Category Archives: geography

Lawrence Wright has a new book out, God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State. One thing I see him saying is that Austin is less diverse. Since he’s lived there for many decades, he has some personal data to bring to the tabl…

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I periodically check up on Amazon’s monthly deals. Though the science section is usually pretty thin, the history deals are more numerous. A lot of them are not too good, or are reprints of very old books. But now and then you get a scholarly and dense work which is magically priced at below $2.00. […]

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I have never read Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class. There are a few reasons for this. First, his thesis was so ubiquitous in the 2000s that a distillation was easy to be had for free. People would write about Florida’s ideas. And he’d talk about it constantly in interviews. Second, what was […]

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Obviously the news over the past week has been filled with the events in the Middle East, and the broader Muslim world, in reaction to an anti-Muslim film. I think the most eloquent commentary is from The Onion (NSFW!!!), No One Murdered Because Of Thi…

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Planet Money recently did a report on the difficulty of maintaining high economic productivity in southern Italy. I won’t rehash the specifics of the story, but, I think it is important to get a visual sense of just how large the contrast between…

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I was alerted to Samuel’s Arbesman’s new paper, The Life-Spans of Empires, by the fact that he pointed to his research on his weblog. Interestingly I’m not the only one who was interested, as after I pointed to it on my link round u…

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The image above is adapted from the 2010 paper A Predominantly Neolithic Origin for European Paternal Lineages, and it shows the frequencies of Y chromosomal haplogroup R1b1b2 across Europe. As you can see as you approach the Atlantic the frequency co…

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Since most international migration is apparently between “developing nations”, I thought the Iran-Iraq-Turkey-Syria border would be interesting to look at in terms of differences in economic and social indices.

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The Pith: Over the past 10,000 years a small coterie of farming populations expanded rapidly and replaced hunter-gatherer groups which were once dominant across the landscape. So, the vast majority of the ancestry of modern Europeans can be traced ba…

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One of the major issues in our world today is that we’re a people of specialties. This means that we don’t have basic interpretative frameworks in which to place novel facts. Because of the abstruse and formal nature of the discipline, this…

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Credit: David Shankbone
The more and more I see fine-scale genomic analyses of population structure across the world the more and more I believe that the “stylized” models which were in vogue in the early 2000s which explained how the worl…

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Since I know plenty of friends are getting, or just got, their V3 results, I thought I’d pass this on, Open-ended submission opportunity for 23andMe data (#2):
Who is eligible
Everyone who is of European, Asian, or North African ancestry and all …

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A comment below inquired about “good books” on American history. Unfortunately I don’t know as much about American history as I do about Roman or Chinese history. But over the years there have been several books which I find to have been very value-add in terms of understanding where we are now. In other words, […]

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Guelta d’Archei, Chad. Credit: Dario Menasce. Everyone who is literate knows that the Sahara desert is the largest of its kind in the world. The chasm in cultural, biological, and physical geography is very noticeable. Northern Africa is part of the Palearctic zone, while the peoples north of the Sahara have long been part of […]

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I decided to take the Dodecad ADMIXTURE results at K = 10, and redo some of the bar plots, as well as some scatter plots relating the different ancestral components by population. Don’t try to pick out fine-grained details, see what jumps out in a gestalt fashion. I removed most of the non-European populations to […]

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When I was in college I would sometimes have late night conversations with the guys in my dorm, and the discussion would random-walk in very strange directions. During one of these quasi-salons a friend whose parents were from Korea expressed some surprise and disgust at the idea of wet earwax. It turns out he had […]

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There’s a lot of stuff you stumble upon via Google Public Data Explorer which you kind of knew, but is made all the more stark through quantitative display. For example, consider Saudi Arabia and Yemen. In gross national income per capita the difference between these two nations is one order of magnitude (PPP and nominal). […]

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To the left you see a map of the distribution of languages and language families in Europe. Language is arguably the most salient cultural feature of our species, as well as one of the most obviously biologically embedded. The trait of language is a human universal, to the point where even those without hearing can […]

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It’s easy to find maps of American ancestries, but I wanted to play around with the data, and in particularly the visualization myself. So I went to the Census and got the county level numbers. The first thing I wanted to do was look at non-Hispanic wh…

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19/19
Razib Khan