Month: June 2011
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No Khannnn!!!!
Very strange. I just saw referrals from this Rupee News website that Omar mentioned earlier today to my Discover blog. Here’s a comment from Dr khan: really interesting piece revisionist history, although quite easy to argue for and against! its a matter of hook or by crook or an easy fit for the glove, if…
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Dharmic without Islam
I am currently reading Victor Lieberman’s Strange Parallels: Volume 2, Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.800-1830. The author is a scholar of Burma, and his focus is on analogies between the rise of mainland Southeast Asian nation-states and other zones of Eurasia (or, lack thereof).…
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Behold, the Interpretome!
Zack and Dr. Daniel MacArthur have already pointed to the Interpretome tool (Chrome and Firefox only!). As Daniel noted the PCA option will probably be the most fun for people. Just load your raw (unzipped) 23andMe data file, and project yourself onto …
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Peak Facebook?
Three weeks ago I observed that Google trend data indicated that Facebook had finally plateaued in its growth in the USA. Today a story on data from Inside Facebook: Facebook just lost a few faces. Six million users in the U.S. ditched their Facebook a…
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The ethnic breakdown of 23andMe customers
According to Your Genetic Genealogist, it is: 1000 African American 3500 Latino/Hispanic 5500 East Asian 3400 South Asian 4900 Southern European 6200 Ashkenazi Jewish 56,000 Northern European 1,000 First generation from two continents I’m kind of…
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Harriet Klausner, a one woman content-mill!
On occasion I browse through books on Amazon with an eye for really good negative reviews. The other day I stumbled upon a really strange positive review of the awful fantasist David Bilsborough. It was confusing to me to see 4 out of 5 stars for this…
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No hangmen for criminal men
With 1.2 Billion People, India Seeks a Good Hangman: India has 1.2 billion people, among them bankers, gurus, rag pickers, billionaires, snake charmers, software engineers, lentil farmers, rickshaw drivers, Maoist rebels, Bollywood movie stars and Vedic scholars, to name a few. Humanity runneth over. Except in one profession: India is searching for a hangman. Usually,…
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Which state has the most PhDs in the legislature?
Josh Rosenau points me to a new infographic from The Chronicle of Higher Education. A lot of the stuff isn’t too interesting or surprising. Are you surprised that 25% of the state legislators in Arkansas don’t have a college degree, the hig…
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Domestication as introgression and assimilation
The Pith: the spread of domestic rice may be a function not of the spread of rice per se, as much as a specific narrow set of genes which confer domestication to disparate rice lineages. This has been a big month for rice. At least for me. Despite my b…
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Gay girl in Damascus and “Orientalism”
I already pointed out at my other weblog that the writers and editors at The Washington Post are as ignorant of Western history as Malcolm Gladwell is of linear algebra, but the “self-outing” post of Tom MacMaster-a.k.a.-”Gay Girl in Damascus” is pretty self-serving A Gay Girl in Damascus: I never expected this level of attention.…
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“Gay girl in Damascus” has “esoteric” interests
I’ve been vaguely following the “mystery” surrounding A Gay Girl in Damascus blog. Turns out that “she” is a “he”, a 40 year guy who lives in Georgia. But that’s not why I’m mentioning this. The art…
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Taking one’s talents to South Beach
So It didn’t work out for LeBron this year. I suspect it will work in the near future. Remember that it took Shaq and Kobe four years to win their first championship. Talent doesn’t guarantee a championship, but it sure does increase the od…
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You are a mutant!
The Pith: You are expected to have 30 new mutations which differentiate you from your parents. But, there is wiggle room around this number, and you may have more or less. This number may vary across siblings, and explain differences across siblings. …
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The swell of content
In the 1980s my family went and visited friends in Queens for a week in August. Down the street from the house there was a small shop with an arcade machine with Legendary Wings. Every day I’d start out with a fistful of quarters and pop them in…
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The future as India?
I had the same reaction as Kevin Drum to this story, In India, Dynamism Wrestles With Dysfunction. Drum says: Basically, Gurgaon has turned into something from a dystopian science fiction novel: an archipelago of self-contained corporate mini-cities that provide their own power, water, sewage, transit, postal service, schools, medical care, and security force. Meanwhile, everything…
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Friday Fluff – June 10th, 2011
1) Post from the past: What it means to be a Turk. 2) Weird search query of the week: “clothedporn.” 5 hits from this! Weird. 3) Comment of the week, in response to
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Flavors of Afro-Asiatic
In the post yesterday I reported what was generally known about the Horn of Africa, that its populations seem to lie between those of Sub-Saharan African and Eurasia genetically. This is totally reasonable as a function of geography, but there are also…
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Man at Bab el-Mandeb
In light of my last post I had to take note when Dienekes today pointed to this new paper in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Population history of the Red Sea—genetic exchanges between the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa signaled i…
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A genomic sketch of the Horn of Africa
Iman, a Somali model Since I started up the African Ancestry Project one of the primary sources of interest has been from individuals whose family hail for Northeast Africa. More specifically, the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia. The pr…