Month: January 2012
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Happy Birthday, Stephen Hawking
Sorry for the light blogging of late. Actual work intervenes, and it might remain that way for a while. But I’ll try to pop in whenever I can. Stephen Hawking is celebrating his 70th birthday today. That in itself is an amazing fact, just as it was amazing when he celebrated his 40th, and 50th,…
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Europe, 10,000 B.C.
The image above come from John Hawks’ weblog. I was thinking today about the resettlement of Europe since the Last Glacial Maximum. It is clear that much of northern Europe was not habitable until the Holocene, after the Ice Age. And those regions which were habitable were often marginal. But, there were zones of southern Europe…
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PGD:2010s::IVF:1980s
Get ready for PGD, the acronym for preimplantation genetic diagnosis. We don’t really talk about “test tube babies” anymore. It’s “IVF,” and as American as apple pie (OK, perhaps as Israeli as falafel). Here’s the Ngrams result: It’s just not that big of a deal anymore. But take a look at the order articles in The…
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Human behavior over the ages
Over at Scientific American Eric Michael Johnson has a very long post up, The Case of the Missing Polygamists. It is a re-post of something he already published at Psychology Today a few years ago. Though provisionally a review of Sex at Dawn, Johnson covers a lot of ground, and also has extensive quotations from…
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How many minorities are there in the USA?
Prompted by Andrea Mitchell’s complaint that Iowa is not representative of America in racial terms the Audacious Epigone probed an American state’s typicality in terms of racial demographics, using the overall American population as a measure. One of the major issues with judging the typicality of a given state is that there is a great…
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Science evolves
I missed this piece in Edge from Chris Stringer in November, Rethinking “Out of Africa”. He sums up his current thinking at the end: We’ve got the lineage of the hobbit, ‘Homo floresiensis’ (in quotation marks because its human status in not yet clear), perhaps diverging more than two million years ago, evolving in isolation in southeast…
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“Missing heritability” – interaction edition
The Pith: A great deal of important medical genetic differences between people may be due to the nature of interactions of genetic variants. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you know that there is a question in genomics right now as to “missing heritability.” The issue is basically that there are traits…
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Elsevier-funded NY Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney Wants to Deny Americans Access to Taxpayer Funded Research
I basically repeated the title from Michael Eisen, who has the details over at his weblog. A minor side point, if I blog on a paper you can’t get access to, contact me and I’m sure I can fix that situation. In any case, the point here is that apparently Congress, thanks to the prodding…
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Hindus are pagans in American politics
I think there are strong odds that this is not by a Ron Paul supporter, but someone who is leveraging Paul’s association with the infamous newsletters.
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The “sex difference factor”?
There’s a new paper in PLoS ONE, The Distance Between Mars and Venus: Measuring Global Sex Differences in Personality*, which suggests that by measuring variation of single observed personality traits researchers are missing larger underlying patterns of difference. The Distance Between Mars and Venus: Measuring Global Sex Differences in Personality: In conclusion, we believe we…
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Systems come back to equilibrium (eventually)
The daughter’s return: A glimmer of hope in the sad tale of sex-selective abortion in India: Now, however, comes evidence that India may in fact be succeeding. In a pair of articles in the Indian Express, Surjit Bhalla, an economist, and Ravinder Kaur, a sociologist, use a different set of figures to get a different result.…
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James F. Crow, 1916-2012
Sad news. John Hawks passes along that James F. Crow has died. Further mention from the National Center For Science Education. A little over 5 years ago I sent Crow an email with only minimal expectation of response, asking about an interview. He responded in less than 24 hours! I think it says a lot…
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Economic forecasters should put their $ where their mouth is
Happy Days Are Here Again! Don’t believe the naysayers: An economic recovery is right around the corner.: Economic forecasting is a mug’s game. There are simply too many unknowable factors that affect “the economy” for anyone to make accurate predictions. The Fukushima earthquake and nuclear disaster, for instance, had a noticeably negative macroeconomic impact around…
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Kindle vs. non-kindle books
Out of curiosity, how many readers are switching mostly to Kindle books? I myself find myself doing this. Not for any ideological or conscious reason. Rather, cost and portability are both major upsides of the Kindle. I also find that “impulse buys” are easier for me on the Kindle (purchased The Great Sea and Civilization:…
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Where Europe expanded & New Guinea persisted
The model outlined in Guns, Germs, and Steel serves to a great extent as a corrective to ideological theories about the expansion and rise to dominance of European power in the 18th and 19th centuries, before its crest in the 20th. Jared Diamond famously gives a great deal of weight to biogeographical parameters. Charles C.…
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Euthanasia, not eugenics
A comment below clarified my thinking in one particular area: is widespread genetic screening going to result in a reconsidering of the idea of ‘engineering’ society? I realize now that in a comparative scenario this is ridiculous. The majority of healthcare expenditure is near the end of life, not the beginning. In 17 years the…
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Iraq: not as bad as Yemen
You probably know that the USA has officially withdrawn from Iraq. And you probably also know that in many ways Iraq became the de facto 51st American state for nearly a decade (I remember that my phone’s news app had an “Iraq” section back in 2007). Looking back 10 years ago I recall my attitude…
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Population around the Mediterranean
With the collapse various North African regimes there has been a great concern about the migration of people from the southern shore of the Mediterranean to the northern. The of the reasons for this concern is that there is an imbalance in population growth. So I thought I’d review some of the data on Mediterranean…
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The aggregate flatness of Facebook
Most readers know that I’ve been tracking Google Trends data on Facebook for years. Now on January 1 2012 It seems pretty obviously that in the international aggregate this was the year that Facebook finally hit saturation in terms of “mindshare.” But there are interesting international differences. United States: United Kingdom: France: Germany: Italy: Russia:…