Month: August 2019
-
Open Thread – Brown Pundits
Please keep the other posts on topic. Use this for talking about whatever you want to talk about.
-
South Asian PCA
Doing some data analysis for my data job. Looking at the data sets some interesting patterns. I will explore further time permitting, but it looks to me that the Bengalis are on the Khasi/Tibeto-Burman cline, not the Munda cline. Basically, Bangladeshis are the inverse of the Khasi people to their north. After seeing these results…
-
Cryptic Ashkenazi ancestry across Eastern Europe
One of the great things about the spread of ‘direct to consumer’ genomics is that it’s increasing sample size in countries where for various reasons there isn’t much coverage. It was brought to my attention that My Heritage DNA results have been analyzed by the company, and yielded the surprising result that Hungary has been…
-
How Islam’s greatness redounds to Indian religion
Reading a paper on Yemen made me realize something that is quite bizarre upon reflection: the greater the evidence of Islam’s transformative power, the greater the miracle and robustness of Indian religion in the face of its expansion. To me, Islam’s demographic impact is clear when it comes to Sub-Saharan African ancestry. Though some of…
-
The origins of “Lucky Arabia”
One of the benefits of reading Arabs is that the author is an expert on Yemen, which often gets short-shrift in works focused on the Arab peoples. As noted in the book itself this is not entirely unfair, insofar as until the past thousand years or so the peoples of Yemen did not even speak…
-
Living in a post-biracial America
Where Does Affirmative Action Leave Asian-Americans? For the purposes of this article, Alex Chen, an 18-year-old senior at the Bronx High School of Science in New York City, is the “typical Asian student.” Alex has a 98 percent average at one of the city’s elite public high schools, scored a 1,580 on the SAT and,…
-
Toward a beige future
But @JDVance1 is in an interracial marriage and family. Does the Washington post not have some basic standard of fact checking before casual accusations of white nationalism? https://t.co/FAQDXm3Opl — Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) August 27, 2019 The Washington Post: As border controls tighten, though, the links between pronatalism and nativism have once again become visible. Inspired…
-
Evolutionary biology in the 21st-century: from big theories to big facts
A few years ago I reflected that genomics has not really “revolutionized” evolutionary biology. In contrast, it arguably has revolutionary the science of medical genetics. The reason I said this is that because the big questions in the field were formulated in the 19th and 20th-centuries. To a great extent, we’re recapitulating theoretical arguments of…
-
Open Thread, 08/26/2019
After a little thought, I’ve decided to cancel the “Membership” option for this weblog. It just wasn’t working in terms of the time/energy it took to keep the tech working on an independent platform, and I didn’t really like gating posts anyway. If you really want to support this weblog, I have a Patreon account,…
-
Open Thread – Brown Pundits
Please keep the other posts on topic. Use this for talking about whatever you want to talk about.
-
Open Thread, 08/19/2019
Just got Statistical Thinking from Scratch: A Primer for Scientists by Michael Edge in the mail (one of the favorite non-electronic books I’ll buy this year). I think a lot of readers of this weblog would find this a useful book in terms of the range of topics covered, as well as the level of…
-
Higher education is going to become a partisan issue
Over the past few years, I have been telling my friends in academia that the Republicans are going to turn on the whole institution. Because my friends don’t know any Republicans personally (well, except for me) it has all seemed abstract and kind of vague. Pew now is reporting that over the past few years…
-
The masses hitting the internet
Back in the mid-90s people on the newsgroups and message boards we would complain about people with AOL addresses. More recently, I think one reason Twitter is a problem today is that so many people are on the platform, and that means more stupid people are on the platform. Another aspect I’ve noticed is the…
-
India and water scarcity
Since someone in the comments mentioned water stress, The Wall Street Journal has a piece up right now, ‘We Can’t Waste a Drop.’ India Is Running Out of Water. The article focuses on Leh, in Ladakh, which I think is a little deceptive since Ladakh has…
-
Against homo religious
Below some comments emerged reflecting differences in the understanding of religious identity and change. After writing on this blog for 17 years I am tempted to just scream “READ WHAT I’VE WRITTEN!”, but that really doesn’t suffice. So I’ll outline very quickly my general stance, which illuminates my sense of how and why the Roman…
-
Open Thread – Brown Pundits
Please keep the other posts on topic. Use this for talking about whatever you want to talk about.
-
The creation of perennialism 2,000 years ago
Today I recorded a podcast for Rationally Speaking. Julia Galef wanted to talk to me about my recent post, Stuff I Was Wrong About!. It was a long discussion, and I don’t know what will go into the final edit. But we did touch on this point from my post: …I believe that some sort…
-
The Ummah for we, but not for thee
How geopolitics enabled India’s gambit in Kashmir: “Saudi Arabia has traditionally been close to Pakistan, but over the past several decades India and Pakistan have diverged economically to where India’s economy is now about eight times larger than Pakistan’s,” he says. “The Saudis can’t ignore that” for the sake of Kashmir. The philosopher of science…
-
Brown down under
This Land Is a Sanctuary for Aboriginal Women. Bulldozers May Soon Come: Mr. Djab Mara greeted them by burning cherry ballart leaves to cleanse their spirits. Then his partner, Ms. Mahomet, an Arrernte woman, invited the young visitors to view the same tree Ms. Jakobi had unknowingly driven by all her life. The Arrernte are…
-
The future belongs to morning people
A new method for estimating heritability and selection, Evaluating and improving heritability models using summary statistics: There is currently much debate regarding the best way to model how heritability varies across the genome. The authors of GCTA recommend the GCTA-LDMS-I Model, the authors of LD Score Regression recommend the Baseline LD Model, while we have…