Miscellanea November 2015

November 2015

The Milky Way Over Monument Valley
Greenland is melting away
How to play chess like an asshole
Spacewar: on an HTML5/JS emulated DEC PDP-1
Things I Won’t Work With: Dioxygen Difluoride: FOOF is “Satan’s kimchi”
Trekonomics Panel at New York Comic Con 2015: Felix Salmon moderates Paul Krugman, Brad Delong, &c.
Endless Sky: and other Escape Velocity clones
Norway Then and Now: photos from a century ago and today
BitCoin surges past $400: after the MMM Global ponzi scheme starts requiring payments in BitCoin
The PyraMmMid: a film about the 1994 Russian MMM pyramid scheme
Everything you need to know about planet Earth: in 7 minutes
The forgotten history of how automakers invented the crime of “jaywalking”
Israel Is Already Selling Kamikaze Micro-Drones That Will Change Modern Warfare
The most common job in each state 1978-2014: from machine operator and secretary to truck driver.
Commentary on “The Mystery of Language Evolution”: ‘…Hauser et al. (2014) concluded that, despite “an explosion of research on this problem,” there has been a “poverty” of viable ideas and that, until further evidence is available, our “…understanding of language evolution will remain one of the great mysteries of our species” …The evidence that Hauser et al. (2014) considered is limited, however, reflecting a syntactocentric view of generative linguistics and a failure to consider recent discoveries about the social and cognitive development of a human infant during her first year of life.’ An overview of some of this research (following Tomasello) follows.
Data is Plural: a weekly newsletter of small data sets.
TransNewGuinea.org: An Online Database of New Guinea Languages
transnewguinea.org
Every (official) place name in the U.S.: the GNIS database
Meet the 80 people who are as rich as half the world: that is, as rich as the poorest 50% of the population.
“Is it in the Public Domain?”: a handbook
Athanasius Kircher and the Hieroglyphic Sphinx
Cat Pianos, Sound-Houses, and Other Imaginary Musical Instruments
A Bestiary of Sir Thomas Browne
The Mystery of Lewis Carroll
Quantitative Standards for Absolute Linguistic Universals: Piantadosi and Gibson examine the possibility of confirming the so-called “absolute linguistic universals” and conclude that it may be statistically possible to confirm linguistic universals with a sample of 500 to 2000 independent languages; however: “It is important to emphasize one aspect of this analysis. The sampling procedure we use assumed independent samples from the true distribution. This means that what is really required is 500 independent languages, not 500 languages overall. For instance, Spanish and Italian do not count as two separate languages in this analysis since they are genetically related. This means that the real number of languages necessary may be much larger than 500 when sampling uses non-independent languages. Correlated samples will probably increase the number of samples needed to stay below a given false positive rate. …To the best of our knowledge, it will in general not be possible to find 500 independent languages. There are, for instance, 212 language families in WALS, yet language families already are not independent samples. More aggressive independence methods—based on, for instance, geography…—will likely arrive at much more independent samples, but orders of magnitude fewer of them. This means that it is very unlikely that statistical analysis will provide sufficient evidence to justify absolute universals.”
High-altitude ejectives: QFT: “Whether or not the altitude/ejective correlation reveals a causal connection, we can expect the near future to bring us a large number of spurious correlational analyses, along with a few meaningful ones. There are three reasons for this: (1) The existence of digital datasets makes it increasingly easy to perform quantitative checks on hypotheses about possible relationships between linguistic and non-linguistic variables; (2) The astronomically large number of such possible relationships guarantees that many of them should exhibit a strong pair-wise connection by chance, even if all of the distributions were statistically independent; (3) The distributions are not statistically independent, due to factors such as cultural and geographical diffusion.”
Beyond Zork
Will Crowther’s Adventure: Part 1
Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther’s Original “Adventure” in Code and in Kentucky
Adventure: iPod version
When Gold Isn’t Worth the Price: A large salmon fishery is inestimably more valuable than a gold mine in real terms. Food sustains human life as cash does not, and a fishery could supply food for a thousand years or more. Sacrificing something of long-term sustainable value for a short-term cash grab is beyond foolish.
