Month: February 2012
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Linsanity
Because I’m a new dad I haven’t kept up with Linsanity. But Nate Silver has an interesting analysis, Jeremy Lin Is No Fluke: So perhaps the list of 41 players above is a roughly appropriate guide to Lin’s possible futures. That would imply that there was about a one-in-four chance that Lin really was going…
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How To Think About Quantum Field Theory
I continue to believe that “quantum field theory” is a concept that we physicists don’t do nearly enough to explain to a wider audience. And I’m not going to do it here! But I will link to other people thinking about how to think about quantum field theory. Over on the Google+, I linked to…
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The Iranian Genome Project
A friend pointed out that the Iranian Genome Project site has been around for half a year. The research team is reputable. You can see the rationale at their blog. Though there are several Middle Eastern populations in the HGDP, and you can get other data sets as well, the total number of markers tends…
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Socialized personal genomics?
Norway to bring cancer-gene tests to the clinic: Norway is set to become the first country to incorporate genome sequencing into its national health-care system. The Scandinavian nation, which has a population of 4.8 million, will use ‘next-generation’ DNA sequencers to trawl for mutations in tumours that might reveal which cancer treatments would be most…
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Blog reinstall
Had to reinstall the blog software because of a security breach. All the old content is saved, but it will take a little while to reimport comments and post. But the old usernames should work for regular posters.
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A personal note
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A 3.8-Sigma Anomaly
Every professional football game begins with the flip of a coin, to determine who gets the ball first. In the case of the Super Bowl, the teams represent the National Football Conference (NFC) or American Football Conference (AFC). Interestingly, the last 14 coin flips have been won by the NFC. Working out the numbers, the…
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Sikhs responding like dumbasses
From what I can tell I’ve gotten surprisingly little flack for my offensive (intent) post about Sikhs which showed Guru Nanak sodomized by a Pathan. Partly that’s a function of the fact that this blog is obscure & I’m a nobody. But I did get one vulgar reaction. Brother even makes sure to represent for the…
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Everlasting permanence
By this point you have probably read about Jonathan Franzen’s comments about digital books. For example: “I think, for serious readers, a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience. Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change.” This seems to be a recapitulation of the…
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ChromoPainter & fineSTRUCTURE on a South Asian data set
Over at Harappa DNA Zack ran ChromoPainter/fineStructure on his South Asian data set and posted the results. The new method immediately makes a few things clear: 1) The “South Asians” in the HGDP data set that’s been used for so long are rather on the inbred side, and relatively genetically distinct as far as South Asian populations…