• File this under “everything you believe about yourself is lie”: “Surveys of the psychological literature suggest that perception of skill is often only moderately or modestly correlated with actual level of performance.”

• What country is the best for expats?

• “The misperception that political spending drives electoral outcomes is reinforced every campaign season by sensational media coverage, post-election debriefs from losing candidates and the exaggerated rhetoric of professional reform advocates.” Even more here.

• I came here to read about retro computing. I didn’t come here to feel.

• Maybe women don’t love psychopaths after all.

• What pieces of philosophical science fiction do actual philosophers recommend? (via Luke Muehlhauser)

• Ever notice how authors tend to be neurotic? A new paper from Personality and Individual Differences finds that verbal intelligence is correlated with worry, rumination, generalized anxiety disorder, and depression.

• The secret to successful haggling? Avoid round numbers. Results from field testing on eBay were less than spectacular.

• How do economists feel about net neutrality?

• Guy builds technical analysis software. Has happy customers. Discovers bug four years later. Software doesn’t work, hasn’t ever worked.

• On cajoling athletes to sleep more: “The results were startling. … A 13-percent performance enhancement is the sort of gain that one associates with drugs or years of training—not simply making sure to get tons of sleep.” (via Isegoria)

• “No one has been able to find someone who has both congenital blindness and a diagnosis of schizophrenia.”

• Study participants lifted more in their 3RM squat after looking at erotic images.

• I have always assumed that the order of authorship on academic papers goes from most-contributed to least-contributed. Whoever does the bulk of the work, well, they’re listed first. Turns out, this is not true across fields. Most notably, postmodernism, where the names might not even be those of the authors at all because, hey, that’s just a social construct.

• “Several studies have indicated that, for men, regular blood donation results in a massive reduction in heart attack.” New idea for reducing heart disease: introduce vampires into the population.

• Google’s targeted advertising is dumber than you expect. According to that page, my main interests are banking and makeup, which makes it sound like I’m planning a heist.

• “there is a negative correlation between trading profits and the superstition index. We find that these losses arise from poor trades at nearly all price points for a superstitious trader … suggesting that superstition may be a symptom of a general cognitive disability in making financial decisions”

• Should you believe that last link? “Echoing a recent disturbing conclusion in the medical literature, we argue that most claimed research findings in financial economics are likely false.” (via The Money Illusion)

• An economist watches a Disney movie.

• In the United States, if you move from making 8 thousand dollars a year to around ~23,000 dollars, your marginal tax rate on the income between is around 66%, and sometimes as high as 95%.

• Speaking of which: How corrupt is your government? The corruption perception index.

• Drunks are more likely to make utilitarian decisions in moral dilemmas. Maybe Canada’s strong showing on the corruption index is thanks to Rob Ford’s alcoholism.

• And while we’re on the subject of scientific findings that sound implausible: Social science is a ghetto. (via gwern)

• So, cooking pasta, allowing it to cool, and then reheating it makes it healthier. (Speculative-ish.)

• Pew Poll finds that men are more likely than women to be harassed online. PBS faithfully reports the findings with, “Pew: Women Suffering Online Harassment Worse Than Men.” (via SlateStarCodex)

• When it comes to running and foot strike — that is, where one’s foot first meets the pavement — there is incredible diversity, even among Olympians. So just do whatever you want.

They sift the human storm for souls, eat flesh of reason, fill tombs with sinners. They frenzy forth… Such are the autumn people.
–Ray Bradbury

It’s October, which implies more links. Last month’s links are here.

• I’ve corresponded with the smartest man alive, sort of — Terrence Tao answered one of my questions. (I am unreasonably proud of this.)

• Peter Thiel on the great stagnation: “Is the iPhone 5, where you move the phone jack from the top of the phone to the bottom of the phone really something that should make us scream Hallelujah?”

• How René Girard influenced Peter Thiel. (As you might have noticed, I’ve been caught up the Peter Thiel hype machine, because the dude is everywhere promoting his new book, Zero to One.)

• Speaking of Zero to One and the hype machine, I read the book. Gave it 4 out of 5 stars. I’m not going to get around to a full review, but I get the general impression that I’m a little less hot on it than most people. I disagree with Thiel on a couple of points, most strenuously religion and the general applicability (and wonderful aesthetic) of a probabilistic world-view. I’m also not convinced Thiel is a genius or a particularly brilliant businessman, given that he set billions of dollars worth of investors’ money on fire. Terrence Tao is a genius. Everyone else is sorta smart.

• Speaking of investors’ money: The best introduction to investing that I’ve yet read. I’ve been on an investing and finance kick lately while working on content for Top Financial Advisor, and I agree with close to 100% of it.