At the End: SF short asks if you would become a slave to escape a doomed Earth.

A Quadruple Sky Over Great Salt Lake
Cool atmospheric phenomenon: fallstreak hole
E.U. Fights to Get Everyone Speaking Same Language on Education: 2014 look at European efforts toward educational multilingualism.
AE Aurigae and the Flaming Star Nebula
The iPad Pro: “Right now, today, the iPad Pro is a peer to the current lineup of MacBooks in terms of computational hardware performance. The iPad Pro is without question faster than the new one-port MacBook or the latest MacBook Airs.”
Mobile, ecosystems and the death of PCs
The Impossible Music of Black MIDI
How Humans Evolved Supersized Brains
XKCD Simplewriter
Rare early photographs of Peking
When the campus PC police are conservative: why media ignored the free speech meltdown at William & Mary
On the dark matter of the publishing industry: “…the New York Times gleefully reported that ebook sales were down in general. The surprising news was predictably greeted with what Mathew Ingram memorably called ‘a whiff of anti-digital Schadenfreude’. Problem was, the news wasn’t just untrue, it was obviously untrue. The title of this awesome takedeown of the whole shameless episode says it all: ‘AAP Reports Own Shrinking Market Share, Media Mistakes It for Flat US Ebook Market’. …Here’s what we really found out in the last couple of months: ebook sales for traditional publishers in the US declined because they raised ebook prices, driving readers to buy and read non-traditionally published books…”
Marijuana USA: Guns, Drugs, and Money: Video: “Marijuana is legal in Colorado, but federal law makes banking nearly impossible for the cannabis industry. The result: a dangerous all-cash operation that requires armed guards and layers of security.”
Floating Point Math
Emulators written in JavaScript: a list.
“The 13th [of the month] is likelier to fall on a Friday than any other day of the week!”
November 2015 Paris attacks: “A series of coordinated terrorist attacks occurred in Paris and its northern suburb, Saint-Denis on 13 November 2015. The attackers killed 130 people,[2] including 89 at the Bataclan theatre, where they took hostages before engaging in a stand-off with police. 368 people were injured, 80–99 seriously.”
Muslims hate ISIS most of all
ISIS wants you to hate Muslims
What ISIS Really Wants
France has declared a state of emergency, but the law has an ugly history: in the Algerian war
Paris attacks: Why the rapid sharing of anything vaguely inspirational after a tragedy is so unsettling: “…Instead of silence or helpfulness, social media pukes out stupidity, virtue-signaling and vicarious “enjoyment” (in a psychoanalytic sense) of a terrible tragedy by people thousands of miles away, for whom the event is just a meme they will participate in for a couple of days, then let fade into their timeline.”
Bakugai (“explosive buying”): Japanese word of the year nominee
How to make 2000-year-old bread: with a handle
Obama: I didn’t appreciate how weak the presidency is until I was president
Jas. Townsend and Son, Inc.: a Revolutionary War re-enactor’s instructional videos on cooking and food processing.
Great Depression Cooking: videos on YouTube
What the World Eats
What goes on in English departments
Don’t call it slacktivism — public grief is an important human act: The five stages of Internet grief are: changing Facebook profile images, snarking about slacktivism, comparing tragedies, issue-driven propaganda, and cynicism about caring. “Grief, like so many other emotions, can hit us unexpectedly, in unpredictable ways, and the manner in which we express it can be just as unexpected and unpredictable. We’ve all grieved. We should all know this. But we keep admonishing each other for it. People are social animals. We process our experiences by pulling our voices together into a collective shout to see if anybody’s listening. And in the age of the internet, a lot of that happens online. So when we question others’ motivations for doing this, we’re not helping anything. Instead, we’re practicing our own form of smug internet performance art.”
