September 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 post only under one of the already created subthreads, and never directly under the parent media thread.
Use the "Other Media" thread if you believe the piece of media you want to discuss doesn't fit under any of the established categories.
Use the "Meta" thread if you want to discuss about the monthly media thread itself (e.g. to propose adding/removing/splitting/merging subthreads, or to discuss the type of content properly belonging to each subthread) or for any other question or issue you may have about the thread or the rules.

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 post only under one of the already created subthreads, and never directly under the parent media thread.
Use the "Other Media" thread if you believe the piece of media you want to discuss doesn't fit under any of the established categories.
Use the "Meta" thread if you want to discuss about the monthly media thread itself (e.g. to propose adding/removing/splitting/merging subthreads, or to discuss the type of content properly belonging to each subthread) or for any other question or issue you may have about the thread or the rules.

Short Online Texts Thread

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)

18gwern12y

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"

11[anonymous]12y

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