• How to design killer graphics for your blog posts. I had no idea that there is a sort of “open source” photography movement, but in hindsight it seems obvious that something like this would exist.

• I’ve written before about spaced repetition, along with Anki tips and lessons learned after 10,000 flash cards. The author of a new app, CleverDeck, contacted me and, since I’m excited about all things spaced repetition, I promised to share it with all of you. It’s specifically targeted at language learning (one of the world’s most popular goals, by the way). If you have an iPhone, check it out.

• “When the KGB tried to blackmail Indonesian President Achmed Sukarno with videotapes of the president having sex with Russian women disguised as flight attendants, Sukarno wasn’t upset. He was pleased. He even asked for more copies of the video to show back in his country.” Dude has my vote. (via SlateStarCodex)

• Speaking of which, I’m looking forward to the day when Mike Rowe does an episode of “Dirty Jobs” on being president. Thomas Jefferson: “To myself, personally, it brings nothing but unceasing drudgery and daily loss of friends.” (I still kinda want to be president, though. It might even make me live longer.)

• “In 1960, 5 percent of Republicans and 4 percent of Democrats said that they would feel ‘displeased’ if their son or daughter married outside their political party. By 2010, those numbers had reached 49 percent and 33 percent.” Bet they hate atheists even more, though. (via Tyler Cowen)

• John Bogle famously quipped, “In investing, you get what you don’t pay for.” I have a new heuristic: everything really expensive is a scam. In investing and in life generally, you get what you don’t pay for. On a totally, definitely-not-at-all-connected note, those taking MITx’s free mechanics course learned more than those in a traditional classroom based setting.

• Chinese restaurant owner laced noodles with poppy to get customers addicted. The evil genius in me wants to root for this guy, but his implementation was so disappointing–the police released him because the dosing was all wrong. It was just… food. A more realistic version of Walter White. (via SlateStarCodex)

• This article confirms all my biases, therefore I must link to it: The Daily Show is a propaganda machine. “Washington Redskins fans agreed to go on ‘The Daily Show’ to defend the team’s name. In the course of negotiating their appearance, the fans asked whether they would be confronted by American Indians on the show. The producers said no, and then surprise! They were ambushed by irate American Indian activists.”

• “My present exercise routine is to enter the gym and to choose a random sequence of exercises at random weights as though they are part of a complex task I have to complete.” It occurs to me that one cannot say something both reasonable and interesting — everything novel sounds unreasonable. Like this exercise routine. But I’m still not going to try it.

• I’ve discovered the coolest AB testing library ever. You define some variants for your page, and then Genetify (the library) treats it like an optimization problem — using traffic to evolve the best performing variant. I’m using it on the homepage. And this page. And every page. I’m experimenting on you and you and you and everyone else.

• You are bad at generating random numbers, and I’ll prove it. (via Ben Kuhn)

• Famous last words: “Why are you dodging [bullets] like this? They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance.”

• “A 2012 survey of the top 100 psychology journals found that barely 1 percent of papers published since 1900 were purely attempts to reproduce previous findings.”

• More evidence that the standard education narrative (“more education, fewer problems”) is false.

• “From the referrer logs in our data set, we found that 20 to 40 percent of sales from email spam arise from users who actively open their spam folder and click on links to pharmacy sites. Indeed, this user behavior is one of the reasons that blacklisted domains in our data set earn 87% of their revenue after being blacklisted.”

• 2000 study: Does Sex the Night Before Competition Decrease Performance? Answer: no. I have heard this theory about art, too, that an artist needs to be sexually starved to create great work. I suspect the causality is wrong: those in relationships (and sexual) have less time for creation, therefore fewer great works.

• Reflecting back on one year of Kaggle contests.

• “Shopping carts are getting larger because testing reveals that they encourage customers to buy more.”

• “The most time-consuming part of operating system development is obtaining enough drivers to enable the OS to run real applications which interact with the real world. NetBSD’s rump kernels allow reducing that time to almost zero.”

• “The odds of any driver experiencing a car crash in their lifetime is quite high (25%)”

• The number of years spent as a European colony is strongly positively related to the island’s GDP per capita and negatively related to infant mortality. … Time spent as a colony after 1700 is more beneficial to modern income than years before 1700, consistent with a change in the nature of colonial relationships over time.

• The mayor of Talkeetna, Alaska, is a cat named Stubbs.

• Prostitutes with a college degree earn more than those without.

• From a write-up of Coursera reviews: “Of students who completed the course 92.0%  read the forums.  Of those who did not complete the course, only 66.0% read the forums.”