Police Civil Asset Forfeitures Exceed All Burglaries in 2014
These Are the Most Spectacular Nature Photos of the Year
Top Brewery Road Trip, Routed Algorithmically
Python’s Hidden Regular Expression Gems
There Were American Nazi Summer Camps Across the US in the 1930s
Einstein’s first proof: “Einstein became particularly enamored of the Pythagorean theorem and—“after much effort,” he noted in the Saturday Review—he wrote his own mathematical proof of it. …The consensus among Einstein’s biographers is that he probably discovered, on his own, a standard textbook proof in which similar triangles (meaning triangles that are like photographic reductions or enlargements of one another) do indeed play a starring role. Walter Isaacson, Jeremy Bernstein, and Banesh Hoffman all come to this deflating conclusion, and each of them describes the steps that Einstein would have followed as he unwittingly reinvented a well-known proof. Twenty-four years ago, however, an alternative contender for the lost proof emerged. In his book “Fractals, Chaos, Power Laws,” the physicist Manfred Schroeder presented a breathtakingly simple proof of the Pythagorean theorem whose provenance he traced to Einstein. …Though we cannot be sure the following proof is Einstein’s, anyone who knows his work will recognize the lion by his claw.”
Gorgeously shot video of a 1600-foot slackline walk
Yearly Cycle of Earth’s Biosphere: Animation showing the 12-month cycle of all plant life on Earth — whether on land or in the ocean.
We know the city where HIV first emerged
There is a better way to read on the internet, and I have found it: Ezra Klein advises using clippings.io to send snippets from Kindle books to Evernote.
The 10,000-Year Clock: finally, video.
A Day After iOS 9’s Launch, Ad Blockers Top The App Store: This came out in September, but ad-blocking and iOS Firefox are what prompted me to upgrade to iOS 9, even if these ad-blockers are only for Safari.
Which iOS Content Blocker is the Fastest?: “As you can see, 1Blocker is the winner. It was (on average) 61.83% faster than having nothing turned on at all.”
The Best Ad Blocker for iPhone: Consensus is for 1Blocker. $3 is a small price to pay for some freedom from all that JavaScript and tracking.
Peter Jackson Freely Admits The Hobbit’s Production Was a Shambles: Ugh.
Meet the People Who Dream of Building a Space Elevator: “Nearly forty years later, space elevators still have the ring of science fiction. But against all odds, a small community of engineers is pushing the idea closer to reality. ‘SKY LINE’, a new documentary directed by Miguel Drake-McLaughlin and Jonny Leahan, is their story. In 74 minutes, the film recounts the origin of the space elevator, describing how such a vertiginous tower would work and the myriad ways it could benefit humanity, from beaming down clean energy to sending up space tourists and interplanetary colonists on the cheap. …[It] will be available on all major On Demand platforms…beginning on November 20th, 2015.”
English is not normal: by John McWhorter
Why do Turkey the country and turkey the bird have the same name?
Video of Colorful Liquid in Space: Once again, astronauts on the International Space Station dissolved an effervescent tablet in a floating ball of water, and captured images using a camera capable of recording four times the resolution of normal high-definition cameras.
The European countries that take in the most refugees, in one interactive map
One woman’s attempt to hide her pregnancy from big data — it’s more difficult than you’d expect: “To keep her pregnancy undetected by cookies, bots and data collectors, Vertesi’s first move was to keep it off social media. She announced her pregnancy via phone or personal email, and asked friends and family not to post it to Facebook. Mashable reported that Vertesi even unfriended and uncle who sent her a congratulatory Facebook message. She also had to explain to family members that even Facebook messaging — as opposed to writing on a person’s “wall” — isn’t just a private chat.”
Bored to Tears by a Do-Nothing Dream Job
Map of the Roman Empire: (CC-BY)
How to Baffle Web Trackers by Obfuscating Your Movements Online
Jack Yufe dies at 82; he was raised Jewish, his identical twin as a Nazi: I never know what to make of the argument that at some arbitrary point in time, one twin was wearing similar clothes to another twin. What is that even supposed to mean? Then there’s this: “In early 1979, Yufe’s then-wife, Ona, showed him a magazine article about the “Jim Twins,” a pair of long-separated Ohio twins who were each named Jim by their respective adoptive parents. Like Yufe and his brother, Jim Springer and Jim Lewis found each other as adults and were astounded by the parallels in their lives, including similar jobs in law enforcement and ex-wives with the same first name. …The two Jims had become the first subjects of the Minnesota twins study. Yufe was intrigued and thought he and Oskar should also participate. …The researchers jumped at the chance and invited them to Minnesota for a week. Yufe and Stohr became the seventh set of twins to enter the study.” Looks like some pretty obvious selection bias in the Minnesota Twins Reared Apart study.
