Category: Culture
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The New York Times flubs basic facts about Islam
Since 9/11, and even earlier back to the Iranian Revolution, Western journalists have served as oracles for the mass public, decrypting the ethnographic confusions of the Islamic world. There are many subtle shadings which no doubt can’t make int…
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Foragers to farmers: a tale of collective action?
The economist Samuel Bowles recently had a paper out in PNAS which caught my attention, Cultivation of cereals by the first farmers was not more productive than foraging. This naturally begs the question: why did farming conquer foraging as a lifestyle…
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Nerd alert!
Apparently July 12th, 2011, is now a hard date for the publication of George R. R. Martin’s A Dance with Dragons, the 5th book in his A Song of Ice and Fire series. Martin has confirmed the date on his website: “Barring tsunamis, general st…
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The changing face of fame
Long time reader Dragon Horse has been generating and collecting (top row images are from Dienekes) composite image of various classes of individuals for a while now. It’s really fun to just skim through and make your own assessments (the “…
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Who are those Houston Gujus?
The figure to the left is a three dimensional representation of principal components 1, 2, and 3, generated from a sample of Gujaratis from Houston, and Chinese from Denver. When these two populations are pooled together the Chinese form a very homogen…
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A problem of aggregation of information
In a post below I regenerated the HGDP PCA plot you’ve probably seen around, except that I added my parents (and a few HapMap populations) into the plot. The PCA below was basically a visualization of the two largest independent dimensions of ge…
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Does your twin have “rights” on your genomes?
Randall Parker asks, Genetic Privacy And Identical Twins: Suppose you have a right to genetic privacy. You might believe you do. Suppose you have an identical twin. Suppose the identical twin decides to publish his (or her) genetic sequence on the web….
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Egypt vs. Indonesia in attitudes
TNR has a post up, Egypt and Indonesia. In it, the author argues that: At times of unexpected but momentous political change in distant countries, we grasp onto political analogies to help get our bearings. Even if we know they are imperfect, we can’…
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What do the people think?
With all the geopolitical tumult and news I was a bit curious to see what The World Values Survey could tell us about public opinion in Egypt and Tunisia. Unfortunately, Tunisia hasn’t been in any of their surveys, though Egypt has. So I thought …
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American history in broad strokes
A comment below inquired about “good books” on American history. Unfortunately I don’t know as much about American history as I do about Roman or Chinese history. But over the years there have been several books which I find to have been very value-add in terms of understanding where we are now. In other words,…
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Portlandia
The boss pointed me to this new series, Portlandia. I lived in Southeast near the Hawthorne neighborhood in 2002, so the following video brings back some funny memories….
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Stop using the word “Caucasian” to mean white
About four years ago blogger emeritus RPM of evolgen brought into sharp relief an issue which has nagged me: Caucasian, literally, refers to people native to the Caucasus, but it has become interchangeable with any number of ‘White’ populat…
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The rise and fall of great powers is stochastic
Long time readers know well my fascination with quantitative history. In particular, cliometrics and cliodynamics. These are fields which attempt to measure and model human historical phenomena and processes. Cliometrics is a well established field, in…
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The inevitable rise of Amish machines
About 20 years ago I lived for a year in a rural area where Amish were a common feature of country roads and farmers’ markets. My parents, being Muslims, would sometimes buy chickens from the local Amish and slaughter them according to halal. We had a relationship with a particular family. They were nice people,…
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The rules of attraction: the not so golden mean
Several people have inquired as to my opinion on the OKCupid post The Mathematics Of Beauty. I’ve blogged data from this dating website in the past, in particular, the differential race consciousness of women vs. men. But that material is a different class than the current post. As I have noted before, there is a…
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How America is a little like Pakistan
Recently a “hot story” in the barbaric nation that is Pakistan is that a politician did not know how to recite a prayer properly. An important back story here is that Muslims generally pray in Arabic, but most Muslims are not Arabic language speakers (and in any case, colloquial Arabic is very different from “Classical…
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The empires of American English
Over the past few days a website which maps American English dialects has gone around the blogs (I found it via Kevin Zelnio). Michelle has some suggestions for improvements of the map in Ohio. Here’s a cropped and resized dialect map: One thing that immediately stood out is the latitudinal banded pattern of the dialects.…
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’tis the day for last second giving!
I know many people decide on their yearly charitable giving between Christmas and the New Year. If you’ve waited until now, you might want to take some more time and check out GiveWell’s Top international charities.
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The Axial Age & world population
A few days ago Robin Hanson brought this chart of world population to my attention: On the x-axis you have time, 12,000 years ago to the present. On the y-axis an estimate of the total world population log-transformed. The data is derived from the US Census low estimate. Granting the data’s accuracy for the purposes…
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Are conservatives fatter than liberals?
The maps above juxtaposes the counties which shifted Republican in the 2008 presidential election vs. 2004 (reddish) and the age-adjusted estimated rates of obesity by county in 2007 (darker blue). One issue which I haven’t seen explored too much are the two faces of Appalachia; the Atlantic facing counties are generally healthier than the lowland…