Clearing out some old links

Solution here.

A neural net creating names for British towns. There's an associated Twitter account, though it does lose its charm after a while.

A lovely old profile of Derek Parfit (pbuh) and Janet Radcliffe-Richards. I don't really know the work of the Churchlands, but it's in my links folder so let's unload that too.

A brief discussion of the value of art, very interesting in the light of Hanson and Simler.

HAIL SATAN!

Some wholesomeness for you

Photos of a real war fought with bows and arrows. (Content warning: unpleasant photos of wounded people).

This is the future liberals want.

At least it's not brutalism.

Hey, Remember When I Used To Do Regular Links Posts? Neither Do I!

In the spirit of cleaning out my "links" folder, a dump of things I found interesting at the time and hopefully you will too:

Perhaps you have plenty of time to get where you want to go, but are tired of dull and ugly routes. Look no further than this tool for identifying not the quickest, but the most beautiful route between two places! The only catch: it's for Yahoo rather than Google, so no-one will ever use it.

An 88-year-old man has found the ultimate trick for getting to sleep with young women under hegemonic capitalism: market yourself as a commodity! "Grandfather Busted For Prostituting Himself To Young Women".

An article about one of my favourite albums of recent years, The Lyre Ensemble's The Flood. The Flood is an attempt at recreating, or at least composing in the spirit of, ancient Babylonian music; more about the album can be found here and the album is on iTunes, my personal favourite songs are "Enkidu Curses the Harlot" and "Ishtar's Descent".

Staying on the topic of music, "Towards a 21st century orchestral music canon". Various enthusiasts chip in with their thoughts on modenr long-from orchestral music and why there's relatively little of it.

The collection of Wellcome Library, Euston Road, includes an impressive selection of calling cards for London prostitutes. Fascinating both because sex and as a reflection of the social history of London. "Until the mid-190s, the typical tart was of apparently English stock. From around 1994 onwards, we see Oriental beauties, busty Amazons and Jamaican Dominatrices. Raunchy photographs become common at this point, but are often cribbed from magazines and bear little resemblance to the goods on offer. The production values improve as well. One lady poses next to an inset that shows her recent endorsement by the News of the World."

Another library I'd have been interested to visit: that of the IRA prisoners. People are often surprised at how well-educated and middle-class most terrorists are, but you have to remember that terrorism is a fundamentally political act, which means that it is most popular among the political classes. In this light, the greater surprise is not that the prisoners were so interested in Marxism, but that they were able to establish such a remarkable compendium of works in the tradition.

Only the true Messiah denies his divinity! (via this 2009 Marginal Revolution post)

Stewart Lee defends the German sense of humour. Incidentally, a dirty Hungarian joke I heard last night about Transylvanians, but which could be about many other nationalities too:
A young Transylvanian man is getting married, and asks his father for advice concerning the wedding night. The father tells him: "First, you must pick up your new wife, to show that Transylvanians are strong. Then you throw her on the bed, to show that Transylvanians are masculine. Then you remove your clothes, to show that Transylvanians are beautiful. And I'm sure you can work out what to do from there."
After the newlyweds return from their honeymoon, and the delighted son checks in with his father. "It was just like you said! I picked her up, to show that Transylvanians are strong. I threw her on the bed, to show that we are masculine. I removed our clothes, to show that we are beautiful. And then I stood next to the bed and masturbated, to show that Transylvanians are independent and autonomous!"

Robert Wiblin has one of the most interesting Facebook feeds I know, and this is a particular highlight: a discussion of "What's the strongest argument against a political position you hold dear?"

Everyone likes to joke about homoerotic readings of the relationship between Batman and Robin, but this is an impressively thorough history.

The complaint that English people only know England, and have no idea of how the world works or of how they are perceived beyond their borders, is a familiar one: I hear it all the time from Scots and Northern Irish. If I had any Welsh friends they'd probably say the same thing, the British-but-not-English countries are all basically the same anyway. In any case, an expat skewers this mentality from a more international perspective, with regard to our beloved "athlete" Eddie the Eagle.

Braess' Paradox: adding capacity to a road network can increase congestion, without changing the volume of traffic!

Edward Feser explains a particular view of the nature of heaven and hell, according to which people choose to go to hell. Warning: relies on kooky metaphysics (though nonetheless fascinating if you have an interest in theology).

