Monthly Archives: January 2013

In response to the post below on joint families. First, a personal question: is it my cultural bias that joint families are fertile incubators of sexual abuse of young females by male relatives? Mind you, there are disgusting as fuck … Continue reading

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Note: please read the the earlier post on this topic if you haven’t. The above image is from 23andMe. It’s from a feature which seems to have been marginalized a bit with their ancestry composition. Basically it is projecting 23andMe customers on a visualization of genetic variation from the HGDP data set. This is actually a rather […]

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With the recent $99 price point for 23andMe many of my friends have purchased kits (finally!). 23andMe’s interpretive results are pretty rich now, but there are still things missing. There are plenty of third party tools you can use, but I know some people might want to do their own data analysis. There are many […]

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Bryan Ward-Perkins in The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization spends a great deal of time on the archaeology of the Classical and post-Classical world. But, he also devotes only somewhat less space to the historiography of the study of the Roman Empire, and Late Antiquity. That is because the study of the […]

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A week ago Keith Kloor had a post up, What Science, Environmentalism and the GOP Have in Common, where he bemoaned the lack of representation of non-whites in these categories. As a matter of fact I think Keith is wrong about science. Even constraining the data set to American citizens and permanent residents people of […]

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India Rape Victim Had Many Onlookers, No Savior: Police records say the underage suspect raped the 23-year-old physiotherapy student twice after she was hit with iron rods and fell unconscious. He extracted her intestine with his bare hands.

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While reading The Founders of Evolutionary Genetics I encountered a chapter where the late James F. Crow admitted that he had a new insight every time he reread R. A. Fisher’s The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. This prompted me to put down The Founders of Evolutionary Genetics after finishing Crow’s chapter and pick up […]

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Nicholas G. Carr, purveyor of high-brow neo-ludditism and archeo-utopianism, has a piece out in The Wall Street Journal, Don’t Burn Your Books—Print Is Here to Stay. The subtitle is “The e-book had its moment, but sales are slowing. Readers still want to turn those crisp, bound pages.” Here are some of his rancid chestnuts of […]

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The above image, and the one to the left, are screenshots from my father’s 23andMe profile. Interestingly, his mtDNA haplogroup is not particularly common among ethnic Bengalis, who are more than ~80% on a branch of M. This reality is clear in the map above which illustrates the Central Asian distribution my father’s mtDNA lineage. […]

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One of the major annoyances with the redesign of this weblog was that its precipitous nature was such that many of the sidebar links, etc., were removed. But, it did make me admit a major point: blogrolls are pretty much dead. In the early years of the blogsophere they served as a way to share […]

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You may have heard that Andrew Sullivan & compnay’s The Daily Dish is leaving The Daily Beast. This is making some waves in the blogosphere, with many of my thoughts being in line with Tyler Cowen‘s. I’ve followed Sullivan’s career since the mid-1990s when he was editing The New Republic, and I remember reading Virtually […]

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Before the Holidays I mentioned that I was rereading Bryan Ward-Perkins’ The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization. Why do I hold this book in such high esteem? Because of figures such as the one to the left. Granted, this chart is not from The Fall of Rome, but that book has an […]

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I didn’t post for the last week for two reasons. Christmas is a lot different when you have a child. The opportunity cost was just too high for me to really blog with gusto, so I didn’t. And in any case I suspect many of my readers were also busy with family or Caribbean vacations […]

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13/13
Razib Khan