Monthly Archives: November 2009

A Lost European Culture, Pulled From Obscurity:The little-known culture is being rescued from obscurity in an exhibition, “The Lost World of Old Europe: the Danube Valley, 5000-3500 B.C.,” which opened last month at the Institute for the Study of the A…

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Since The New York Times put up the csv file which they used to generate their maps of food stamp usage, I thought I’d look at the data a little closer. In particular, look at this graphic of change in food stamp usage by county (dark equals more usage…

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Ben points to the a new article in The New York Times, Across U.S., Food Stamp Use Soars and Stigma Fades. The county-by-county data are of interest. I’ve just snatched the csv file, which they made available. Andrew Gelman has a modest critique of the…

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A friend of mine who was looking at the distributions on obesity and diabetes wondered about their political correlations. To do that and add anything new it seems that it would be best to estimate the white vote for Barack Obama in 2008 by county. Thi…

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Reading Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism I am struck again by the peculiarity of the American nation, and its fundamental radicalism. I have already stated that this is implicitly an Anglo-Protestant nation. As a point of fact Protestant churches were established and supported in most American states at the Founding, with Massachusetts not […]

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I just finished Vali Nasr’s Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World. Very much in the mold of Fareed Zakaria’s The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad. Nasr is the author of The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will […]

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Hunger here vs. hunger there:There has been a fair amount of buzz lately (examples here, here, here, here) about “food insecurity” in the U.S. According to the Reuters headline, one in seven Americans is short of food. In looking into the data, what ha…

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Update: I made a major error in the algebra of estimating “white diabetes rates” per county. So the last set of correlations was junk. I think fixed the issue. Thanks to “bayesian” who noted that something was off with them.The CDC provides data on dia…

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Since it’s after Thanksgiving and I’m feeling bloated, I figure a follow up to the post on obesity and diabetes might be apropos. I want to focus on obesity. I have the raw county-by-county data, but obviously it isn’t broken down by race. But, I do ha…

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There has been much discussion in the blogosphere (for example by Olivia Judson here) of the current libel case between the science writer Simon Singh and the British Chiropractic Association. Most of the comments have supported Singh and criticised b…

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The Big Money has an entry up, Karl Who? China is a Communist country, but I have yet to meet an actual Communist. After reading the first paragraph I began to think of the clear analogies between conventional supernatural organized religion and Marxist-Leninism, in particular, in its ideological flexibility (e.g., the transformation of the cult […]

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In researching for a review of The Nurture Assumption, I read over the debate between Harris and Sulloway over birth order effects on personality. Sulloway’s thesis, explained in Born to Rebel, is that last-born children have more rebellious, agreeabl…

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Two new articles in AJHG, Genomic Dissection of Population Substructure of Han Chinese and Its Implication in Association Studies:To date, most genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and studies of fine-scale population structure have been conducted pr…

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Hope readers have a happy Thanksgiving. I assume this is also a day when you’re not going to think too much about your diet and eat what you want to eat. But I thought this map on diabetes and obesity for those age 20 and up was interesting. These are …

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The debate over global warming is relevant to GNXP (previous posts here and here) not so much because our readers are interested in climate science but because the dynamics of the debate — scientific “consensus” versus politically incorrect minority …

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After reading this article about the The Biggest Loser, I checked out the Wikipedia page for the show. There are international versions. Through that I found out that there is an Indian version of the show. I thought this was weird. I mean, it’s India,…

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A few weeks ago people in the comments were nagging me a bit about some new papers on the haplogroup R1a1. This Y chromosomal lineage is found at very high frequencies from East-Central Europe into India. Initially, researchers such as Spencer Wells as…

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Carl Zimmer reports that it might be a function of physics. Bigger whales have proportionality bigger mouths, but at some point the biological engineering runs up against constraints:s they report today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, Goldboge…

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It’s News On Academia, Not Climate:Yup, this behavior has long been typical when academics form competing groups, whether the public hears about such groups or not. If you knew how academia worked, this news would not surprise you nor change your opin…

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A a new paper in PLoS ONE, Genetic Variation and Recent Positive Selection in Worldwide Human Populations: Evidence from Nearly 1 Million SNPs:Our analyses both confirm and extend previous studies; in particular, we highlight the impact of various disp…

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Razib Khan