July 2014 Media Thread

ArisKatsaris

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.
If you think there should be a thread for a particular genre of media, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.

Rules:

Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.
If you think there should be a thread for a particular genre of media, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.

Short Online Texts Thread

5 Baffling Discoveries That Prove History Books Are Wrong from Cracked. They are:

Cocaine Discovered in Egyptian Mummies, Ancient Hebrew Inscribed on a Rock in New Mexico, Ancient Roman Statues in Mexico, A Norse Coin in Maine, and Ancient Japanese Speakers in New Mexico.

4gwern12y

Politics/religion: * Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, Graeber 2004 (excerpts) * "A Genome-Wide Analysis of Liberal and Conservative Political Attitudes", Hatemi et al 2011 (excerpts) * "Growing Up Sexually in Europe" * "Losing the War" (WWII in propaganda vs as experienced) * Basil Zaharoff * "A Filthy History: When New Yorkers Lived Knee-Deep in Trash" * "Bin Laden raid reveals 'state failure': Leaked report offers scathing assessment of how al-Qaeda chief was able to evade detection" (and if you believe that...) * "New New Fatherhood in the Inner City: A new book reveals how poor urban dads are reversing gender roles in caring for their children, but not being providers" * Higher education is signaling * "'Why did you shoot me? I was reading a book': The new warrior cop is out of control" * "U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement" * "What Can the Middle East Learn From What's Happening in Qatar?" * "Xhosa cattle-killing movement and famine (1854-1858)" Psychology: * "A preliminary report of kayak-angst among the Eskimo of West Greenland: a study in sensory deprivation", Gussow 1963 * "Do Rational People Exist?" * "Social Psychology Is A Flamethrower" * "Hikikomori as a Gendered Issue: Analysis on the discourse of acute social withdrawal in contemporary Japan", Dziesinski 2004 (excerpts) * "Drugs and the Meaning of Life", Sam Harris * "Fooled twice, shame on who? Problems with Mechanical Turk study samples, part 2" * training murder investigations: * Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death * "1930s: Nutshell studies of unexplained death" * Death in Diorama * "These Gruesome Dollhouse Death Scenes Helped Create Forensic Science"

9gwern12y

Technology: * "In the Beginning was the Command Line", Neal Stephenson * Data Compression Explained, Matt Mahoney * "A Pedagogy of Diminishing Returns: Scientific Involution across Three Generations of Nuclear Weapons Science", Gusterson 2005 * "Responses to Catastrophic AGI Risk: A Survey", Sotala & Yampolskiy 2013 * "It's All About The Benjamins: An empirical study on incentivizing users to ignore security advice", Christin et al (excerpts) * "Visualizing Algorithms" (sorting, maze-drawing) * "how I created 8088 Domination, which is a program that displays fairly decent full-motion video on a 1981 IBM PC" * "Fixing Unix/Linux/POSIX Filenames: Control Characters (such as Newline), Leading Dashes, and Other Problems" (on the nigh-insuperable difficulties of correct filename handling) * "TCP ex Machina: Computer-Generated Congestion Control" ("Although the RemyCCs appear to work well on networks whose parameters fall within or near the limits of what they were prepared for - even beating in-network schemes at their own game and even when the design range spans an order of magnitude variation in network parameters - we do not yet understand clearly why they work, other than the observation that they seem to optimize their intended objective well. We have attempted to make algorithms ourselves that surpass the generated RemyCCs, without success.") * Ultra-long-term civilizations: planets warmed by neutrinos Statistics: * "Knowing When to Stop: How to gamble if you must-the mathematics of optimal stopping" * "Model Combination and Adjustment" * "Big Data: New Tricks for Econometrics", Varian 2014 (Readable overview of some machine learning techniques for economics.) * "If correlation doesn't imply causation, then what does?", Nielsen * "Sequence Thinking vs. Cluster Thinking" (False dichotomy - "cluster thinking" is simply "sequence thinking" sans arbitrary restrictions of hypotheses/models, like a cryonics analysis which only uses conjunctions and nev