A defence of Napoleon, portraying him as a great reformer who sought to avoid war, at least following his return to power in the Hundred Days. In a similarly revisionist but less hot-takey, more plausible vein, various instances of private violence being taken over by the government as a way to restrain and control it. "Many southern states tightened "Jim Crow" racial codes between the World Wars as part of an attempt to stop lynchings"!

Since I may have just defended governments, better even it out with a reminder that many of them are literally evil: as famine is declared in two counties of South Sudan, the government increases the fee for work permits for foreign aid workers from $100 to $10,000.

Some people just hate progress: an argument against colonising Mars. That said, perhaps the problem is that Mars is the wrong target and we should aim for Venus first.

A takedown of certain elite views that war with China is inevitable. Convincing as an explainer, I particularly enjoyed the section suggesting that the same argument imply inevitable war between the US and Europe.

Links, June 2016

Considering that 90% of the sixth Harry Potter film was just about teenagers being frisky and hormonal, they could at least have done it the proper way: as a teen comedy.

The current Republican party is depressing for a number of reasons, including its positions on immigration. There was a better time, though: see this 1980 video of soon-to-be-POTUS Ronald Reagan and his soon-to-be-VPOTUS (and successor as POTUS) George H.W. Bush discussing illegal immigration.

Have you heard that "Happy Birthday" is under copyright, and can only be used in films at great expense? Turns out the copyright has been overturned! (Yes, this is old news. It was recent at the time I added it to my list of links, dammit!)

Despite its lack of Euro '16 coverage, FiveThirtyEight.com remains one of my very favourite websites. One of the reasons is its coverage of questions which are not only important, but with answers that are applicable to daily life. To wit: when should you turn up for a party?

Zilla Van Den Born's holiday to Thailand was unlike any other: it took place entirely in her flat, through the medium of Photoshop.

A review of Brighouse and Swift's Family Values, a book which argued that the imperative of social equality places strong limits upon what parents can do for their kids. The book, for me, exemplified two of the great malaises of modern political philosophy: attempting to provide essentially consequentialist grounds for essentially deontological concepts like non-legal rights, and armchair psychology presented as moral principles.
(Worryingly, these seem set to continue. I recently had a conversation with a PhD student working in this area, and trollishly suggested that egalitarian governments should intervene to encourage non-assortative mating. Obviously you can't force people to marry outside their social class, but if you can require military service why can't you require them to occasionally go on a date with someone they otherwise wouldn't? If you can subsidise marriage, why can't you give a higher subsidy to cross-class marriage? Her objection was that "it would require us to identify some people as the least attractive, and this would be harmful to their self-esteem." Presumably the collection and publication of income statistics is impermissibly harmful to the self-esteem of those on low incomes, and if some independently of the government were to come up with an objective measure of which people are least attractive then as an egalitarian this PhD would have had no further objections to my proposed measures. But I digress.)
In any case, the review is worth reading as a critique of the book on its own terms.

The Independent (to which, RIP): "Christians are the world's most persecuted people".
Salon (to which, please also die): "The Myth of Christian Persecution".
Sort yourself out, left-wing media complex!

A fascinating attempt to portray anti-suffragism as it was seen by sensible, liberal, anti-suffragists. The argument about maintaining a non-politicised sphere of society hits very close to me: people should be able to avoid politics, and the current fashion of right-ons for insisting that everyone vote is not only dangerous and misguided as a way of improving the world, but deeply depressing. If you are interested in politics and you follow one of these links, make it this one.

Links, February 2016

It's been ages - well over a year possibly more than two - since I last did a links post. But my folder of interesting things on the internet has continued to grow and needs to be partially cleared, so here are a few things which may be of interest. Hopefully, since many of these were accumulated many moons ago, they will not be the same things which float around all the links posts and therefore have already been seen by anyone reading this.

Political cynicism is nothing new. A nineteenth-century painting entitled "Avant et Apres le Vote" (right).

Nervousness is a problem for many people, and this guy has a solution: Rejection Therapy, in which he goes around asking for odd things with the aim of being rejected for something every single day and so desensitising himself.

