Open Thread – Brown Pundits
Please keep the other posts on topic. Use this for talking about whatever you want to talk about.
Natural Selection and “Deep Learning”
Evolutionary biology and computer science don’t seem to have much in common. But this week Razib talks to a geneticist who brings both together in his research. https://blog.insito.me/the-insight-show-notes-season-2-episode-29-deep-learning-and-populat…
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 29: Deep Learning and Population Genetics
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 29: Deep Learning and Population GeneticsThis week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and Google Podcasts) Razib talks to Andrew Kern, a computational biologist at the University of Oregon who b…
I am human, and I think nothing human is alien to me.
There was a comment below which I am now reflecting on…that this “This blog pertains to South Asians.” The comment was sincerely made, and I take no deep issue with it. Rather, I wonder what the purview of pertaining to South Asians is for each of us. Do we all see the same sky above …
Continue reading “I am human, and I think nothing human is alien to me.”
Browncast into June….
Thanks to everyone who is a patron on the Browncast. I’ll be posting a few more in there today (or very early tomorrow). We won’t be posting anything in public until June 1st. Our podcasts tend to go longer, rather than shorter. Perhaps it’s a brown thing? In any case, regular podcasts of 1+ hours …
How Indians invented the universal religion
One of my favorite podcasts is Two for Tea, which tends toward “centrist-edgelordism”. The latest guest is, Armin Navabi, who I have nicknamed the Ayatollah. Armin is literally one of the most logical people I have ever known of, at least in the domain of those who are not visibly already extremely at one end …
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Population genetics + “deep learning”
Population genetics is many things, but a popular field that gets written up in Wired or the tech-press is usually not one of those things. It emerged out of Mendelian genetics in the early decades of the 20th-century, transforming elegant pedigrees in…
Pakistani women, Chinese men, the continuing story….
The New York Times has a follow-up story with some nuance, She Thought She’d Married a Rich Chinese Farmer. She Hadn’t. Now there is coverage of Muslim girls going to China. The model is the same as the Christian girls, rural Chinese men who aren’t as wealthy as the present themselves, go through nominal conversions …
Continue reading “Pakistani women, Chinese men, the continuing story….”
Pakistani women, Chinese men, the continuing story….
The New York Times has a follow-up story with some nuance, She Thought She’d Married a Rich Chinese Farmer. She Hadn’t. Now there is coverage of Muslim girls going to China. The model is the same as the Christian girls, rural Chinese men who aren’t as wealthy as the present themselves, go through nominal conversions …
Continue reading “Pakistani women, Chinese men, the continuing story….”
Open Thread, 05/26/2019
I’m having issues with the server load on this website in the past week. No idea what’s going on…I suspect that it has to do with WordPress plugins. I’ve tweaked caching and added Cloudflare. We’ll see. Since this website is kind of intermittent right now, remember to bookmark or note: * My newsletter. * My content (RSS). * […]
Vital stats in South Asia
A bunch of vital stats from South Asia from Google Data Explorer. Since Zach and I started looking at these data since the early 2000s Pakistan and Bangladesh have diverged, unfortunately. I don’t understand what’s going on with Bangladesh’s anomalously high adolescent fertility though. This could be a function of variation among women as they …
Browncast Ep 42: American Arranged Marriage
Another BP Podcast is up. You can listen on Libsyn, Apple, Spotify, and Stitcher. Probably the easiest way to keep up the podcast since we don’t have a regular schedule is to subscribe at one of the links above. You can also support the podcast as a patron (the primary benefit now is that you get the podcasts considerably earlier than …
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Murray Gell-Mann, R.I.P.
Murray Gell-Mann, Who Peered at Particles and Saw the Universe, Dies at 89: Murray Gell-Mann, who transformed physics with his preternatural ability to find hidden patterns among the tiny particles that make up the universe, earning a Nobel Prize, died on Friday at his home in Santa Fe. He was 89. The author of the […]
The decline of the bee
At the Spelling Bee, a New Word Is M-O-N-E-Y – Elite spellers now can pay to get a spot in the national event. For this generation of zealous competitors, it just means another chance to shine: An extra factor driving the stakes for this generation of spellers is a concerted effort by non-U.S.-born parents, particularly …
The decline of the bee
At the Spelling Bee, a New Word Is M-O-N-E-Y – Elite spellers now can pay to get a spot in the national event. For this generation of zealous competitors, it just means another chance to shine: An extra factor driving the stakes for this generation of spellers is a concerted effort by non-U.S.-born parents, particularly …
Was India ever really “secular”?
Anton Wessels, a Reformed Christian professor of “missiology”, wrote a book many years ago, Europe: Was It Ever Really Christian? The title reflects on the fact that a secular ‘post-Christian’ Europe may never have been very Christian at all, at least in Wessels’ telling. Wessels writes from a Reformed Protestant perspective. This tradition has taken …
The Jomon contributed little to the Japanese
A few months ago there was a preprint with an ancient Japanese genome, Jomon genome sheds light on East Asian population history. I read it but didn’t say anything at the time. I read it again, partly because I’m reading a history of Korea where the Wa, the early Japanese, show up to intervene in […]
The steel and the star
I recently recorded a podcast with Anders Bergstrom discussing his paper from a few years back, A Neolithic expansion, but strong genetic structure, in the independent history of New Guinea. This got me to thinking a bit about the patterns over the last ~5,000 years within the island, and more broadly. The island of New […]