The Trouble with Twin Studies: Jay Joseph is a leading critic of twin research.

Aurora Over Clouds
Why Don’t We Just Throw All Our Garbage Into Volcanoes?
A Cabinet of Infocom Curiousities: “…Steve showed me his collection of items he had from the days of Infocom (which spanned from roughly 1981 through to the company’s eventual closing and absorption by Activision in the early 1990s).”
The Infocom Cabinet: Binders and Folders of Infocom, Inc. (1981-1987)
The origins of graphic communication: “In a 12:05 TED talk filmed in August, 2015, cave art researcher Genevieve von Petzinger asks: ‘Why are these 32 symbols found in ancient caves all over Europe?’ Von Petzinger, a paleoanthropologist associated with the University of Victoria (British Columbia), is concerned primarily with symbols in Ice Age European cave art dating to the Upper Paleolithic (40,000-10,000 BP), but she also has her eye on possible predecessors in Africa and parallels across Asia all the way to Indonesia.”
The Myth of Language Universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science: “Talk of linguistic universals has given cognitive scientists the impression that languages are all built to a common pattern. In fact, there are vanishingly few universals of language in the direct sense that all languages exhibit them. Instead, diversity can be found at almost every level of linguistic organization. …The article summarizes decades of cross-linguistic work by typologists and descriptive linguists, showing just how few and unprofound the universal characteristics of language are, once we honestly confront the diversity offered to us by the world’s 6-8000 languages. …While there are significant recurrent patterns in organization, these are better explained as stable engineering solutions satisfying multiple design constraints, reflecting both cultural-historical factors and the constraints of human cognition. Linguistic diversity then becomes the crucial datum for cognitive science: we are the only species with a communication system which is fundamentally variable at all levels…”
The Norwegian Secret To Enjoying A Long Winter: Apparently the secret to tolerating winter is to live in a place with a spectacularly beautiful winter. I’d like winter more if it was all sledding all the time.
Star Castle 2600
Pokemon or Big Data?
Not Even Scientists Can Easily Explain P-values: “P-value is the value widely taken in science as a marker for whether a result is statistically significant, and they’ve “taken a beating” for not being a good measure of that after all. “P-values have taken quite a beating lately. These widely used and commonly misapplied statistics have been blamed for giving a veneer of legitimacy to dodgy study results, encouraging bad research practices and promoting false-positive study results. …We want to know if results are right, but a p-value doesn’t measure that. It can’t tell you the magnitude of an effect, the strength of the evidence or the probability that the finding was the result of chance. So what information can you glean from a p-value? The most straightforward explanation I found came from Stuart Buck, vice president of research integrity at the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. Imagine, he said, that you have a coin that you suspect is weighted toward heads. (Your null hypothesis is then that the coin is fair.) You flip it 100 times and get more heads than tails. The p-value won’t tell you whether the coin is fair, but it will tell you the probability that you’d get at least as many heads as you did if the coin was fair.”
Hoverboard: XKCD Game
12 Things We Loved About Jessica Jones (And 4 We Didn’t)
Macbook charger teardown: The surprising complexity inside Apple’s power adapter
The Authoritarians: A 261-pp. PDF: “…authoritarian followers have a little volcano of hostility bubbling away inside them looking for a (safe, approved) way to erupt. …Prejudice has little to do with the groups it targets, and a lot to do with the personality of the holder. Want to guess who has such wide-ranging prejudices? Authoritarian followers dislike so many kinds of people, I have called them ‘equal opportunity bigots.’ …the premise behind ‘Posse’ runs right down Main Street in the authoritarian aggression mind-set. When the authorities say, ‘Go get ‘em,’ the high RWAs saddle up. Who can ‘em be? Nearly everybody, it turns out. …I offered as targets the very right-wing [Canadian political parties]. These were the parties of choice for most authoritarian followers at the time, yet high RWAs proved more willing to persecute even the movements they liked than did others. …Finally, just to take this to its ludicrous extreme, I asked for reactions to a ‘law to eliminate right-wing authoritarians.’ …authoritarian followers still favored, more than others did, a law to persecute themselves.”
