Author: Razib Khan

  • Of interest around the web

    I am not doing daily link round ups right now because I’m not reading the web as much, but I certainly have enough material to put up one link round-up/pointer per week. David Burbridge of GNXP has completed five posts on the Price equation. One more to go (focusing on group selection). Highly recommended. Vitamin…

  • American human geography in numbers

    One of the great things about Google Data Explorer is that it allows us to explore the quantitative magnitudes of qualitative differences which we have a general sense of intuitively. I’ve focused on the international data so far, but I thought I…

  • Open Thread – November 13th, 2010

    Blogs worth checking out: Reaction Norm, A Replicated Typo, and Dodecad. Heather Mac Donald has some expectations for the Tea Party. Take a look at the Wikio Science Top 20. Same old, same old. I’m always sniffing around for new science blogs, and am struck by how many of the top bloggers I’ve met personally.…

  • Bonus Katz – November 12th, 2010

    Been a while since I did some bonus kat photos, so here it goes….

  • Friday Fluff – November 12th, 2010

    1. First, a post from the past: Extremism in defense of precision is no vice. 2. Weird search query of the week: ‘”it’s a jersey thing” gnxp.’ 3. Comment of the week, in response to Tariffs, not trade?: You’re ignoring intergenerational wealth transfer. Grandparents don’t like to see their grandchildren’s parents out of work, or…

  • Was the Pocahontas exception necessary?

    In Jonathan Spiro’s Defending the Master Race it is recounted that as American states were passing more robust anti-miscegenation laws and legally enshrining the concept of the one-drop-rule an exception was made in Virginia for those with 1/16th or less Native American ancestry. The reason for this was practical: many of the aristocratic “First Families…

  • The layers and fault-lines of genes

    At Genomes Unzipped Luke Jostins elaborates on how the genetic facts he now has about his paternal lineage change how he views his own personal history: … my father’s father is Latvian, and the N1 haplogroup is not rare in the Baltic regions. In fact, the subgroup, N1c1, is more common in parts of Eastern…

  • Tariffs, not trade?

    In the the 19th century the Democratic party, rooted in large part among Southern planters who were dependent on exports of commodities and imports of finished goods, was the party of free trade. The northern Whigs, and later the Republicans, were the party of tariffs. They were the faction which drew support from the industry…

  • Aziz Ansari is not a Muslim, he is an atheist

    A few days ago a friend was asking me about Aziz Ansari, the brown American comedian who grew up in South Carolina, and is of Tamil Muslim heritage. Since I don’t watch Parks and Recreation, I knew about him mostly through the Sepia Mutiny weblog. Some of the comments there indicated that Ansari was a…

  • The future Indian Yao Ming

    In a nation of ~1 billion, even one where a large minority are positively malnourished, you’d expect some really tall people. So not that surprising: NBA Awaits Satnam From India, So Big and Athletic at 14: In a country of 1.3 billion people, 7-foot, 250-pound Satnam Singh Bhamar has become a beacon for basketball hope. At…

  • European man of many faces: Cain vs. Abel

    When it comes to the synthesis of genetics and history we live an age of no definitive answers. L. L. Cavalli-Sforza’s Great Human Diasporas would come in for a major rewrite at this point. One of the areas which has been roiled the most within the past ten years has been the origin and propagation…

  • The importance of representativeness

    A few weeks ago when I posted on the results of a high likelihood of a partially eastern origin for the Mundari people I received a message via Facebook that the article really wasn’t relevant to most South Asians, since only 1-2% spoke a Mundari language (along with pointers to old out of date articles).…

  • Fractional reserve banking: it’s a sin!

    The junior Senator from Kentucky, Randal “Rand” Paul, is well known as an icon of the Tea Party movement, son of Ron Paul, and devotee of the “Aqua Buddha.” Paul has already stated that means tests on Medicare and Social Security should be on the table. Additionally, he tipped his hand that he was […]

  • Size doesn’t always matter

    Neandertals famously had larger cranial capacities than modern humans, and, have gone through multiple phases of de- and re-humanization. A few weeks ago there was a revision of the idea that Neandertals in France ~30,000 years ago adopted some aspects of modern human culture through diffusion. This was a support for the Neandertal “ooga-booga” thesis.…

  • The banality of Facebook

    Jonah Lehrer (a.k.a. the “boy-king of the neuroscience blogosphere”) has a mild and gentlemanly rejoinder to Zadie Smith essay which verges on moral panic about the Facebook phenomenon. Back in 2000 I remember listening to literary critics rave about Smith’s White Teeth. I’m a nerd, and when I read fiction it tends to be “speculative…

  • What intra- & inter- population genetic variance tells us

    The figure to the left is a composite merged from two different papers. One analyzes the patterns of genetic variation within African Americans, and the other the patterns within the East Turkic ethnic group, the Uyghurs. The bar plots show the ancestral element which is similar to two parent populations which resemble Europeans and Africans…

  • Engineering the Messiah

    In the 1920s the Soviet Union sponsored a “humanzee” breeding program. From what I recall the ultimate rationale for the funding was that the program might create a race of superior warriors, combing the incredible physical strength on a per pound basis of the chimp, with the greater level of intelligence found in human beings.…

  • Demographics as political destiny

    From The New York Times, White Democrats Lose More Ground in South: There are other signs that the realignment might not be permanent. Growing Latino populations in Florida and Texas, and in Georgia and South Carolina, could rearrange the political map again before too long. And then there is the curious case of North Carolina.…

  • Around the great northern circle

    Recently there’s been some talk about how the Mercator projection distorts our perceptions of the world, in particular how it makes Africa seem very small in relation to North America, and about the same size as Greenland. But there’s another artifact of the Mercator projection as well: it misleads us in terms of our perception…

  • Open Thread – November 6th, 2010

    A few days ago I was propounding to an old friend my hypothesis that social networks of cultural affinity are determinative in both the nature and trajectory of attitudes and norms within subcultures. In more plain language, you come to an opinion on many issues through your peer-network. The number one predictor of conversion to…

Razib Khan