Link Dump 2014-12-15

2014-12-15

We like to think that all of science is, in principle, reducible to physics. But what principle are we using? This article argues that maybe no such principle exists, and that science will always be a collection of separate fields. I took away a different point: if physics is only sufficient to generate certain phenomenon, but not necessary to generate it, then it may not be useful to reduce the phenomenon down to physics. This is roughly the same argument as the physical symbol system hypothesis that underlies a lot of AI - that intelligence behavior can come from both neurons and CPUs, and therefore the exact chemistry/physics doesn't matter at this high level.
Some notes on the design of robots in Interstellar.
The Gangnam Style music video is so popular that it forced YouTube to switch to 64-bit integers to track its viewership.
Rule 34: If it exists, there is porn of it. In this case, Mormonism.
This article about hackers/"weird nerds" being drawn into the feminism debate annoys me. Okay, I get that hacker culture used to be shunned (and still is, to some degree), but that doesn't mean we now have the right to shun everyone else. At the end of the article, the author even explicitly states that the stereotyping of non-hacker programmers is a cognitive bias - then goes on to argue that people should therefore try harder to make us get rid of it. That's entirely the wrong thing to do; if you know you're doing something you shouldn't be doing, stop doing it. I have no sympathy for this argument.
Perhaps hypocritically, I am now going to bash history as a discipline (not really), a discipline that people should study because it turns them into critical, reflective thinkers. A question that history does not ask, on the other hand, is: is history the most effective way of turning people into critical thinkers? We should be looking not at the absolute benefits of history, but the relative benefits of history as compared to other disciplines; it's the idea of opportunity cost (which is from economics). After all, I'm sure the Holocaust got rid of more than a couple pedophiles and murderers and rapists, but that doesn't mean the Holocaust is a good idea, or that it's the best way of getting rid of criminals. I'm not saying that studying history is useless; I'm merely saying that the article doesn't make a complete enough argument.
What do the video game series Assassin's Creed, Tomb Raider, and Uncharted have in common? Their protagonists Ezio Auditore da Firenze, Lara Croft, and Nathan Drake all need to climb buildings. And they all suck at it.
Ads are more subtly gender-specific now (for example, using pink instead of blue) instead of being overtly advertised as "for girls" like they were 50 years ago. People like to blame ads for perpetuating a sexist culture, but I more inclined to believe that ads are purely capitalist, and that it's society that's perpetuating a sexist culture by buying more pink princesses than blue princesses. In other words, how much profit should companies give up in the pursuit of gender-neutral toys?
From an article linked from the above: "Twenty years ago, Hasbro, a major American toy manufacturing company, tested a playhouse it hoped to market to both boys and girls. It soon emerged that girls and boys did not interact with the structure in the same way. The girls dressed the dolls, kissed them, and played house. The boys catapulted the toy baby carriage from the roof."
Speaking of using psychology for the greater bad, CIA used the idea of induced helplessness to design its torture - I mean, enhanced interrogation techniques program.
China has banned puns! Ostensibly it's to protect its cultural heritage, but many suspect it's to crack down on disguised jabs at the government. They should put a taboo on it so the police can track down everypun who doesn't comply with the rules.
This War of Mine is a video game about war... from the civilians' perspective. I'm excited that we're slowly moving towards games being actual artistic experiences (as opposed to just telling good stories).
What if the main target audience of colleges were not young adults? How would a college designed from the ground up for adults be different from colleges as we know them now?
MIT took down Walter Lewin's physics lectures from their online education platform due to his sexual harassment of female students. One MIT alumni reflects on how it's the right thing for MIT to do, but it's sad regardless because Lewin actually taught his students, instead of thinking "well they just don't have what it takes" or "well they're just not working hard enough". That attitude is common for computer science too. In an evaluation of my class, a student wrote a memorable comment, that I "can be a little ruthless to people who do not know have much programming experience", and it's still something I'm struggling with.
Of course, entirely ironically, the next article I read would be how the Codeup Bootcamp found a correlation between programming ability with the scores on an algebra test. It was pointed out on Hacker News that this is a known result, but now I'm wondering how this effect compares with the effect of different instructors.
A beautiful heat map of 6.3 billion tweets over three and a half years.