• “Participants in a study published this year rated writing samples more favorably when the author’s name included a middle initial; they also presumed people with middle initials to be of higher social status than their uninitialed peers.” (via Marginal Revolution)

• When giant ant eaters attack. (via Isegoria)

• P-hacking is accelerating and, as a corollary, scientific integrity deteriorating — maybe this is a symptom of increased competition for tenure-track positions? With a glut of grad students fighting over a few available spots, it’s not surprising that 1) the less ethically constrained are more likely to succeed and 2) people are more likely to manipulate results. I can’t condemn this too much because I once gave the nod to this sort of thing, arguing that breaking the rules is part of the game. (via SlateStarCodex)

• I have been informed that this is the best way to learn Rails.

• “Israeli wars should be thought of less as any attempt to change things, and more as some sort of horrible tension-release cycle like forest fires”

• How the Soviet Union handled hostage negotiation.

• “Just 45 percent of upper-middle-class households (income from $75,000 to $99,999) saved anything in 2012”

• Useful Science is a super cool website, aimed at summarizing instrumentally useful science. Example from the site: “Thirty minutes of sunlight exposure in the morning makes it easier to wake up early the next day.” Bonus: my software tools to improve writing post is referenced in the site’s style guide.

Economics

• Betting markets beat statistical models when it came to predicting Germany’s 7-1 win over Brazil.

• “The growth of incarceration rates among black men in recent decades combined with the sharp drop in black employment rates during the Great Recession have left most black men in a position relative to white men that is really no better than the position they occupied only a few years after the Civil Rights Act of 1965.”

• Greg Mankiw (economist)’s reading list.

• Self-perceived unattractive people are more inclined to care about equality issues
  . The implication being, naturally, that everyone on Tumblr has very poor self-image.

• Why are large companies so inefficient? Because they lack an internal price mechanism — From Valve’s economist: “And yet, quite paradoxically, firms can be thought of as market-free zones. Within their realm, firms (like societies) allocate scarce resources (between different productive activities and processes). Nevertheless they do so by means of some non-price, more often than not hierarchical, mechanism!”

• $1 out of every $10,000 is counterfeit.

• How to use bets to signal devotion.

• Self-publishing continues to take over the book market: “We can now say that self-published authors earn more in royalties than Big 5 authors, combined.”

• I’ll take rent seeking for $350, Alex: Make-up artist is the 22nd most regulated occupation, with some states requiring 280 days of schooling and several exams.

• Amicus founder on mistakes and lessons learned.

• Marginal Revolution has this recurring category of post, “Markets in Everything,” which documents the outlandish things that people will pay for. Now I have one of my own: butt covers for your dog.

• In 2011, Paul Buchheit (gmail creator) shared his angel investing returns after 3 years. 10%.

Religion

• “In the United States, 38% of people who identified themselves as atheist or agnostic went on to claim to believe in a God or a Higher Power.”

• Pew: Americans love Jews, hate atheists and muslims.

Computers

• “nearly half of the Gödel Prize winners (given to the best CS theory papers after they’ve appeared in journals) were initially rejected or didn’t appear at all in the top theoretical computer science conferences.”

• Alan Winfield has a new paper out (link to actual paper) where he Fermi estimates how much power it would take for us to evolve a human-level artificial intelligence, you know, inside of a computer, via genetic programming. The number he comes up with? 100,000 EJ. Or about 185x the energy humans consumed last year.

• Using neural networks to save energy at Google.

• Need a cheap server?

Health, Exercise, Sports

• “Epidemiological studies of walkers, for instance, have found that those whose usual pace is brisk tend to live longer than those who move at a more leisurely rate, even if their overall energy expenditure is similar.” (via Gretchen Reynolds)

• During the Hardrock 100, a 100-mile trail race, Adam Campbell was struck by lightning. At about mile 85. And then ran the remaining 15 miles and finished the race.

Sex

• “The idea that men are naturally more interested in sex than women is [so] ubiquitous that it’s difficult to imagine that people ever believed differently. And yet for most of Western history, from ancient Greece to beginning of the nineteenth century, women were assumed to be the sex-crazed porn fiends of their day.”

• “Telegony is the ancient and medieval idea that a woman’s children could inherit characteristics not only from their father, but from all the woman’s previous sexual partners. It was seriously defended right up until the real mechanisms of genetics were pinned down in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.” (via SlateStarCodex)

Trivia

• “O. J. Simpson was considered briefly [for the part of Terminator], but producers felt he seemed too nice to play a killer.”

• There are no nations with an older minimum drinking age than the United States (the Puritans are still at work, I guess). No entire nations, anyways. In some Indian states, you must be 25 to purchase alcohol.

• Within a  24 hour period, bamboo can grow four feet.

• To create the murmur of a crowd, extras are told to repeat the phrase “watermelon” or “walla” over and over. In the UK, they use rhubarb.

