Links from Spring 2022
One step closer to predicting people’s face from their genome. Eventual applications include forensics, mapping “anonymized” genomes to the corresponding Facebook profiles, and automatically finding celeb lookalikes in the UK Biobank.
In 1896, a train company in Texas deliberately had two trains crash full-speed into each other. The plan was to make money as people would take the train to see the trains crash.
Cool evolutionary biology: did you think natural selection occurred over millions of years? Rudman et al found that fruit flies evolve cyclically every year, as they adapt back and forth to seasonal temperature changes. Is this first- or second-order fitness?
A nice explanation of Landauer’s principle by Euanmclean.
A claim that newborns learn phonemes within the first 5 hours of their lives. The experiments were conducted in Mandarin, I’d like to see a replication with an atonal language.
Manga of the season: Shintaro Kago, the Ultra Power Mongol Invasion. Kago is specialized in the most twisted kind of hardcore guro hentai, but he also wrote a manga telling an alternate version of World History, starting with the Mongols. I wouldn’t quite call it hentai, but it’s still twisted. The only online version I could find is hosted on this hentai scan website. Excerpt:
Wholesale wikipedias
Signs of the Coming Judgement Day
Shadows from the Walls of Death
Sentences out of context
“It is striking to the modern reader that none of these gentlemen were natural philosophers acquainted with the methods of science; but according to the historian Steven Shapin, it was the bond of the gentleman that counted.” (here)
“There is no known record of Bat Pussy's existence prior to the 1990s.” (here)
“At the bottom of each of the 24 basins was a snail, glued in place, and each associated with a different letter of the alphabet. An identical second device held the paired snails. To transmit a letter, the operator touched one of the snails.” (here)
Music
Some miniature classical music: Lutosławski’s Fanfare for CUBE (21s), Webern’s Bagatelle No. 3 (22s), Bartók’s Contrary Motion (40s), Kurtág’s Bogancs (20s)
Possible question on facial genomics:
1. Since facial structure correlates with personality (e.g. big five, dark triad, "masculinity") would this prove or disprove Chinese face-reading?
2. Can similar research but for bone structure (testosterone exposure) and gait (mental health) be done to examine cross-correlations of genetic fitness?
3. Can attractiveness be quantified and genetically predicted then, since perception of attractiveness has internal consistency?