I'm playing around with writing a Chrome extension that identifies countries of the world in the browser and marks them up with expandable, at-a-glance summary data for that country, like GDP per capita, composite index scores (HDI, MPI, etc.), literacy rate, principal exports and so on. I find myself regularly looking this up on Wikipedia anyway, and figured I'd remove the inconvenience of doing so.

This example probably isn't that useful for everyone, but it got me wondering what other sets of things could be marked up in the browser in this way. Another example that occurred to me was legislature voting records, where a similar plugin would provide easy visibility of how elected representatives voted on legislation. Again, not useful for everyone, but I could imagine political junkies getting some use out of it.

Such a set of mark-uppable entities would have to be either identifiable by format (like an ISBN) where the data could be fetched from a remote source, or a finite list of a few hundred items (like countries), where the data could be stored locally. What kinds of things would you like this sort of visibility on in the browser? Is there a set of entities you find yourself tiresomely looking up data for over and over again?

(Partly inspired by the Dictionary of Numbers)

The Elon Musk biography that just came out is quite entertaining, but I didn't any significant actionable knowledge in it.

There's an interesting turn at the end. The author thought at the beginning of the project that Musk was particularly terrible with people. At the end, he says he thinks he gets it: Musk has basically just calculated the work of his companies to be more important that the feelings of its employees, and to go against that calculation would be illogical, which for Musk makes it kind of physically painful. So he'd rather put someone down i... (read more)

I have my genome data from both 23andMe and BGI. I am wondering what to make of it. BGI reports about thirty times as many SNPs as 23andMe. 23andMe: 598897, BGI: 19695817.

Of these, 475801 are reported by both. I looked to see how well they agree with each other, and summarised the results as a count, for each occurring pair of results, of how often that pair occurred. In descending numerical order, and classifying them by type of match or mismatch, this is what I get. (No individual SNPs are identified here.)

87565 CC CC
86952 GG GG
75289 TT TT
75087 A

The conflict between liberty and equality seems to dominate contemporary political philosophy, but do we all understand this conflict only happens when you already have fairly high levels of both? If the lack of liberty means someone gets to give you orders, you are clearly not equal with that someone, so you cannot achieve meaningful equality through repressing liberty. Conversely, why a purely wealth/income inequality is compatible with liberty, there is a more fundamental sense of equal respect or consideration that is a prerequisite for liberty. Libert... (read more)

This Video Will Make You Angry by CGP Grey discusses the meme-ic virility of controversial arguments.

A few different sources have also discussed the idea that we are out of the Age of Information, and into the Age of Attention, and that attention is the currency of the day.

Now, has anyone found these ideas combined in a short online text or video to present the idea that: If you find an idea to be ideologically offensive, the best way to fight it is to not engage it in argument but to starve it of attention and let the cat photo and inspirational quote weeds of social media grow over what ever fertile soil it may have found.

Would a series of posts explaining the basics of Homotopy Type Theory be well accepted here?

Ray Kurzweil spouts more innumerate nonsense. Why does a date 15 years from now sound like some far-off future time to him? I could see how FM-2030 made the year 2030 as the arrival date of the Cool Future sound sort of plausible back in the 1980's. But Ray should know better than to say something like this now:

Ray Kurzweil: Humans will be hybrids by 2030

http://money.cnn.com/2015/06/03/technology/ray-kurzweil-predictions/

I'll give you a prediction I have more confidence in: According to the actuarial tables, a man Ray's age has a 45 percent chance of dying... (read more)

I'm trying to understand fear of public speaking, because that's an emotion I appear to lack entirely.

So if you have it - a little or a lot - can you tell me if it is better when your audience is paying full attention, versus when they're somewhat distracted, looking somewhere else, versus when they're not listening at all but looking at their cellphones or something?

What does it feel like when someone is silently looking at you with a blank expression, and how does that feeling change depending on whether you're speaking?

Maybe I've gone far too deep into the Terrible LessWrong Cult, but could someone remind me why everyone else around me often seems to think that not-thinking and irrationality are happier, more satisfying ways to go through life than thinking clearly about stuff? Because I really don't fucking get it anymore.

Suppose we have a set S of n elements, and we ask people to memorize sequences of these elements, and we find that people can generally easily memorize sequences of length k (for some definition of "generally" and "easily"). If we then define a function f(S) := k log n, how will f depend on S? Have there been studies on this issue?

Is Solomonoff induction a theorem for making optimal probability distributions or a definition of them? That is to say, has anyone proved that Solomonoff induction produces probability distributions that are "optimal," or was Solomonoff induction created to formalize what it means for a prediction to be optimal. In the former case, how could they define optimality?

(And another question: I posted this a couple days ago on the last open thread, but it was closed before I got a response. Is it okay to repost it?)

I just got a Kindle Paperwhite. I'm still in the process of learning how to interact with the device. In case you have a Kindle, can you give me a few pointers?

1) How do you organize the relationship between the Kindle and Evernote?
2) How easily is a Kindle damaged by falling to the ground? Is it important to use a case to prevent damage?
3) Do you have tips for good PDF conversion. Especially for textbooks?
4) Anything useful to know as a new Kindle user?

Sorry, this was an useless post so now it's gone

This illustrates the problem I have with how we leave boys' sexual development to the haphazard and just hope that they can figure it out somehow. What about the boys who can't or don't have these experiences and learn these skills at an appropriate age?

Sex And The Valley: Tech Guys Seek Expert Love Advice From Therapists

http://www.vocativ.com/culture/society/the-sex-therapists-of-silicon-valley/

“Dan” seems at first to perfectly embody that popular object of scorn these days in San Francisco: the privileged tech worker. He’s a developer-turned-manager at