I have in the works a long essay about how I see mating patterns going in the future (spoiler: if I'm right, most people probably won't like it). Until then, here's a Vox essay on dating in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Cast yourself back into the dim mists of 2014. The music charts are full of songs from kids' movies, Facebook is dominated by #NekNominate and the Ice Bucket Challenge, and everyone is reading Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the summation of French economist Thomas Piketty's research into historical income and wealth distributions. Except they're not, as this WSJ article of dubious methodology suggests. Relatedly, here is a review by someone who hadn't read the book.

Let it never be said that you can't apply intelligence and rigour to understanding the Bible. To prove it, here is an exam in Theological Engineering.

Various weird musical instruments. And another.

One of the most interestingly evil business plans I've seen.

People who claim to be the world's fastest guitarist. This guy "only" gets up to 350 beats/minute, but maintains clear musicality. This one claims to reach 2000 BPM, but I'm somewhat sceptical about whether, if you slowed down the recording, you would find him having actually played all the notes. (For one thing, a difference of 7x between some of the world's fastest guitarists hardly seems plausible - surely there just isn't that much variation in how fast people can move their fingers?)

The kind of government that I hope we never lose: five-year-old boy loses his bid for a third term of office as local mayor. That said, the candidates for this mayoralty seem worryingly white and male.

Another portion of North America in desperate need of feminism: the Alaskan outback, where low population density, backward institutions, and a high male-female ratio have combined to give the state a rape frequency three times the US average.

"You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.”

ISIS wins the Turner Prize.

The Wikipedia page for Daniel Lambert (left), who was slightly shorter than me and five times the weight. He seems to have been a stand-up fellow indeed.

Another interesting person, though rather more recent: RIP Stephen Masty.

Women: is waking up on time a struggle? Worry no more: the vibrator-cum-alarm-clock (pun tolerated though not intended) has arrived!

Links, December 2014

Earlier in the year I started doing links posts. Then there was a month when I didn't have enough new links. Then I had far, far too many, and didn't feel like sorting through them for a considerable while, during which time the list grew longer and longer. So, after a long absence, here is a bunch of links.

Vox: 7 things the most-highlighted passages tell us about American readers.

A true story of Turkish politics. It tells the strange tale of a coup, launched by democratically-elected politicians, against the military leaders.

Yet another reason to protest against the Chinese government: it gets you lavish, all-expenses paid holidays.

I wonder what became of this: an attempt to crowd-fund a drone for the defence of Ukraine.

Why is Barcelona FC so strong: Tiki-Taka or Lionel Messi?

We're nearing Christmas, so why not celebrate in the traditional way? That is, to have a man on hand to perform "one whistle, one jump and one fart." That man went down in history as Roland the Farter.

A rather more modern entertainment: rap mash-ups, to the Thomas the Tank Engine theme tune.

Theological Engineering Exam. "For all questions, assume a perfectly spherical Jesus of constant density D... 25 grams of wafers and 20 ml of cheap wine undergo transubstantiation and become the flesh and blood of our Lord. How many Joules of heat are released by the transformation?"

An artist's impression of what various Pokemon would look like if they were real. Some of them look fine (e.g. Eevee), some look different but alright (e.g. Pikachu), and Togepi looks disgusting.


Philosophers have argued for many years on the possibility of zombies which lack concious experience. The answer to this question has an important implication: whether zombies should be regarded as capital or as labour.

Speaking of philosophers: the views of major political philosophers, explained with reference to the question "Should Batman kill The Joker?"

The story of Isabel Moctezuma, daughter of the Aztec emperor Moctezuma II. By the age of 18 she was a widow four times over, and had been impregnated by Hernan Cortes. She is presumably an outlier, but still it causes one to wonder: if this was how bad it was for women in the royalty, how terrible must life have been for the average woman in those times.

While I'm in a feminist mood, I'll link to this fascinating review of the Hermione Granger series of books and this picture of the wrong way to stare at a girl:

I first saw the picture below on Twitter, but it went around Facebook too:

Also, yet another reason not to trust the state to handle this kind of thing: a man spends six months on bail for receiving, not making, a video in which a woman was believed to be having sex with a tiger. What happened after six months? The police finally realised that the tiger was talking, and that it was a man in a tiger suit.

Links, June 2014

A proposal to reduce distracted driving, by making things less distracting rather than banning them.