• Before 1958, a troop of monkeys would wash their sweet potatoes in fresh water. Then they discovered that washing them in salt water tasted better. They never looked back.

• The phrase “with a grain of salt” originates from Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia, which reported that a grain of salt was an ingredient for a poison antidote. Thus, if a meal was poisoned, you’d take it “with a grain of salt.”

• 3 book recommendations straight from Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos: The Goal, The Innovator’s Solution, and The Effective Executive.

• Remember that list of data sets? Noel at The Armchair Scholar has put together a visualization of some of the crime data.

• Speaking of which, my friend Benn Stancil and the rest of the team at Mode Analytics have officially launched. The service enables users to easily visualize and analyze a number of different data sets, including quite a few of those in my list, so check it out.

• If you place rats into a cage with a morphine drip, as expected, they become addicted. If you place rats in a larger cage, along with other rats and plenty of social stimulation, they will refuse to drink from the morphine drip. (via RockstarResearch)

• “Echoing a recent disturbing conclusion in the medical literature, we argue that most claimed research findings in financial economics are likely false.” (via Tyler Cowen)

• 57% of Americans believe that demonic possession is a real phenomenon, while 37% of voters believe in ghosts — 26% even report that they’ve seen these elusive creatures. (Given so many sightings, maybe elusive isn’t the right word.) Oh, and chocolate bars are by far the Halloween candy of choice, a preference echoed by some 62% of respondees. Candy corn, the runner up, received only 11% of the vote. (via Alternet)

• Did Pol Pot’s genocide of intellectuals in Cambodia lower the average IQ? Answer: probably, but not by much. (via slatestarcodex for this and the next couple)

• Attitudes towards premarital sex haven’t shifted over the last 26 years:

• If your self-driving car is in a situation where it can save your life, or save the most lives, what should it do? Only 28% of IEET readers opted for saving the most lives in this poll. If I taught an ethics class (and boy do I wish I taught an ethics class) they would all fail.

• So… it used to be pretty popular to use elephants as executioners. “Elephants (unlike horses) can be trained to execute prisoners in a variety of ways, and can be taught to prolong the agony of the victim by inflicting a slow death by torture or to kill the condemned quickly by stepping on the head.”

• In 1746, two identical twins were sentenced to die. Their sentences were commuted to life imprisonment — on one condition: one twin had to drink two pots of coffee each day, the other two pots of tea. The tea drinker was the first to die.

• Mr. Money Mustache is known as an authority on, well, money-saving. I checked out his recommended reading list and, from what I’ve read on the list, it looks surprisingly good, although I cringed when I read that there’s an economics book, Naked Economics, whose “claim to fame is that it uses absolutely no graphs or numbers when explaining economics.” The whole trend of a book bragging about not including equations makes me want to start a riot. (I’ll have you know that the ebook I’m working on contains a gratuitous, not strictly necessary copy of one of the Navier-Stokes equations.)

• If you know what the words codec, golem, paladin, or biped mean, you’re probably a guy. If you know the words taffeta (my sister laughed at me for mispronouncing this, I have no idea what it means) or wisteria mean, you’re probably not.

• “Mensa is a club restricted to high-IQ individuals, and one must pass IQ-type tests to be admitted. Yet 44 percent of the members of this club believed in astrology, 51 percent believed in biorhythms, and 56 percent believed in the existence of extraterrestrial visitors-all beliefs for which there is not a shred of evidence.”

• “The number of new drugs approved per billion US dollars spent on R&D has halved roughly every 9 years since 1950…” (via Luke Muehlhauser for this and the next.)

• Using linear algebra to translate between languages without labeled data.

• Will we eventually be able to colonize the stars? “My impression is that the most informed people thinking about these issues believe that space colonization will eventually be possible, and that they believe this for reasons that make sense to me.”

• One of the more creative weight-loss approaches I’ve heard (female readers only!): Artificially induce lactation.

• The best set of algorithm visualizations I’ve seen.

• Iceland consumes 5837 watts of electricity per person, more than twice that of the #2 spot, Norway, and more than 4x that of the average US citizen. The majority of this power (68.4%) is being consumed by their aluminum industry and 85% of their energy is from renewable resources, via a mix of geothermal energy (65%) and hydropower (20%).

• File this under results-I’ll-believe-after-12-replications: Monkeys hate Western music, but enjoy music from Africa and India.

• Some nice looking social share buttons. I’ll have to test if these are more effective than the current sorta ugly solution, in the same vein as the first split test post.

• “Contrary to theory, women were found to be more physically aggressive to their partners than men were”

• You know how Rome salted the earth after conquering Carthage so nothing would ever grow there again? Well-l-l, that never happened.

