Musicians Algorithmically Generate Every Possible Melody, Release Them to Public Domain - https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/wxepzw/musicians-algorithmically-generate-every-possible-melody-release-them-to-public-domain
Passports started as a "temporary" war measure - https://fee.org/articles/passports-were-a-temporary-war-measure/
"There is one thing that the extreme pro- and anti-abortion people can agree upon: that the issue is intellectually trivial, the correct answer blindingly obvious. They just disagree about which position is blindingly obvious and which stupidly evil. I disagree, though. I think the issue of abortion is difficult. In fact, if you think the issue is easy, then I would say you’re irrational" - http://fakenous.net/?p=392
Models that predict a decline in human population due to declining birth rates fail to account for whether fertility is heritable. If it is, then what we'll really see if a temporary drop, where the ability to choose your family size starts replacing people who don't want more children with those who do. - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1090513817302799
Over time, kids are getting better at delayed gratification. - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289620300295
In every social science, the scientists are, on average, left-wing. But economists are the ones who are least left-wing. - https://t.co/Bf9e2pFMOx
According to John Ehrlichman who worked for Nixon: "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." - https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/
Right-wing political correctness - https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/right-has-its-own-version-political-correctness-its-just-stifling
Young people have about the same level of debt and home ownership as 2 decades ago - https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/06/millennial-debt-is-actually-quite-low/
Instead of being separate conditions, many mental health problems appear to share an underlying cause - https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24532660-500-a-radical-idea-suggests-mental-health-conditions-have-a-single-cause/
"white officers use force 60 percent more than black officers, and use gun force twice as often... while white and black officers use gun force at similar rates in white and racially mixed neighborhoods, white officers are five times as likely to use gun force in predominantly black neighborhoods." - https://www.nber.org/papers/w26774
The NRA used to be "at the forefront of legislative efforts to enact gun control", plus other weird facts about the history of gun control - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/the-secret-history-of-guns/308608/
"Republican district attorneys lead to a 18-21% increase in new prison admissions in the two years following their election... there are no significant effects on local crime or arrest rates" - https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/11/the-effect-of-district-attourneys-on-criminal-justice-outcomes.html
The ways Texas and California Republicans took different paths on immigration in the past, and how it seemed to change who voted for them - https://www.cato.org/blog/proposition-187-turned-california-blue
Missing moods - https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/01/the_invisible_t.html
The majority of Republicans say that college has an overall negative impact on the U.S. - https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/08/19/the-growing-partisan-divide-in-views-of-higher-education-2/
"Liberals, relative to conservatives, express greater moral concern toward friends relative to family, and the world relative to the nation." - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12227-0
Saturday, May 29, 2021
Links 2021/05/29
Wednesday, January 1, 2020
Best songs of the 2010s according to science: 1-25
Everyone knows the best thing about the end of a year is reading and making lists. The end of a decade is even better! I sat down to make my top 10 songs, then accidentally made 100, and then forced myself to cut this to 25. I didn't allow listing more than 1 song by a single artist (otherwise some artists like Tera Melos and Buke and Gase would be listed too much). This ended up taking a lot of time therefore you are morally obligated to read it. I'm so sorry.
25. Dark Dark Dark - Daydreaming
I heard just a small clip of this folk song in the background of a TV show and spent a while trying to dig up what it was. The little repeating instrumental piano part seems like it shouldn't work on paper but it's so great and unique and never gets old.
24. Flying Lotus with Kendrick Lamar - Never Catch Me
They need to make a whole album together in this style.
23. Ian William Craig - A Single Hope
Very distorted and harsh sounds mysteriously adding up to something extremely calm and beautiful. Headphones required.
22. Norwegian Arms - Kiva Ikva
Mandolin-driven Animal-Collective-inspired freak-folk that I imagine SpongeBob would listen to.
21. Black Midi - BmBmBm
Best new genre (auction rock) and worst front-flip. A brand new band that I have a feeling will make some of my favorite music of the 2020s. They feel like the spiritual successor to The Mars Volta.
20. Julia Holter - Turn the Light On
I've listened to this song so many times and still don't feel like I understand it. What is the main "part"? What is the structure of it? What are even the instruments being played? It feels futuristic and alien and not acoustic, yet when I try to listen to each sound it appears they are all classical instruments like strings, horns, and piano? It feels very abstract and beautiful and different on each listen.
