Random Linkage, May 2015

Attention conservation notice: If you'd care about these links, you've probably seen them already.

I have been very much distracted from blogging by teaching undergraduates (last semester; this semester), by supervising graduate students, and by Life. Thus even this link round-up is something I literally began years ago, and am only now posting for lack of time to do real blogging.

• "Discovery: Fish Live Beneath Antarctica". all that's missing is commentary from Drs. Lake and Danforth, and maybe the adjective "Stygian".
• Zombie Sponge Reefs. I say again, zombie sponge reef.
• The growing problem of Pablo Escobar's pet hippos: portrait of charismatic megafauna as an invasive species.
• "The Strange Inevitability of Evolution" is a nice popularization of the role of neutral networks in evolution, and how they contribute to both robustness and innovation. It's obviously very strongly based on talking with Andreas Wagner (rather than, e.g., Gerhart and Kirshner), but not crazily so.
• "Egypt was already 11 dynasties old when the last mammoth died on Wrangel Island."
• "The Epic Story of Maximum Likelihood"
• Abusing hierarchical regression to turn a p-value of 0.027 into 10^-16. Relatedly, attractive models, and rat neurons which predict the stock market.
• "Ask a silly question, get a silly answer": Thomas Lumley on a failure mode of opinion surveys. Presumably there a linguistic-pragmatics explanation of this — people are interpreting the question so it makes sense as something asked for by an intelligent person, quite possibly more knowledgeable than they are. (Cf.)
• Why we keep recycling the boomers' childhoods every Christmas. (Also: that's what the guy who wrote The War Against Silence ended up doing for a living? How the mighty are fallen.)
• "Your Online Attention, Bought in an Instant by Advertisers": this is a good account of current practices in on-line advertising, but takes the accuracy of the algorithms on faith. (The "Republicans in such-and-such a part of Texas just don't exercise" thing screams multiple-testing issues to me.) Still, the idea that our for-profit mass surveillance mightn't work as well as its boosters hope is not exactly a great comfort. Cf. David Auebrach's "Your Are What You Click".
• "R, the master troll of statistical languages"
• In all other contexts, we count from 1. Why, in programming, do we count from 0?
• "The short life of publishing traditions". As we may cover our books, when our books are electronic.
• Bruce Sterling's Essay on the New Aesthetic. His Meditation on the archives of Arthur C. Clarke, recently acquired by the Smithsonian. (The latter makes me feel better about the time I had my ex take every Sterling book I owned to a signing I couldn't make.)
• A review of Paula Merriman's Mungojerrie: A Brief History of the