Why the Economic Fates of America’s Cities Diverged

Dark Sand Cascades on Mars
How to Snore in Korean: The mystery of onomatopoeia around the world
Animal Sounds: “Below is the world’s biggest multilingual list.”

Hello London
Saving a School on the Blackfeet Reservation: Having a dual-immersion program in Blackfoot language is presented as evidence of a school’s success. Good.
Why the Public Can’t Read the Press
The real-life election of 1800 was even wilder than Hamilton the musical lets on: Lest you think the Founders were peerless geniuses who created a perfect Constitution.
The case for letting children vote
XKCD: Fire Ants
Pickle Cat
GDP Growth over the Very Long Run: GDP per Capita Growth around the World Since the Year 1 CE
The Beggar CEO and Sucker Culture
Buddhist morality is Medieval: “Traditional Buddhist morality developed in feudal theocratic cultures. Mostly, it is typical for such societies: …crude, arbitrary, patriarchal, and often cruel. …Buddhist modernizers replaced traditional morality with Victorian Christian morality in the late 1800s, and with leftish secular morality in the the 1980s. …I’ll go through two of Keown’s examples briefly, plus three others: sex, gender, and slavery. …Buddhism is extraordinarily anti-sexual. Rejection of sex is the first and most important aspect of its central principle, renunciation. Buddhism recommends complete celibacy for lay people as well as monastics. …Details depend on the tradition, but commonly verboten are solo and partner masturbation, oral and anal sex, sex between men, sex during daytime, and sex with a woman who is pregnant or nursing. Abortion is murder, and sends you straight to hell. On the other hand, polygamy is taken for granted, and married men having sex with prostitutes is explicitly OK… [Sexual equality] simply does not exist in Buddhism. …[Buddhist societies] no idea of human rights—ones all humans have, simply for being human. …The most fundamental human right is to not be enslaved. Slavery is explicitly approved in many Buddhist scriptures. …According to scripture, the Buddha himself (after enlightenment) accepted slaves as gifts to the sangha, and he did not free them.”
Jaguars fall, everyone dies: “The world probably won’t end on Friday, but it’s still a good time to remind yourself that Mesoamerican eschatology is really really neat. The Aztecs believed that the creator-god, Ometeotl, created four main gods for the four cardinal directions. These four gods tried to create the world, but it was too dark and they kept screwing up and dropping stuff into the Great Void, where it was eaten by Cipactli the Crocodile Demon With Extra Mouths Upon Every Joint And Teeth Protruding From Her Entire Body. The gods realized they had to get their act together. They slew the Crocodile Demon and placed the world atop her body. They created mankind out of ashes. And they elected Tezcatlipoca, God of Darkness And Killing Everybody, to become the sun so they could see what they were doing a little better. But – and this is what happens when you don’t have a God of Staffing Decisions – the God of Darkness made a predictably terrible sun.”

Time travel: An isochronic map shows where to go, how long it took to get there – and what changes were on the way
The best Christmas movies aren’t about Christmas
America Is Too Dumb for TV News: “What we call right-wing and liberal media in this country are really just two different strategies of the same kind of nihilistic lizard-brain sensationalism. The ideal CNN story is a baby down a well, while the ideal Fox story is probably a baby thrown down a well by a Muslim terrorist or an ACORN activist. Both companies offer the same service, it’s just that the Fox version is a little kinkier. When you make the news into this kind of consumer business, pretty soon audiences lose the ability to distinguish between what they think they’re doing, informing themselves, and what they’re actually doing, shopping. And who shops for products he or she doesn’t want?”
Unhappy Meals: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy. ” Such a classic.

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