19. Dawn of Midi - Dysomnia
It's a little bit cheating that I'm putting the album instead of a track off the album, but really the whole album is a single song and it'd be impossible to pick just one track. It's very unique and hard to categorize, but they are mostly considered a jazz band acoustically playing techno. I don't really like jazz or techno, yet I haven't been able to stop listening to this. The way the instruments spiral around each other and slowly unfold into different shapes is really trance-inducing.
18. Tool - Fear Inoculum
I was happy for Tool to finally make a new album but had low expectations because I figured surely their glory days are over. And at first I just felt like this was "alright". But it really grows on you.
17. Kendrick Lamar - u
The song I've found myself going back to the most from the best hip-hop album of the decade. The transition around half-way through the song is the thing that stands out to me the most.
16. Olafur Arnalds - Near Light
A neo-classical pianist, who made this album "Living Room Songs" in his living room, writing and recording 1 song per day for 8 days. This one in particular mixes in electronic elements; he said "my mother and sister came by for a visit so I made them play some synths."
15. Folo - White Bear and The Birds
Israeli folk-tronica that I think any Radiohead fan would really like. As far as I know, they just made this album and then disappeared without it really being noticed, which isn't fair.
14. Dirty Projectors - Unto Caesar
When should we bust into harmony?
13. PJ Harvey - England
A rock goddess from the early 90s that can then make odd folk stuff in the 2010s and have it be her best music and maybe the best album of the decade.
12. Drop Electric - Empire Trashed
I remember hearing this for the first time, knowing absolutely nothing about them, and being taken aback several times by how the song evolves.
11. Kanye West - Lost In The World
I don't need to say who Kanye West is.
10. Sylvan Esso - Hey Mami
Started by making an a capella song that works as is, then with electronics added in a surprising and exactly-right way.
9. Animal Collective - FloriDada
Most instantly and consistently catchy song of the decade.
8. Cloudkicker - Oh, God.
Just one guy making music on his home computer as a hobby and making all of it available for free. Even though it's of a genre I mostly don't like (metal), I obsessed over all his music this decade, and when I make music I find myself frequently imitating his approach to things.
7. Buke and Gase - Your Face Left Before You
2 people strumming instruments they invented/built while drumming with their feet. Even though a lot of thought and experimentation has clearly gone into it, the songs feel extremely spontaneous and just more alive than other music. Nobody really knows how to classify it; I've seen it called anything from math rock to country pop.
6. Kishi Bashi - Philosophize In It! Chemicalize With It!
Feels like a song from some cult I want to join and live happily ever after.
5. Tera Melos - Purple and Stripes
If I kept making this list from scratch I'd pick a different Tera Melos song to be toward the top each time; throughout their last 3 albums they've been my consistent favorite artist of this decade. This song is like taking clips from unknown insanely catchy 90s punk pop songs, throwing them in a blender, then picking out some of the broken shards and piecing them together into a jigsaw puzzle.
4. Alt-J - Hunger Of The Pine
Only good because it samples Hannah Montana, obviously.
3. Son Lux and Lorde - Easy (Switch Screens)
The original song by Son Lux was already really good and unique. Then they started changing it up live, and also Lorde started covering it on her tour, and then they combined all that together to make it truly perfect.
2. Swans - Apostate
This is what the end of the world sounds like. If you are patient and also listen to it LOUD, it's a very rewarding and intense experience.
1. Sigur Ros - Ekki Mukk
Listen on headphones. By the end your breathing will be slowed to half its normal speed, and you'll have no idea whether the song lasted 1 minute or 1 hour.
Tuesday, October 29, 2019
Links 2019/10/29
Kansas City spans two states, both of which have constantly competed for businesses to relocate to their side of the city with tax incentives. Obviously this was a negative-sum game, and the governors of both states have worked out a deal to end it (link). Everyone appears to correctly recognize this as a good thing to stop, but isn't this what's happening across all cities and states offering tax incentives to specific businesses!? Should we not pass a federal law to end this at a higher level?
The PATRIOT Act created special warrants that were supposed to give federal agents more power to stop terrorism. It turns out, this new power has been used a lot, but almost entirely on the war on drugs instead of terrorism. Link.
And yet... per capita US drug deaths have doubled every decade for the last 4 decades! That's a far bigger increase than I realized. Link.
A long-term look at California's Paid Family Leave Act suggests that it "tended to reduce the number of children born". That seems very surprising to me, and I don't know whether to consider this a case where evidence should overturn common sense or it's safer to brush this aside as noise in the data? Link.