Middle Ages prohibitions on people having sex.

Tom Lehrer is, in my opinion at least, the greatest musical satirist to have existed - equally competent as a bitingly sharp critic of society and as a composer of wonderful melodies. This is a fascinating article on his life  - I was vaguely aware that he'd invented a drink of sorts, I didn't realise it was the FREAKING JELLY SHOT. I knew he'd studied at Harvard, but he went there when he was FIFTEEN. And I (grade eight piano, grade seven cello) would struggle to play a Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto, if I even could; he would do so, with his hands playing in different keys!

It's probably too late to make this change for the 2014 World Cup, but Lindybeige's suggestion to replace the penalty shoot-out makes a lot of sense. I'd quibble with some of the details, but so far as I can tell it would a) better represent actual football, b) involve a larger proportion of the team, c) generally take less time than 30 mins of extra time plus 5-15 mins for a shootout.

A tour of British accents. It's far from complete - indeed, none of the three accents which I most regularly encounter (Estuary English, Brummy, and Mancunion) appear - but it does an excellent job of bringing out the differences between accents.

"Factors that were independently associated with increased probability of extra-marital partnerships [included]... spouse longer erect penis." Also, boys contribute more to marriage stability than girls.

Suppose Tyler was right when he wrote this post, which argues that libertarians will never achieve their goals but will always be intellectually important. That's probably bad for people in general, but possibly good for me personally, as an aspiring libertarian intellectual.

"Normal" people are strange. That has consequences for the rest of us.

As a former RPS champion, it's nice to see that I was automatically doing much of this in my normal gameplay.

Evolution, destroying all that is natural, beautiful and loving. This week: motherhood!

Poetry of Afghan women. There are some excellent lines in there, I'll quote a couple of my favourites:
When sisters sit together, they always praise their brothers.
When brothers sit together, they sell their sisters to others.

My lover is fair as an American soldier can be.
To him I looked dark as a Talib, so he martyred me.
See also the accompanying podcast.

A fascinating attack on home ownership. There are obvious good reasons for home ownership - principal-agent problems regarding landlords, tenants and maintenance, for example - but there are serious downsides too.

Sporting governance - all the idiocy of real politics, but without the constraints of people having ever though about economics or ethics!

I read Scott Alexander's Piano Man parody by singing it while playing along on my piano. I frequently had to stop, torn somewhere between laughing and being utterly horrified.

A genuine success of government. It'll be interesting to see if this can be replicated on a wider scale: it seems silly to me to think that government can never improve things, the key question is whether it can do so on a predictable basis without spiralling out of control or large unintended consequences.

Speaking of unintended consequences, the assault on the Bin Laden compound has led to an outbreak of Polio.

Frozen and higher education? I just had to link to this...

A new arrangement of Siegmund's Horn Call.

Is there a poster version of this really pretty picture of Elsa's ice palace?

It's often remarked when looking at maps of Africa that whole national boundaries were created by lazy bureaucrats with maps, pencils and rulers whereas "real" borders - those determined by genuine links of language and culture - are far more complicated and nuanced. This analysis of actual borders shows this to be the case largely for the Americas too. I'm quite fascinated by the tendency towards horizontal borders in the more "natural" continents or Europe and Asia - perhaps it's just a chance result caused by the existence of Russia, but I don't see any a priori reason why countries should tend to have greater variety of longitude than latitude so this is an interesting thing to think about.

Another thing I need to turn into a poster.

One of the most common arguments in favour of a need to equalise incomes and wealth is that unequal distributions lead to unequal political influence. There's a crucial problem with this: they don't.

"Because he composed the music without the benefit of knowing what the title was going to be, Copland was often amused when people told him that he had captured the beauty of the Appalachians in his music".

A profile of Paul Krugman. Reading this was what led to me deciding to actually read Pop Internationalism, as opposed to merely keeping it on my Amazon wish list.

Going by the books on this list which I have actually read, I come out as four parts Ravenclaw, four parts Gryffindor, three parts Slytherin and only one part Hufflepuff. From the same author, One Direction's What Makes You Beautiful as a Goedel sentence.