• Is everyone getting dumber? “Based on 13 age-matched studies from Western countries conducted between 1884 and 2004 yielding 16 data points we estimated a decline of −13.35 IQ points.” (via hbd* chick for this and the next)

• Being a criminal may be reproductively adaptive: “Convicted criminal offenders had more children than individuals never convicted of a criminal offense. Criminal offenders also had more reproductive partners, were less often married, more likely to get remarried if ever married, and had more often contracted a sexually transmitted disease than non-offenders.”

• More people died during the evacuation of Fukushima than will die from the radiation.

Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these.
—Ovid

• From 1995 to 1998, during the daytime on rural roads, Montana had no numeric speed limit. The policy was that one should drive as fast as is “reasonable and proper.” In 1999, they threw this out, implemented proper speed limits, and… accidents increased.

• Markets are great at aggregating information, which is then reflected in the price. (This is part of why prediction markets are so exciting). So I’ve wondered: How can I, as an individual, get that information back out of the price? If I look at, say, the price of Tesla, and it goes up, what does that tell me about the world? Here’s one interesting application: using market mood to predict if the president will be reelected. And, indeed, positive stock market gains predict an incumbent re-election.

• But that was just the setup. In 1954, the United States detonated the “Castle Bravo” nuclear device, the largest in US history, on Bikini Atoll. (This is the origin of Bikini Bottom in Spongebob — the characters can speak because of the radioactivity.) At the time, the bomb’s construction was a closely guarded state secret (and much of the assembly of hydrogen bombs still is a state secret), but there were a few likely contenders for materials: thorium, beryllium, thallium, and so on. So how can we figure out what went into the bomb? Well, Armen A. Alchian thinks something like, “I’ll just look at stock prices of the guys making this stuff.” He writes, “One firm’s stock price rose, as best I can recall, from about $2 or $3 per share in August to about $13 per share in December. It was the Lithium Corp. of America. In January, I wrote and circulated within RAND a memorandum titled ‘The Stock Market Speaks.'” Two days later, government officials forced him to withdraw the paper because of, you know, national security and stuff.

• In World Cup news: Apparently the iconic soccer ball (you know, the one you’re imagining right now) has only been the iconic soccer ball since 1970. Before then, it was orange.

• “historically, hurricanes with female names have, on average, killed more people than those with male ones.”

• Downvotes make online communities worse. “Not only do authors of negatively-evaluated content contribute more, but also their future posts are of lower quality, and are perceived by the community as such. Moreover, these authors are more likely to subsequently evaluate their fellow users negatively, percolating these effects through the community.”

• Okay, so a male water strider, in order to mate, climbs on the back of a female, but the female controls the whole process via a sort of “hatch” — if she doesn’t want to mate, it’s not going to happen. Except now, male water striders have evolved to produce vibrations (which attract predators) until the female consents to mating, a sort of animal kingdom blackmail.

• As far as I can tell, Howard Morgan holds the record for “most times shot and still survived,” at 28. In fact, a single gunshot wound is “only” fatal in about 20% of cases. (via Isegoria)

• Credentialism is the new taxation: almost 30% of the work force need a government license. Mark Perry calls them “permission slips.”

• ‘Obvious’ theorems that are actually false.

• Chimps are pretty good game theorists.

• Why walking through doorways makes you forget.

• “Is there a sub-population of individuals who consistently exhibit less cognitive bias and better judgment under uncertainty than average people?” (Answer: for some certain biases, yes.)

• “the share of women among the very wealthy in the United States peaked in the late 1960s at nearly one-half and then declined to one-third.”

• John Quincy Adams chose to be sworn in as President of the United States on a book of law instead of the Bible. He wanted to swear upon the Constitution.

• Civil wars are almost always hijacked and funded by foreign governments, suggesting that they should be thought of as just an extension of international politics.

• “Shakespeare never had six lines together without a fault. Perhaps you may find seven, but this does not refute my general assertion.”

• “people in the United States now make more [phone] calls to India than to Western Europe” (via Tyler Cowen)

• What will the US have first: a gay president, a female president, or an atheist president? Well, probably not an atheist, says a new paper from The Journal of Applied Psychology: “the affective content of anti-atheist prejudice is both broader and more extreme than prejudice against other historically disadvantaged groups.”

• Gigantopithecus is the largest ape known to have ever lived (now unfortunately extinct). It towered some 9.8 feet and weighed up to 1,190 pounds (540 kg).

• Do you like your name? Yeah, that might be genetic.

• Regarding MMOs: 23 percent of men play as women, but only 7 percent of women try taking a walk on the hairier side.

