Even More Links For September 2014

Data science divides the music world into 1264 genres, and the Guardian wants to show us all of them. Okay, ten of them. Including “charred death”, “deep filthstep”, and “skweee”.

This is a joke: Five Ways ISIS Can Reduce Its Carbon Footprint. This is not a joke: Parents Defecting To ISIS Because Of Its Family-Friendly Environment.

I always figured the “rebel yell”, the supposedly bone-chilling battle cry of the Confederates during the Civil War, was one of those sensations lost to history, like the face of Helen of Troy or the taste of fresh mammoth. But turns out some Confederate veterans lived long enough to be recorded on video and there are clips of them doing the rebel yell on YouTube. It sounds like a crazy person making silly noises, and history is now ruined for me forever.

If we ever go into some alternate dimension where everyone is perfectly selfish game theoretic agents, I want this guy on my team: Chinese restaurant owner secretly drugged his food with addictive poppies to keep customers coming back.

Possibly the first – and one of the most impressive – effective altruist projects in history – The Balmis Expedition. A fleet of ships armed with a complicated cowpox incubation system in the form of 22 orphaned children travels to the New World to vaccinate the Indians against smallpox.

Something that looks a lot like real progress from the various climate summits going on now: Cargill Promises To Stop Chopping Down Rainforests – This Is Huge.

Your daily reminder that everything in psychology changes about as frequently as the wind – Human Preferences For Sexually Dimorphic Faces May Be Evolutionarily Novel – by which they mean they’re only found in industrialized countries. More diverse populations don’t seem to prefer feminine women or masculine men at all. I look forward to seeing whether this is replicated.

More fallout from that Victorian IQ study – are we sure that the effect isn’t confounded by luminance of stimulus?

About half a meta-level above normal discussions of politics, but half a meta-level below meta discussion of politics: Vox: New Zealand Has The Best Designed Government In The World. Makes sense, although it kind of conflates “makes every vote count” and “promotes good policy”. Still, I agree with its general thrust that this kind of thing would be worth pushing over here.

Megan McArdle’s guide to appearing on the Daily Show: Don’t. Having spent a few years watching it, I’m not really surprised to learn they twist and edit everything people say in order to support the political position they’re pushing.

Indian businessman Anil Agarwal has decided to donate 75% of his $3.3 billion fortune after talking to Bill Gates.

Kim Jong-un has not been seen for about a month, sparking rumors of some kind of problem. Now North Korean media have announced he is suffering from “discomfort”, which sounds like a totally legit medical diagnosis. Speculation is that he might have gout. I am surprised they can’t control that given the level of medical care he probably has access to.

Last links post I mentioned some interesting Google Maps Street Views, but those pale compared to whatever is going on in the Skerry Isles. I think they might have had the Singularity without telling us or something.

If you read Tumblr, you’re probably familiar with realsocialskills, the overly heavy and opinionated advice blog. Now there is realersocialskills, the parody/hate account that criticizes everything it says. But the weird part is that it’s really civil about it and I actually find their conversation to be productive and interesting.

China Removes 100,000 Government Officials Who Were Paid But Had No Work. I would make fun of them, except that apparently they have less than half the bureaucrats per capita we do.

Did you know: the ruins of the southernmost Russian colony in the New World are within a couple hours’ drive north of San Francisco? Or that some fringe Russian politicians want to sue to get it back?

Another study finds a link between Tylenol use during pregnancy and ADHD. Still far from proven, but evidence starting to build up. Do remember that most alternatives to Tylenol are worse.

Wikipedia’s page on evolutionary aesthetics contains a bunch of links to weird fields you never knew existed, like “evolutionary musicology” and “Darwinian literary studies”. Also: “When young human children from different nations are asked to select which landscape they prefer, from a selection of standardized landscape photographs, there is a strong preference for savannas with trees.”

I know I’m not supposed to judge books by their covers, but if I did, my favorite would be Naive Set Theory.