Despite what this says, The King's Gambit seems (to me) to be pretty popular online. I personally play the King's Bishop's Gambit as one of my favourite openings (others of my favourite openings include the Benko, the Queen's Gambit, the Sokolsky, and the Grand Prix Attack).

Pakistanis would rather turn down free money than fill in an anonymous form acknowledging gratitude to the Americans giving it to them. At first I assumed this was a failure of US soft power caused by the War on Terror, although thinking over it I wonder if it has more to do with cultural factors - I'm reminded of responses to the Ultimatum Game where people would turn down generous offers for fear of acquiring costly obligations.

Andrew Cuomo might not be so terrible compared to many other Democrats - what with cutting spending and promoting civil rights he could even be one of the small-l libertarians (stereotyped as right-wing on economic policy, left-wing on social policy) thought to make up around 20% of the US population. My key worries is that he could end up running against someone like Rand Paul, in which case I daresay most self-described libertarians would flock to the Paul banner and do a lot of damage to those of us who are trying to reclaim the whole "compassion for the poor" thing from the left.

Very hi-res picture, very pretty.

Harry Potter, as Ayn Rand might have written it.

Sweden, utopian model of income equality, turns out to have high wealth inequality. I'd be interested to see the level of social mobility alongside these.

Links, April 2014

Foreign policy is of course an area ripe for being affected by cognitive biases; however, when I saw this article (original paper here) claiming that "all of the cognitive biases in our [complete list of known cognitive biases] all of them favour hawks" I was suspicious - it seems implausible to me that in a list of forty of so biases, all of them would push in one direction. My prior in favour of the article has been raised by this article however, which describes combining a survey of attitudes regarding Russia and Ukraine with a test to see if people could place Ukraine on a map.

It was found that there was a statistically significant (for what that's worth) relationship between being unable to accurately place Ukraine on a map, and favouring military intervention. (Is this evidence that cognitive biases can really be overcome?)

Elsewhere, Robin Hanson observes that, since cognitive biases developed because they were effective ways of thinking, perhaps this is not really a problem.

I don't know how accurate this representation of the spectrum of political beliefs is - and I'm not entirely certain I even understand it - but it's interesting enough to be worth linking to.

A while back a quiz comparing your political views to those of the major parties of the UK was floating around Facebook; my results are here. The correlations with the parties seem to have changed since I took the quiz, and so they may well change in the future, but as of the time of writing I am in 1% agreement with the BNP. This is something I am (mildly) proud of.

I don't know what my views would have been had I been born 80 years ago, but now I know what Superman thought back then.

Get in! Possible contributing factor: bra are generally designed for right-handed women, which makes it difficult to operate them for left-handed women and for right-handed men standing in front of the woman but very easy for a left-handed man.

Bra from the perspective of the presumably right-handed Randall Munroe.

Short video on love and attraction. To my romantic mind it's sad to see how much this seems to be associated with looks, but then again I guess looks are by far the easiest thing to assess about a potential partner.

Speaking of shallow romance, consider this fascinating theory about the Twilight series. It certainly threw the whole series into a different light for me. (On a somewhat related note, if you have read and enjoyed HPMoR then you should read Luminosity, its Twilight-equivalent, which can also be found here).

While I'm still talking about fiction: Harry Potter and the Brokeback Mountain, a video splicing together footage from across the films so as to imply Harry to have had affairs with both Ron and Cedric Diggory.

The first time I was exposed to the debate between Determinism and Free Will, compatibilism didn't seem like a sensible position and I couldn't really face the absence of free will because it would seem to remove all grounds for morality, so by default I adopted libertarianism (in the free-will sense rather than the political sense - that ought to be clear, but I'll just make certain) and started hacking away in a controlled fashion - could one have morality despite determinism? Would it really be so bad if there were no genuine moral rules or injunctions? This post at Practical Ethics suggests that a lot of people share my concern, since there is a strong correlation between belief in free will and desire to punish wrongdoers. To me this seem strange from a logical standpoint, since most of our moral intuitions serve as limitations compared to economically efficient punishment and moral irrealism doesn't forbid us from punishing people - it gives us license to punish whoever we like, whenever we like (although this may come into conflict with our other goals, so it may not be a good idea except in certain circumstances).