ICE accidentally deported an American citizen with mental disabilities to Mexico with only $3. It took 125 days of living on the streets of foreign countries before he was able to get back. Yet another reminder that you can lose all your rights as soon as you are suspected of being an illegal immigrant. Link.
A guy who was born in Greece, then moved to America as a kid, was deported by ICE to Iraq because he was ethnically Iraqi. He had never lived there, did not speak Arabic, had diabetes, and of course... died, apparently from a from lack of insulin. Link.
"65% of American adults describe themselves as Christians ... down 12 percentage points over the past decade. Meanwhile, the religiously unaffiliated ... now stands at 26%, up from 17% in 2009." Link. There has also been an especially rapid drop in religiosity the last few years in parts of the Arab world, without almost half of young adults in Tunisia now identifying as not religious (link). I expect these trends to continue, but... if religiosity remains somewhat heritable and correlated with larger family size, then in the long-run, maybe those less naturally inclined to be religious will fade from the gene pool and religion will make a major comeback?
People often mention Trump's deregulation efforts without ever getting into any details. The Brookings Institution keeps a running list here. As noted here, the deregulations are largely environmental, such as less restrictions on pollution and removing the rule requiring humane treatment of animals in order to be officially "certified organic". On the other hand, regulations of the labor market have increased in many ways, e.g. "employers have been asked to document every possible project a prospective immigrant employee might work on over the next three years".
Per "average fine particulate matter" measurements, American air pollution decreased by 24.2% from 2009 to 2016, then reversed course and increased by 5.5% between 2016 and 2018. "The increase was associated with 9,700 additional premature deaths in 2018." Link.
Tuesday, July 30, 2019
Links 2019/07/03
"What you think about landfill and recycling is probably totally wrong": "Almost all of the litter that escapes into nature, especially the sea, comes from fishing ships or poorer riverine countries with bad rubbish collection practices... Rich countries like the UK or US have rubbish collection rates approaching 100%". Throwing stuff away is probably fine most of the time. We're just taking stuff out of the ground, making use of it, then putting it back in the ground.
"An investor-led building boom has almost doubled the size of the Sydney apartment rental market in two years, forcing landlords to drop rents more than $100 a week in some areas to secure tenants" (link). It almost makes you wonder if restrictions on increasing housing supply, happening in cities all over, are bad and increasing our cost of living!
"I’m begging you: Stop donating canned goods to food banks". Canned food drives are maybe the best example of ineffective altruism. Among other things: "that $1 you spent on tuna could have purchased $4 worth of tuna if put in the hands of non-profit employee".
A government policy passed today will affect younger people more, because they will live longer. So wouldn't it be more fair to make votes count more the younger you are? The case for age-weighted voting.
Tax preparers are capturing 13-22% of the value of the EITC (link). So if the government did pre-filled tax returns, people would get much more out of the EITC without us having to spend an extra penny on it (link).
Comparing states that accepted the ACA Medicaid expansions to those that did not finds a "reduction in disease-related deaths" which "grows over time" in states that did the Medicaid expansion (link).
Replacement of manned toll booths with electronic ones greatly reduce vehicle emissions in the area. And a study of one example of making that transition in a populated area found that it "reduced prematurity and low birth weight among mothers within 2 kilometers of a toll plaza by 10.8 percent and 11.8 percent, respectively, relative to mothers 2-10 km from a toll plaza" (link).
Related: schools downwind of a highway have "decreases in test scores, more behavioral incidents, and more absences" than ones upwind. To help control for other variables, this is comparing students who move campuses from one side of the highway to the other (link).
Related again: when Volkswagen cheated on emission tests, they were selling cars "which secretly polluted up to 150 times as much as gasoline cars". That's a lot! So a study tracked where these vehicles were used as a natural experiment on the effects of sudden and randomly dispersed increases in air pollution from cars. And it found "a 10 percent cheating-induced increase in car exhaust increases rates of low birth weight and acute asthma attacks among children by 1.9 and 8.0 percent" (link).
A Dallas-born teenage citizen was mistakenly arrested under suspicion of being an illegal immigrant and kept in one of our special detention centers for asylum-seekers. He was not given basic rights like a phone call, because those rights do not apply to people who are not believed to be citizens. In the 23 days it took before the error was recognized and he was released, he apparently lost 26 pounds (link). In contrast, read this excerpt on how well we treated Nazi prisoners. Were we wrong to not treat them worse? Or is being a brown person seeking asylum a worse crime than Nazism?