• If you’re interested in artificial general intelligence (strong AI), several researchers in the field have put together “course recommendations”, including one from Ben Goertzel, one from Pei Wang, and one from Marcus Hutter.

• The largest dinosaur yet has been discovered: “Based on its huge thigh bones, it was 40m (130ft) long and 20m (65ft) tall. Weighing in at 77 tonnes, it was as heavy as 14 African elephants, and seven tonnes heavier than the previous record holder, Argentinosaurus.”

• Randal Olson has a post up examining when Reddit posts are most likely to go viral, providing some evidence that the early bird really does get the worm. Between 8 to 12 EST seems to be the best time to maximize influence.

• One might imagine that great mathematicians simply stumble across brilliant conjectures. (Perhaps in the shower?) But this is a myth. Gauss, for instance, conjectured the prime number theorem after laboriously collecting and studying tables of prime numbers. There may have been a moment of insight, but it was the result of priming the subconscious mind with thousands upon thousands of primes.

• According to Google, 16% of queries have never been seen before.

• Pentametron is a Twitter bot that retweets in iambic pentameter. It writes non-sensical (but well-formed!) poetry.

• I’ve been skeptical about innovation inducement prizes, like the Clay Institute’s million dollars for anyone who can best one of the millennium problems. A 2013 review finds that, although research is scarce, a 10 million dollar prize does lead to ~100 million dollars in additional investment. On this evidence, along with the low risks for prize-givers (you only need to pay out when someone solves the problem), I’ve updated in the direction of innovation prizes being useful.

• It turns out that dictionaries used to be way more useful, but have been pared down into a husk of their former selves in the name of efficiency. For the definition of flash, for instance, Google returns “the lights started flashing.” In contrast, Webster’s 1913 edition contains this gem: “A thought flashed through me, which I clothed in act.”

• During a storm this week, I wanted to know why lightning insists on the path that it does (which is a very interesting sort of pattern, as documented here). After searching through a sea of “explanations,” I stumbled across this lightning textbook, which says, “Why is the lightning channel so tortuous? The answer is not known… As is probably becoming more and more apparent with each succeeding chapter in this book, there is an awful lot we still don’t know about lightning.”

• When you first learn about prisoner’s dilemmas, you tend to see them everywhere. There’s a new paper out by Hannes Rusch arguing that this is illusory, “It is highlighted that only 2 of the 726 combinatorially possible strategically unique ordinal 2×2 games have the detrimental characteristics of a PD and that the frequency of PD-type games in a space of games with random payoffs does not exceed about 3.5%.”

• If, tomorrow, everyone just stopped dying (by some miracle, perhaps), population growth would still be about half of what it was during the 1950s baby boom.

• Talk about persistence: “When Dyson invented his first Dual Cyclone vacuum cleaner, which hit stores in 1993, he spent 15 years creating 5,126 versions that failed before he made one that worked.”

• The Spanish navy commissioned four submarines for a cool 3 billion USD, only to now discover a serious design flaw: they’re too heavy to float.

• JP Morgan lost $6 billion after “An unnamed overworked staffer in London copied and pasted the wrong figures into an Excel spreadsheet, throwing the firm’s risk models out of whack.”

• Wojtek the bear was “officially drafted into the Polish Army as a Private.” Favorite drink? Beer.

• matthen of math visualization fame has a very cool interactive Fourier transform demo here. I can thank it for a more intuitive understanding of how to combine circles to create periodic functions.

• So magnetars are super-dense neutron stars. How dense? Well, you would have to collapse our sun into a few kilometers to match the density of a neutron star. The nearest one, at 50,000 light years away, experienced a “starquake,” which would register at 32 on the richter scale. The almost-craziest part? We felt it here on Earth. The craziest part? I lied. There’s a closer magnetar a mere 15,000 light years away.

• Chinese men grow long fingernails as a status symbol. It signals that they don’t have to do manual labor.

• You know what warms my heart? Replication, and not the baby making kind. I mean scientific replication — “For instance, there appears to be no evidence that making people feel physically warm promotes social warmth, that asking people to recall immoral behavior makes the environment seem darker, or for the Romeo and Juliet effect.” (via Kaj Sotala)

• A Stradivarius is a type of 300-ish year old violin. They have a reputation for producing the best sound and, as a result, are super expensive. (One sold at auction in 2010 for $3,600,000.) But how good are they? Turns out — when suitably blinded — no one can tell the difference between a “Strat” and a modern violin, which command a fraction of the price.

• Married couples are more genetically similar than chance. (via hbd* chick for this and the next few)

• I’ve often wondered if there’s room for some kind of genetic calculus, where you figure out just how much you love your relatives based on shared genes, so I was excited when I read this in the NY Times: “More recently, I showed that identical twins who are aunts and uncles invest more in caring for the children of their twins (their ‘genetic’ sons and daughters) than do fraternal twins.” It is sad, in a way, that I was born without a twin. I feel robbed. I’ll never experience what might be the deepest connection any human can have for another. I guess there’s always cloning or forked ems (whole brain emulations), right guys? Guys?