Recently, a group of us tried to recreate the foundations of microeconomics while assuming that all agents are perfectly rational utility minimisers. This course in Buddhist Economics is probably somewhere around the same level as a model of good economics.

The Swiss and their trains.

Now I want to hold a music concert inside a giant cello. It has that fantastic old-timey, warm-and-reliable look about it.

There is a vast amount of fanart being produced relating to Frozen; all of the pictures I've seen, this is my favourite. And have some music to go with it.

A fascinating statistic regarding immigration. If nothing else, it ought to put to bed any concerns about "native culture being overwhelmed".

Despite my extreme political distance from the BNP, I think I'd still be wary of wearing this t-shirt. But I very much hope that someone would wear it.

Market cost-pressures, finding new and unusual ways to save fuel and thus protect the environment since forever.

Links, February 2014

It's amazing how many links accumulate once you start keeping a record of them. Rather than highlighting the more interesting links like last time, I'm going to sort them by category.

Pretties / Culture
If I remember correctly, this was from somewhere in North America.

Music straight from the streets of Adelaide. I don't think that's how you're supposed to play the guitar.

God: If you didn't want me to have sex with other men, why did you make them so attractive?

Unfortunately not yet available to order.

Politics
This is how all political philosophy ought to be taught.

Some interesting pieces on the surveillance state: first, what if we had had the NSA in 1776? Second, memoirs of a TSA agent. Third, probably the worst police brutality I've come across which hasn't resulted in death.

I'm generally sceptical of the feminist movement, but I agree that it is responding to genuine problems - many of which are disturbingly subtle. Also, see this type of sexism in action.

SOCIALISM!

The latest celebrity chef. (Just to be clear, linking does not imply endorsement).

People
If you're impressed by Sherlock, then remember that Walter Oi could do the same thing despite being blind.

The human capacity for delusion knows no bounds.

The case for charity. If you read nothing else here, read this.

I believe that this is where I'm supposed to say: "Still a better love story than Twilight."

France sounds nice. If only it was less left-wing and I wasn't vegetarian.

Funny

The Mafioso, the deaf bookkeeper, and the lawyer.

Somehow an ethicist has got this far in philosophy without hearing of Utilitarianism.

Sterling negotiation technique on display here.

Economics
This is supposed to be about currency, but I think it's more interesting as a discussion of the never-ending variety and complexity of local institutions.

"Science"
If you see me wearing some bags of ice-cubes in lectures, this is why. (It's worth a try, surely?)

Inaugural Link Post

Loads of people seem to do link posts. I thought I'd do one, although many of the links probably aren't very interesting to most people. I've highlighted in green the ones which the casual reader may care to look at.

I've never visited this stretch of canal while it's snowing. It looks rather less drab. Also on the subject of canals, I'd almost be interested in seeing this and these pictures are worth a quick look even if you're not interested in canals.

While watching the early part of Sherlock's Best Man Speech, I felt the need for a mini Julia Galef to pull out of my pocket at appropriate moments.

More pretties!

I wouldn't say conversation is really this bad, but it's an excellent poem.

SOCIALISM!!! Was writing a response, but realised it would need a whole post of its own; this may or may not be appearing shortly (I feel that rather too many of my recent posts have been politics-related). Most obvious point to make in response: distinguish between socialism the system of government (stupid, evil, anyone seriously advocating it needs to get their head checked) and socialism the social movement (sometimes stupid, sometimes evil, sometimes both, and the bits which both meant well and thought well - Benjamin Tucker, for example - are now far more part of the libertarian tradition).

This is what happens when you attempt a Sicilian Dragon without learning the theory. (I'm playing as black, just to be clear. For future reference in case the game disappears from the archive, I get mated in 23 moves by a player rated 200 points below myself).

More culture which ought to be better known. My favourite songs are The Young Slaver (track 2) and The Sea and the Sky (track 11).

I'm uncertain as to whether I should read this until I've got my (firmly old-Keynesian) economics modules for my degree done. Also, I'd be interested in a non-partisan discussion of this topic: I honestly have idea to what extent the piece is fair to the writer's opponents, a group with whom it would be ideologically convenient for me to disagree and therefore one I should be extra careful to make certain that if I reject them, it is for the right reasons. On a related note, this really made my New Years Day.

Feminist ideas can be just as screwed-up as the ideas they replace.