Trump is now telling non-white women in Congress, who were born in America, to go back to the countries they came from (link). In a follow-on rally, his supporters chanted "send her back" about a Somali-born American citizen (link). I wonder what David Duke saw in him.
Wednesday, May 29, 2019
Links 2019/05/29
The state agency that regulates and licenses plumbing in Texas is being abolished. According to one state representative, "our plumbing shortage is solved because we can all become plumbers." Link. Yee-haw!
Sweden has a tradition called "Lordagsgodis" (Saturday candy), where you shouldn't eat candy on any other day of the week, but on Saturday you eat as much as you want. "When participating in the 'Lordagsgodis' tradition, the average Swedish family of four eats about 1.2 kilos (2.65 lbs.) of candy!" Link.
Does College Turn People Into Liberals? In a study following 7,000+ students across 120+ colleges through their first couple of years, "48 percent viewed liberals more favorably in their second year of college than when they arrived on campus. However, among the same students, 50 percent also viewed conservatives more favorably. In other words, college attendance is associated, on average, with gains in appreciating political viewpoints across the spectrum, not just favoring liberals."
One Step For Animals is an animal welfare organization that, instead of advocating vegetarianism, is focused just on getting people to stop eating chicken. "If we can convince someone to stop eating birds, they would go from being responsible for the factory farming and slaughtering of more than two dozen land animals per year to fewer than one." "It takes more than 200 chickens to provide the same number of meals as one cow."
Everyone learns about the Stanford Prison Experiment, but the whole thing was basically bad science and a sham. People know this and still teach it because, in the words of one professor, it teaches a lesson "bigger than the science". THIS REALLY GETS ON MY NERVES! Link.
"Paying American students cash incentives causes them to do better on the PISA, an international standardized test of math skills. But similar incentives had no effect on Chinese students, implying that Americans are slacking while Chinese students are trying hard." Link. IMO, it's often the case that what people are "good" or "bad" at is more matter of how motivated they feel to do it.
In a study trying to determine why people deny science: "Subjects were asked to justify their rejection of the scientific consensus. In 33% of cases... subjects simply restated their position, essentially giving no justification." Link. ...
Wednesday, May 22, 2019
Links 2019/05/22
The Day The Dinosaurs Died: The asteroid's impact "formed a fiery plume, which reached halfway to the moon". Hollywood has really dropped the ball on cool/scary asteroid explosions.
"Our belief in the benefits of low salt consumption are largely based on mis-information and myth-information." Link.
"Saudi crown prince defends China's right to put Uighur Muslims in concentration camps." ??? This has been up to 1 million people. Link.
"August birthday (read: enter school younger) associated with 30% increase in ADHD diagnoses relative to September birthday. But only in states with September school cutoff." Hmmm... Link.
California used to allow medical and non-medical exemptions for school-mandated vaccines. Then, to try to increase vaccination, they repealed non-medical exemptions. But this only led to a 1% decline in total exemptions, seemingly because many of the people who were getting non-medical exemptions switched to medical ones instead. What a coincidence! It makes you doubt how effectively we can change people's behavior in general... Link.
"A Women's March planned in Eureka has been postponed by the organizers over fears that participants were not diverse enough." Link.
You Have No Right to Your Culture: "Do you have more cultural ground in common with your grandparents - or with foreigners of your own generation?"
After reading the full Mueller report, Justin Amash, a GOP congressman, now says that "Attorney General Barr has deliberately misrepresented Mueller's report", "Trump has engaged in impeachable conduct" (obstruction of justice), and "few members of Congress have read the report". Link. I have no doubt that nothing will come of this.
Saturday, March 30, 2019
Common sense regulations to save children's lives
In the U.S., according to the CDC, gun accidents are the #1 cause of injury deaths for children ages 1-4, mostly caused by guns kept in the home. For ages 1-14, it is the #2 cause of unintentional injury-death, behind only car accidents (link and link). Yet many people insist on keeping guns in their homes. And many oppose simple regulations that could reduce these deaths, such as child locks. Do they just not care about the deaths of so many children?
Sorry, I read that wrong. That was the data for drowning and pools, not guns.
I'm guessing that, of the people who strongly support gun control laws and have fond memories of swimming at their or friends' homes growing up, most dislike the idea of "pool control" laws. If so, why do you feel that way? Do you think, maybe, people who have enjoyed gun ownership have the same negative reaction to gun control, for the exact same reasons?
Should there be more regulations on swimming pools?