• There are around 70 sets of all-identical quadruplets worldwide.

• Speaking of the weirdness of the genetic calculus: If you love someone if they share more genes with you, you’d expect that a child born to two genetically similar parents would be loved more than one born to two dissimilar parents, as the first would share more genes. This might be related to this next study: “But paradoxically, in some societies, marrying a related spouse is linked to having more surviving children, research suggests.”

• And, while on the subject of marrying relatives, a new research paper in Judgment and Decision Making suggests that better reasoners are less likely to condemn consensual incestuous acts as morally wrong.

• People with wet earwax have stronger body odor. The more you know, I guess.

• A family buys a house. Pretty nice, right? And then a Brown Recluse Spider comes out of the wall. Not so nice, but no big deal. And then another. And another. Until finally an expert comes in and estimates that there are about 5000 of them living in the house. The new owners are suing the old ones.

• High-ranking Google pages average ~2400 words.

• Cats are lactose intolerant and shouldn’t be given milk. Thanks for the lies, every children’s book ever. (via Austin)

Curiosity is only vanity. Most frequently we wish to know but to talk.
—Blaise Pascal, Pensées

• Joshua Bell, the Washington Post assures me, is a world-class musician and a Very Big Deal. The Post asked him if “he’d be willing to don street clothes and perform at rush hour.” The results? No one cared. (HT: Terry Tao)

• For luxury goods, the ruder the salesperson the better.

• Wikipedia’s lamest edit wars.

• Do dogs know calculus? Well, they can’t take symbolic derivatives, but they can compute optimal paths.

• Women who prefer the evening to the morning are more sexually, uh, liberated. This makes sense given the link between testosterone levels and night preference.

• Dunbar’s number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. Dunbar proposed 150, but given data from online communities, it looks like the real number might be more like 50.

• Hector is the name given to a cumulonimbus, or thundercloud, that forms regularly nearly every afternoon on the Tiwi Islands.

• Carl Shulman has a post up on scientific fraud: “1.97% of scientists admitted to have fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least once”.

• “each Apollo mission took about the same amount of work as each pyramid.”

• Colin Wright has written a fun discussion of the mutilated chessboard problem.

• So, in Montana, there used to be this 1 mile long, 1,780 feet deep open pit copper mine. When it closed in 1982, the company stopped pumping out water, and it became a lake. Nice story right? Except the water interacted with the exposed rock, releasing acid. It’s a lake of poison.

• For anyone new to machine learning who’s ever wondered: Which algorithm do I apply? Try this graphic.

• Guerino Mazzola is attempting to fuse algebraic geometry and music. Grothendieck reportedly calls it “Das ist wohl schon die Mathematik des neuen Zeitalters,” or “This is probably already the mathematics of the new age.” (It seems there has been much ink spilled on mathematics and music.)

• “16 out of 22 hallucinating, profoundly deaf schizophrenics insisted they had heard some kind of communication.” Other patients hallucinate sign language which, interestingly, seems to imply that schizophrenia manifests more generally as communication wonkyness than anything specific to language.

• From a former maintainer, an explanation of why GNU grep is fast. Thoughtful throughout. Ends with this gem: “The key to making programs fast is to make them do practically nothing.”

• “Yes, US fisheries seem to be recovering. But that’s not true for much of the rest of the world. And, given that the United States imports around 91 percent of its seafood, this is a pretty crucial caveat.”

• With regard to Isaac Newton: His successor in the Lucasian Chair described him this way, “Of the most fearful, cautious and suspicious temper that I ever knew.”

• Numberphile has a (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsSeoGpiWsw), featuring part of an interview with John Conway. It’s a bit like if we found some really bizarre prime number and nobody could tell you why it exists or what it all means.

• The story of a burglar who thought rubbing his face in lemon juice would make him invisible.

• W.H. Coltharp needed to move 50,000 bricks to build a bank, but he couldn’t afford freight. So he mailed them.

• A neat post on using color to gain intuition about four-dimensional space.

• A probably apocryphal story: Bertrand Russel, when asked why he gave up philosophy, is said to have responded, “Because I discovered I preferred fucking.”

• After winning a Fields medal, publication rate declines.

• “We find that while going from elite to lower-rank institutions on average associates with modest decrease in scientific performance, transitioning into elite institutions does not result in subsequent performance gain.”

