Author: Razib Khan
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A sign that Facebook has peaked
The other day NPR’s Planet Money quipped that the gold bubble was going to burst soon, as they’d decided to buy gold. Well, perhaps Facebook is nearing its bursting point…I created a Gene Expression fan page. I don’t have a good sense of the great utility of this sort of thing…you can after all find…
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…Those Germans
I have a long post reviewing Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century. Good book. In the process of blogging on the topic I found something kind of funny, but it was too immature to be posted there. I yanked some charts from Gallup Coexist 2009. Basically it shows…
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Borders we forget: Saudi Arabia & Yemen
There’s a lot of stuff you stumble upon via Google Public Data Explorer which you kind of knew, but is made all the more stark through quantitative display. For example, consider Saudi Arabia and Yemen. In gross national income per capita the difference between these two nations is one order of magnitude (PPP and nominal).…
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Daily Data Dump – October 21st, 2010
Bob Guccione, Penthouse Founder, Dies at 79. Playboy has been in decline too. HUMAN GENE COUNT: MORE THAN A CHICKEN, LESS THAN A GRAPE. Going under 20,000. Hey, it’s just a number, not the measure of a man. Robert Heinlein, We Never Knew Ye. Fred Pohl’s blog is really interesting. Only You. And You. And…
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Glenn Beck, Evolution, Global Warming & Tea Parties
Glenn Beck said some dumb, but unsurprising, things about evolution: How many people believe in evolution in this country? I’d like to see. I mean, I don’t know why it’s unreasonable to say this. I’m not God so I don’t know how God creates. I don’t think we came from monkeys. I think that’s ridiculous.…
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Daily Data Dump – October 20th, 2010
My DonorsChoose page. Compared to previous years I’m kind of under-performing. I haven’t done any PBS-like incentives before, but perhaps I should. For example, anyone who gives $250 is owed a post from me on a topic of their choice of at least 2,000 words excluding quotations within the next 3 months. Those are just…
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Genetic watersheds on the Great Himalayas
One of the great geological landmarks on earth are the Himalayas. Not only are the Himalayas of importance in the domain of physical geography, but they are important in human geography as well. Just as South Asians and non-South Asians agree that the valley of the Indus and its tributaries bound the west of the…
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Daily Data Dump – October 19th, 2010
Use Cash, Not Cards, To Buy Better Food? Another of the upsides of the “pain of paying.” I wonder if the effect will be transferred to debit cards as we move away from cash? Or, perhaps the effect is tied to the concreteness of a currency, and cash is just more concrete than debit cards.…
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Did cavemen eat bread?
Food is a fraught topic. In How Pleasure Works Paul Bloom alludes to the thesis that while conservatives fixate on sexual purity, liberals fixate on culinary purity. For example, is it organic? What is the sourcing? Is it “authentic”? Obviously one can take issue with this characterization, especially its general class inflection (large swaths of…
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Daily Data Dump – October 18th, 2010
Elitism in the Senate. Harvard Law School:Tokyo University::Congress:Diet. Perusing The Almanac of American Politics makes it pretty clear that Harvard Law is way overrepresented. Barbara Billingsley Dies. All icons shall pass. Common variants at TRAF3IP2 are associated with susceptibility to psoriatic arthritis and psoriasis. Will this pan out in replication? Am I partly Jewish? Testing…
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Sex with thee and the last woman
A quintessentially sexy topic in biology is the origin of sex. Not only are biologists interested in it, but so is the public. Of Matt Ridley’s older books it is predictable that The Red Queen has the highest rank on Amazon. We humans have a fixation on sex, both in our public norms and our…
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The “Hispanic Paradox”, and others
The New York Times has a piece out on the “Hispanic Paradox”. The paradox is that American Hispanics are longer-lived than non-Hispanic whites, despite the relatively lower socioeconomic status of Hispanics (poorer, less educated). The paradox has been around for a while, and these stories tend to emerge whenever there’s a Census or CDC data…
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Leigh Van Valen, 1935-2010
John Hawks is reporting that Leigh Van Valen passed away this weekend. I had the pleasure and honor of Leigh Van Valen being an occasional reader of my musings. He would leave comments as “leigh.” Here’s one which he left in February 2008: Goldschmidt did a great deal more than hopeless monsters. I was with…
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Völkerwanderung back with a vengeance
The German magazine Der Spiegel has a rather thick new article out reviewing the latest research which is starting to reintroduce the concept of mass folk wanderings into archaeology. The title is How Middle Eastern Milk Drinkers Conquered Europe. In the story you get a good sense of the recent revision of the null model…
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Japan’s end of history
A rather depressing piece in The New York Times, Japan, Once Dynamic, Is Disheartened by Decline: But perhaps the most noticeable impact here has been Japan’s crisis of confidence. Just two decades ago, this was a vibrant nation filled with energy and ambition, proud to the point of arrogance and eager to create a new…
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Open Thread – October 16th, 2010
Yesterday regular contributor “miko” announced two things. First, he’s signed up as one of the 1,000 for the Personal Genome Project. And, he’s fired up a weblog to chronicle his journey. I know at least one other reader, my friend Paul, is also among the 1,000. Combined with the recent reveal of Genomes Unzipped, we’re…
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Friday Fluff – October 15th, 2010
1. First, a post from the past: 10 questions for Jim Crow 2. Weird search query of the week: “black mormons in utah”. They exist. One of my friends from college ended up marrying one and they live in Utah (he is Mormon as well, though not black). 3. Comment of the week, in response…