Razib Khan

Month: January 2012

  • Moving Secularism Forward, March 2012

    Because of scheduling conflicts* I can’t make ScienceOnline2012 (I had planned to make it). But I thought I would put in an announcement here that in a month and a half I’ll be at the Moving Secularism Forward conference put on by the Center for Inquiry. I’m going to be on a political panel on…

  • The India-Israel “axis?”

    India-Israel relations come out of Arab world shadow: The India-Israel relationship is finally out of the closet. In three days in Israel and Palestine, foreign minister S M Krishna showed that Indian foreign policy may have finally matured enough to be able to conduct perfectly normal, successful relations with Israel and the Arab world simultaneously,…

  • The Fulani have an old “Berber” (?) element

    After the second Henn et al. paper I did download the data. Unfortunately there are only 62,000 SNPs intersecting with the HGDP. This is somewhat marginal for fine-grained ADMIXTURE analyses, though sufficient for PCA from what I recall. That being said, the intersection with the HapMap data sets runs from ~190,000 SNPs, to the full…

  • Mendelism is not magic

    Michelle points me to this article in The Lost Angeles Times, The Colors of the Family: I was holding my 1-year-old, ambling about downtown with some friends. White friends. She must have thought my boy belonged to one of them. There’s a simple explanation: I’m black but my son, Ashe, is white. At least he…

  • The milkmen

    Dienekes and Maju have both commented on a new paper which looked at the likelihood of lactase persistence in Neolithic remains from Spain, but I thought I would comment on it as well. The paper is: Low prevalence of lactase persistence in Neolithic South-West Europe. The location is on the fringes of the modern Basque…

  • Not following the script

    The screenshot above shows the number of visits from a given country over the last month for this website. This is a multicultural site! I don’t say that in a normative sense. It’s a pure description of the readership. Though posters and commenters here differ in their values and views, I don’t pretend to make…

  • Your Favorite Deep, Elegant, or Beautiful Explanation

    The annual Edge Question Center has now gone live. This year’s question: “What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?” Find the answers here. I was invited to contribute, but wasn’t feeling very imaginative, so I moved quickly and picked one of the most obvious elegant explanations of all time: Einstein’s explanation for the…

  • India, the internet, and the joke on the modern world

    The title at The New York Times is anodyne, India’s Courts Grapple With Web Censorship. But the story stinks up the page/screen with manifest evidence that the Indian government and mass culture is not equipped to deal with the wide open liberty which the internet provides: India has long faced an uneasy tension between allowing…

  • The extraordinary sex ratio of our age

    The New Atlantis has a nice piece, The Global War Against Baby Girls. It’s relatively heavy on charts and maps, so I recommend it (yes, it has a particular ideological perspective, but that’s really not consequential, as I assume most readers do not favor skewed sex ratios either). There’s nothing too surprising in it (assuming…

  • Reconstructing a generation unsampled

    In the near future I will be analyzing the genotype of an individual where all four grandparents have been typed. But this got me thinking about my own situation: is there a way I could “reconstruct” my own grandparents? None of them are living. The easiest way to type them would be to obtain tissue…

  • The old Amazon

    Once Hidden by Forest, Carvings in Land Attest to Amazon’s Lost World: For some scholars of human history in Amazonia, the geoglyphs in the Brazilian state of Acre and other archaeological sites suggest that the forests of the western Amazon, previously considered uninhabitable for sophisticated societies partly because of the quality of their soils, may…

  • Good News/Bad News: Nobel Edition

    The good news about winning the Nobel Prize: you get better parking on campus. The bad news: Sheldon Cooper makes fun of you on national TV. Of course you don’t need to watch the ceremonies to learn what all the scientists are wearing this year. I am reliably informed that a regular tuxedo is not…

  • Do I Not Live?

    Can we define “life” in just three words? Carl Zimmer of Loom fame has written a piece for Txchnologist in which he reports on an interesting attempt: biologist Edward Trifonov looked at other people’s definitions, rather than thinking about life itself. Sifting through over a hundred suggested definitions, Trifonov looked for what they had in…

  • The dynasty which created Iran

    Shah Ismail I The BBC Radio 4 program In Our Time just had an episode on the Safavid dynasty. If you want to understand how Iran as we understand it came to be, and you know nothing about the Safavids, this program is essential. Because of its outsized role in Western antiquity the pre-Christian Achaemenids…

  • Between the desert and the sea

    Zinedine Zidane, a Kabyle There is a new paper in PLoS Genetics out which purports to characterize the ancestry of the populations of northern Africa in greater detail. This is important. The HGDP data set does have a North African population, the Mozabites, but it’s not ideal to represent hundreds of millions of people with…

  • Civilized nations can split in peace

    Scotland Plans Independence Vote: The Scottish government said Tuesday that it would hold a referendum on independence from Britain in 2014, a decision that Alex Salmond, left, who leads the government in Edinburgh, said would be Scotland’s “most important decision for 300 years.” But the path to the referendum promises to be tortuous. Prime Minister…

  • Noisy Systems and Wandering Canines

    There are three types of scientific explanations: those involving cats, those involving dogs, and those that aren’t very interesting. Via Andrew Revkin, here’s a well-done animation that uses a dog to explain the difference between a long-term trend and a short-term variation. Show this to your local climate denialist when they get confused about the…

  • You know barbarians when you see them

    When I use the word “barbarian,” I use it to denote phenomena which are just difficult to comprehend from my own Weltanschauung. For example, Egypt’s Women Find Power Still Hinges on Men: At first Samira Ibrahim was afraid to tell her father that Egyptian soldiers had detained her in Tahrir Square in Cairo, stripped off…

  • More on the “missing heritability” and epistasis

    Please see Luke Jostins’ posts at Genetic Inference and Genomes Unzipped. Update: Steve Hsu weighs in. He read the supplements! Mad props.

  • James F. Crow profile

    The University of Madison-Wisconsin, has a long piece up on the late James F. Crow. Much recommended.

Razib Khan