• An survey of 33 quantum physicists. The authors describe the paper as “to our knowledge the most comprehensive poll of quantum-foundational views ever conducted.” Some of the interesting bits: a plurality expect a useful quantum computer in 10 to 25 years, the Copenhagen interpretation is still the most popular by far (42%), but currently most (58%) also hold that a choice of interpretation is a matter of personal philosophical preference.

• Alex Tabarrok has a post up on implementing prediction markets to give not-yet-born citizens a say in policy debates.

• 80% of Spotify’s songs have been played at least once.

• The left is (surprise!) more neurotic than the right.

• According to Wikipedia, in 2013, $5.3 trillion dollars changed hands daily in foreign exchange markets. The New York Stock Exchange, in contrast, moves a paltry $169 billion per day. This means that at least 7 percent of the gross world product (total GDP of the world) is traded each day.

• Occasionally, my sister will forget the name of a movie and I’ll offer to tell her the name, but she’ll say, “Don’t tell me! It’ll come to me.” It turns out that this might be totally rational: the harder time you have recalling something, the more that memory benefits from a successful recollection.

• Expensive wine doesn’t taste better: “In a sample of more than 6,000 blind tastings, we find that the correlation between price and overall rating is small and negative, suggesting that individuals on average enjoy more expensive wines slightly less.”

• A 1987 meta-analysis finds a modest .3 correlation between price and quality. Rao 2005 suggests that people generally overestimate the strength of the price-quality relationship.

• Tax revenue has recently declined in Slovakia, so officials have created a bizarre lottery system. Citizens can enter receipts for a chance to win a car. If the merchant has printed the receipt with a fake tax identification number, they’re flagged for further investigation. (HT: Kaj Sotala)

• “Falling in love comes at the cost of losing two close friends.”

• Reductio ad Hitlerum: “an informal fallacy that consists of trying to refute an opponent’s view by comparing it to a view that would be held by Adolf Hitler or the Nazi Party.”

• “There is no such thing as cheating in art. I don’t care how it’s created: I only care about the results. You’d think that’s all anyone should care about, but unfortunately that’s not the case.”

• Great works in programming languages.

• Wikipedia’s most referenced articles.

• “In three studies, we found that students who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than students who took notes longhand.”

• Wages and performance reviews depend not on performance, but on politics.

• “Most famously, the Bechdel test challenges films to feature (1) two or more female characters that (2) talk to each other about (3) something other than a man. Only ~56.7% of films pass all 3 conditions of the test.”

• Pablo Picasso died in 1973.

• George Green was the first person to create a mathematical theory of electricity and magnetism. He received only about one year of formal schooling as a child, between the ages of 8 and 9.

• We may finally have a biomarker for aging. Gwern describes the significance: “The truly exciting part here is the possibility that his clock will not just be real, but it’ll be caused by aging and not just correlated through the myriads of possible pathways. If you get an actual biomarker for aging, it’ll revolutionize anti-aging studies by letting you test interventions in a decade with a small fraction of the humans you’d need with mortality-based methods.”

• German doctors were the first to identify the relationship between smoking and lung cancer. As a result, Nazi Germany initiated a strong anti-tobacco movement and led the first public anti-smoking campaign in modern history.

• Stochastic superoptimizers are super cool. The field (is it a field?) is basically concerned with using search to find the fastest possible implementation.

• How the Putnam Competition is written. “It used to be said that a Broadway musical was a success if the audience left the theater whistling the tunes. I want to see contestants leave the Putnam whistling the problems.”

• The overwhelming majority of the participants in these three experiments were more creative while walking than sitting, the study found.

• “all the advances in computational complexity theory, all advances, have been from the discovery of new algorithms”

• Don Knuth, author of The Art of Computer Programming, has a nontechnical reading list. “I read very slowly.”

• About 1000 Iraqi civilians are killed each month.

• “people using a foreign language make substantially more utilitarian decisions”

• Men are more likely than women to starve during a famine.

• It’s pretty well known that women’s mate preferences change across the menstrual cycle — something that’s been mentioned on this blog a few times before. A recent meta-analysis finds little support for this hypothesis. (HT: Scott Alexander)

• And here’s some commentary in Emotion Review on how no one listens to meta-analyses anyways.

• “In nearly all respects – economically, socially, psychologically – the typical cult converts tested out normal. Moreover, nearly all those who left cults after weeks, months, or even years of membership showed no sign of physical, mental, or social harm.”

• This longitudinal study of psychedelics (such as LSD) finds that they’re associated with better mental health. Also, “A case-control study of Native Americans failed to find any evidence of cognitive or mental health deficits among people who regularly used peyote in religious services compared to those who did not use peyote, rather total lifetime peyote use (mean 300 occasions, range 150–500) was associated with overall better mental health.”