Month: January 2011
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The empires of American English
Over the past few days a website which maps American English dialects has gone around the blogs (I found it via Kevin Zelnio). Michelle has some suggestions for improvements of the map in Ohio. Here’s a cropped and resized dialect map: One thing that immediately stood out is the latitudinal banded pattern of the dialects.…
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Visualizing West Eurasia
Over at his blog Dienekes Pontikos has taken some public data sets and his own Dodecad samples and generated a massive MDS plot of West Eurasian populations. The MDS is fine as it goes. It illustrates clearly that when you visualize an individual on a plot defined by the two largest dimensions of variation in…
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Hobbit DNA in 2011
I predicted earlier that Hobbit DNA would be extracted in 2011. It was pretty much an educated guess based on various omissions I sensed in papers in 2010. But it seems that an attempt is going to be made: Scientists are planning an attempt to extract DNA from the ‘hobbit’ Homo floresiensis, the 1-metre-tall extinct distant…
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Profiling hair color by DNA
Hair Color of Unknown Offenders Is No Longer a Secret: The research findings demonstrate that on the basis of DNA information it is possible to determine with an accuracy of more than 90 percent whether a person has red hair, with a similarly high accuracy whether a person has black hair, and with an accuracy…
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Kissing & the science of humanity
I approached Sheril Kirshenbaum’s The Science of Kissing: What Our Lips Are Telling Us with some trepidation and excitement. The former is a consequence of my hypochondria and its associated germophobia. I have no aversion to kissing in my own life (apologies for divulging personal information), but I did have some worries about having to…
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Around the Web – January 3rd, 2010
I don’t do too many New Year’s Resolutions. My main goal this year which is of interest readers is increase total quantity of quality in terms of content. In other words, I want to keep volume up, but increase the quality of posting. If you haven’t contributed to the Open Thread this week, it’s about…
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Open Thread – January 1st, 2011
So what should I post about this year? I do get a fair number of ideas from reader comments & emails, so this thread might be useful.