Monthly Archives: December 2012

For real. How time flies
Related Posts:An IntroductionBrown Pundits in SFGateBlogroll update- adding another bunch of Desi PunditsHappy New Years to allWhat makes BP tick?

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I am reposting last year’s post on Benazir. Dont miss Hasan Mujtaba’s poem at the end. Benazir Bhutto was murdered on December 27th 2007.  She and her father made many mistakes and had many weaknesses and flaws, perhaps fatal ones. … Continue reading

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Because of the nature of modern American ‘work-life balance’ the next week or so is going to be my longest period of being the ‘primary caregiver’ for my daughter in her short life. Needless to say I’m quite excited! Especially because this will be her first Christmas. I spent most of my childhood in a […]

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One of the great aspects of owning a Kindle has been that I have been able to load it with cheap copies of “classics.”* As it happens I had physical copies of many of these works, but often it became difficult to keep track of various books in even my modest personal library. Generally scientific […]

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A recent conversation I had with a friend whose parents are immigrants from Germany made me reconsider and reflect on the power of implicit information in shaping one’s life; that information being culturally mediated. Though my friend was raised in the United States, because of her parents’ immersion in the German expatriate community her upbringing […]

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One of the issues which I occasionally bring up on this weblog is that despite all the talk about diversity and multiculturalism which most people air rhetorically, I live with diversity and multiculturalism because of my family background everyday (more … Continue reading

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A few days ago I was browsing Haldane’s Sieve,when I stumbled upon an amusing discussion which arose on it’s “About” page. This “inside baseball” banter got me to thinking about my own intellectual evolution. Over the past few years I’ve been delving more deeply into phylogenetics and phylogeography, enabled by the rise of genomics, the […]

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Christmas is a time when I accelerate my reading, and catch-up for lost time. Here’s my three books I plan to get through: The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization. I’ve read this twice already. This short book has been one of the most influential works in my own personal thinking. Even if […]

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The above map shows the population coverage for the Geno 2.0 SNP-chip, put out by the Genographic Project. Their paper outlining the utility and rationale by the chip is now out on arXiv. I saw this map last summer, when Spencer Wells hosted a webinar on the launch of Geno 2.0, and it was the […]

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Over at National Geographic David Dobbs of Neuron Culture has an eminently readable and engrossing piece up, Restless Genes. I have never really read about ‘allele surfing’ on the wave of demographic expansion in the way that Dobbs’ rendered it. I certainly wouldn’t have been able to produce that sort of spare but informative prose. […]

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To understand nature in all its complexity we have to cut down the riotous variety down to size. For ease of comprehension we formalize with math, verbalize with analogies, and visualize with representations. These approximations of reality are not reality, but when we look through the glass darkly they give us filaments of essential insight. […]

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In a few days South Korea will have a new president, and this is very important because of how large North Korea looms in geopolitics. An interesting aspect of this race for Americans is that the candidate of the conservative party, Park Geun-Hye, may be an atheist, running against a Roman Catholic liberal. I say […]

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Over at Genomes Unzipped Vincent Plagnol has put up a post, Exaggerations and errors in the promotion of genetic ancestry testing, which to my mind is an understated and soft-touch old-fashioned “fisking” of the pronouncements of a spokesperson for an outfit termed Britain’s DNA. The whole post is worth reading, but this is a very […]

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I went and saw The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey yesterday with some friends. It’s been 20 years since I last read The Hobbit, and even longer since I watched the television film from the late 1970s. So I really didn’t notice all the differences between the three hour film and the original novel. Two quick comments: […]

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It’s that time of the year, and I quite like “the Holidays.” I am, of course, looking forward to my daughter’s first Christmas. Though no one in our family believes in the religious justification for the holiday, it is still an important time of the year, for reasons I have outlined before. But for the […]

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A few weeks ago I reiterated that the most parsimonious explanation for why Asian Americans have been shifting to the Democratic party over the past generation (George H. W. Bush won Asian Americans according to the 1992 exit polls) is a matter of identity politics (reiterated, because I noticed this years ago in the survey […]

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Life Expectancy Rises Around the World, Study Finds: A sharp decline in deaths from malnutrition and diseases like measles and tuberculosis has caused a shift in global mortality patterns over the past 20 years, according to a new report, with far more of the world’s population now living into old age and dying from diseases […]

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There’s another Census Projection out. Yes, I understand that the character of the children born today is going to have obvious impacts on the nature of the population 50 years from now, but we really need to heed the stupidity of past projections. Here’s a piece from 1930, A Nation of Elders in the Making: […]

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There’s an interesting piece in Slate, The Great Schism in the Environmental Movement, which seems to be a distillation of trends which have been bubbling within the modern environmentalist movement for a generation now (I’ve read earlier manifestos in a similar vein). I can’t assess the magnitude of the shift, but here’s the top-line: But […]

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In the post below I offered up my supposition that Dan MacArthur’s ancestry is unlikely to be Northwest Indian, which precludes a Romani origin for his South Asian ancestry. Indeed this is almost certainly so, Dienekes Pontikos followed up my crude analyses with IBD-sharing calculations (IBD = ‘identity by descent,’ which is basically what you […]

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20/41
Razib Khan