Category: Culture
-
Turtleneck & Chain – geekcore extraordinaire
A few days ago I praised The Lonely Island’s new album Turtleneck & Chain. Though I assumed I’d already heard most of the best songs via their videos I still was curious enough to pull it down on iTunes. Unfortunately iTunes decided to …
-
Fall of the metrosexual, rise of the hipster
1
-
2,000 years of Yayoi – Japanese are gaikokujin!
A new paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society dovetails with some posts I’ve put up on the peopling of Japan of late. The paper is Bayesian phylogenetic analysis supports an agricultural origin of Japonic languages: Languages, like genes, evolv…
-
“I don’t have a T.V.” isn’t such a signal anymore….
So I last had cable television in August of 2004. By the the summer of 2005 we’d phased out the television, period. I became the “well, I don’t have a television….” guy. This causes some issues. I am somewhat spotty in my …
-
The “law school scam” media bubble
If you’re like me you have friends and acquaintances who want to go to law school. I often respond sarcastically that “a mind is a terrible thing to waste.” There have long been “law school scam” blogs, but it seems that r…
-
The loss of sacred belief?
Over at the Less Wrong blog there is a post, So You’ve Changed Your Mind. This portion caught my attention: So you’ve changed your mind. Given up your sacred belief, the one that defined so much of who you are for so long. You are probably…
-
The soft twilight of monarchies
Years ago I took a course on Tudor and Stuart England. Its primary focus was more on social and cultural aspects of British society at the time, rather than diplomatic history. Later I took an interest in the England of the Civil War era. One thing tha…
-
The royal wedding and outbreeding
In the wake of the post from earlier this week on the inbreeding within the House of Windsor (and current lack thereof), Luke Jostins, a subject of the British monarch, has a nice informative post up, Inbreeding, Genetic Disease and the Royal Wedding. …
-
A loss of literacy
The Case for Cursive: For centuries, cursive handwriting has been an art. To a growing number of young people, it is a mystery. The sinuous letters of the cursive alphabet, swirled on countless love letters, credit card slips and banners above elementa…
-
A loss of literacy
The Case for Cursive: For centuries, cursive handwriting has been an art. To a growing number of young people, it is a mystery. The sinuous letters of the cursive alphabet, swirled on countless love letters, credit card slips and banners above elementa…
-
Changing your null on charities
My friend Holden Karnofsky has a review of the Greg Mortenson affair over at the The GiveWell Blog: There has been a lot of coverage of the scandals around the Central Asia Institute. The founder has been accused of fabricating inspiring stories, as w…
-
Sectionalism submerged
Aside from transient memes such as Jesusland sectional sentiment tends to be implicit and remain below the surface, especially outside of “Dixie”, in the United States today. In a nation the size of a continent and populated by over 300 mil…
-
Is “Game of Thrones” racist? Not even wrong….
One of the aspects of fiction is that it serves as a Rorschach test. Over at Slate Nina Shen Rastogi has a post up, Is “Game of Thrones” Racist?: The Dothraki are dark, with long hair they wear in dreadlocks or in matted braids. They sport …
-
The poorest community in the United States
Its demographics: As of the census…of 2000, there were 13,138 people, 2,229 households, and 2,137 families residing in the village. The population density was 11,962.2 people per square mile (4,611.5/km2). There were 2,233 housing units at an ave…
-
Language and serial founder effects
Mr. James Winters has finally offered his take on Phonemic diversity supports a serial founder effect model of language expansion from Africa. The Return of the Phoneme Inventories: There are several assumptions made in the paper that I’ve already co…
-
African ur-language reconsidered
Mark Liberman at Language Log has looked through the Science paper Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa. Overall he seems to think it is an interesting paper, but he has some pointed criticisms. …
-
Greg Mortenson and “Three Cups of Tea”
I’ve been a bit skeptical of the details of Greg Mortenson’s story in his book Three Cups of Tea for years. It seems be to so predicated on contemporary biases about the basic universal goodness of human nature. I hoped everything was true,…
-
Can 46% of Mississippi Republicans favor banning interracial marriage?
That’s the number. At least according to Public Policy Polling. That seems rather high. So I decided to go back and look at the RACMAR variable in the General Social Survey. Here’s the question: Do you think there should be laws against mar…
-
The end of Ayla & The Land of Painted Caves
I read Jean Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear in elementary school at a friend’s house during a sleep over. It was next to the bedside, and I decided to pick it up. I’d thought it was a human evolution book from the cover. I read 2/3 …
-
Islam, creationism, and anti-modernism
The other day I was listening to NPR and they were discussing at length the upheavals in the Arab world. Offhand I noted how the discussants would occasionally shift between “the Arab world” and “the Muslim world,” and naturally…