puppy pregnancy syndrome

Technology:

• Hal Finney has died (NYT)
• "The Rise and Fall and Rise of Virtual Reality"
• "Hervé This: The world’s weirdest chef; building food, molecule by molecule"
• "Two Centuries of Productivity Growth in Computing", Nordhaus 2007 (excerpts)

Economics:

• "Why Isn't the Whole World Developed? Lessons from the Cotton Mills", Clark 1987 (excerpts)
• "How the Robots Lost: High-Frequency Trading's Rise and Fall"
• "What Do Chinese Dumplings Have to Do With Global Warming?"
• Rag-picker

Politics/religion:

• "The Bomb Didn't Beat Japan... Stalin Did: Have 70 years of nuclear policy been based on a lie?"
• Gombe Chimpanzee War
• Bedford Level experiment
• "The Great Canadian Sperm Shortage"

Fiction:

• 2002 in anime (Overall, not the best year for anime by far, but nevertheless, I would happily rewatch Azumanga Daioh, Haibane Renmei, & RahXephon any number of times, and picked up some interesting suggestions for future watching like Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat in Space.)
• "The Too-Clever Fox"
• TvTropes reviews Nature of Nature's Art webcomic

Misc:

• Evolution of E. Coli over 60k generations
• "War in the womb: A ferocious biological struggle between mother and baby belies any sentimental ideas we might have about pregnancy"
• "A Parable", Dijkstra 1973 (Orienting toilets on train cars.)
• Judas goat
• "The Strange & Curious Tale of the Last True Hermit: For nearly thirty years, a phantom haunted the woods of Central Maine"

The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering - Somewhat changed my view about the scale of wildlife suffering and the sentience of non-domesticated animal species

Trying to See Through: A Unified Theory of Nerddom - On insight porn and what kind of people LW and the related memeplex tend to attract