This is the inaugural December issue of the gwern.net mailing list; you probably signed up through a link there. If you do not want to receive further monthly emails, there is an unsubscribe link at the bottom.

The purpose of this mailing list is to be a more meaningful and summarized version of the RSS feed (which lists every patch, no matter how small) overlapping with my Changelog page, but in a push/notification medium rather than pull.

While I was at it, I thought I would include some other material like the links I share on Google+. Since this is the first time, I don’t know if people are interested in this or if I omitted anything that people expected; feel free to email me with suggestions or feedback (I believe the reply-to should be set to my address, gwern@gwern.net, but I am not sure). Without further ado:

Writings

Black-markets:

• compiled an updated table of all known black-markets with lifetimes
• wrote up an essay on 3 attempts to blackmail/extort/scam

Statistical:

• analyzed a self-experiment about low level laser therapy improving reaction time
• power simulation of the penalty from omitting key covariates in A/B testing
• critique of Chinese moxibustion study

Radiance:

• transcribed novella “Radiance”
• transcribed & annotated the autobiographical essay “Old Legends” by Gregory Benford on his physics career, SF & science, the “Star Wars” program, Edward Teller, etc
• tracked down and scanned a copy of “The Astounding Investigation: The Manhattan Project’s Confrontation with Science Fiction” (Berger 1984, Analog )

Personal:

• reviewed Umineko
• posted my biographical research on an old family friend who has passed away, Arthur Moulton

Site:

• signed up for MailChimp & started a monthly mailing list for gwern.net updates
• my Gittip is up to $7.35 a week. I thank all donators.

Media

Links

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”

Film/TV

• Aku no Hana: dropped after a few episodes, couldn’t stand the rotoscoping
• A Christmas Story/National Lampoon: Christmas Vacation: watched with family. The former was pretty good. The latter, though, had some good jokes but was generally mediocre and strained, and a product of its time.

Books

Nonfiction

I reread Discovery of France because I liked it so much the first time (review).

Fiction

Descending order of enjoyment:

• I finished Umineko back in September, finished writing a review
• New Legends (SF anthology; review)

Music

Giants (recommended if you like Explosions in the Sky or El Ten Eleven; I particularly liked “While the Ages Steal”):

• “A Near-life Experience” (Demo) [post-rock]
• “The Sleep of a Laboring Man” (Demo)
• “Berlin Rooftop” (Demo)
• “Under The New Sun” (They, The Undeserving)
• “Steps In Static Progression” (They, The Undeserving)
• “The Palace Stands In Its Proper Place” (They, The Undeserving)
• “Withered Life- Communal Rhythm” (They, The Undeserving)
• “While The Ages Steal” (Old Stories)
• “At Last, Ashore” (Old Stories)
• “O’ Tide” (Old Stories)

Misc:

• Raiders of the Lost Ark, “End Credits” (John Williams) [orchestral]
• “I Saw Three Ships”, (King’s College Cambridge) [Christmas carol]

Touhou:

• “流体、ライフサイクル instrumental (Fluid, Life Cycle)” (o ben to box; miskyworks {C82}) [instrumental]
• “パンザマスト (instrumental)” (o ben to box; miskyworks {C82}) [instrumental]

Vocaloid:

• “echoes_teha” (声になる; HKGrecords) [trance/vocal]
• “vanishing_しじみ” (声になる; HKGrecords) [electronic/vocal]
• “小規模な世界の私_ぴすた” (声になる; HKGrecords) [Jpop]