Razib Khan

Razib Khan’s Content Aggregation Site

  • Is this a parody of James Franco?

    OK, a little off topic for this weblog…not science, not nerdy. But The New York Times has an article up, James Franco Straddles Two Roles at Yale, which made me think of this SNL sketch: Do you think The New York Times reporter was playing an in…

  • How technology makes ideology irrelevant

    Dienekes points to two interesting phenomena which when juxtaposed together show how the pace of technological change can outrun ideological arguments and hand wringing. Those of you who have been reading me since the early 2000s know where I stand on …

  • Friday Fluff – March 4th, 2011

    1) First, a post from the past: Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters. 2) Weird search query of the week: “are you allowed to drink alcohol in class.” 3) Comment of the week, in response to “Are we still evolving”…

  • 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…

  • Fat China!

    Paul French talks about his new book, Fat China: How Expanding Waistlines are Changing a Nation. And rest assured, this is one measure by which America is still #1 in relation to China….

  • In praise of the House of Habsburg!

    One of the most annoying aspects of the post-Westphalian era is the conceit that all national administrative units are equivalent in some deep fundamental sense. So, for example, you get comparisons of per capita income for nations, and Luxembourg and…

  • Are we still evolving….

    The question whether humans are still evolving is something that crops up now and then. If the story is British you know that the evolutionary geneticist Steve Jones will be approached for his obligatory quote. There’s apparently going to be a pr…

  • The residual of the genes & geography correlation

    David of the Eurogenes Genetic Ancestry Project has a cautionary post up, When is a genetic map also a geographic map? Always and never. In it, he uses a specific peculiar pattern as a launching point into a broader exploration of the relationship betw…

  • Around the Web – February 28th, 2011

    February always goes by so fast…. Should you go to an Ivy League School, Part II. I think the value of an Ivy League degree will be more, not less, important in the future. It seems possible that we’re nearing the end of the age when the wa…

  • My parents, looking east and west

    Yesterday Michelle decided to put up a post with her own analysis of her ADMIXTURE results. With that in mind, I thought I’d revisit some results from my parents. After many runs of ADMIXTURE, both by myself and Zack, some consistent differences …

  • “Content farms” and the media Precambrian

    I’ve only become aware of “content farms” in any significant way over the past few days. Yes, I’m aware of Associated Content and eHow. I use Google! But I’ve always ignored them. But with Google’s turn against these…

  • 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 &#8220…

  • Friday Fluff – February 25th, 2011

    1) First, a post from the past: “Black” & white twins again. 2) Weird search query of the week: “buff chimpanzee.” 3) Comment of the week, in response to The evolution of man is no cartoon: I think the confounding notion here is …

  • Brazilians, more European than not?

    Credit: Dragon Horse The Pith: Brazil is often portrayed as the second largest black nation in the world, after Nigeria. But it turns out that the majority of the ancestors for non-white Brazilians are European. One of the more popular sources of se…

  • Run as fast as you can!

    Since his move to Wired I swear that Dr. Daniel MacArthur has gotten a bit more pugnacious. In any case, today he has a post up which smacks-down the A.M.A.’s attempt to expand the long arm of its regulatory capture: The American Medical Associat…

  • A mental map of the world

    One of the major issues in our world today is that we’re a people of specialties. This means that we don’t have basic interpretative frameworks in which to place novel facts. Because of the abstruse and formal nature of the discipline, this…

  • Better comprehension through visualization

    Zack has started to improve on static R plots with Google powered charts. Check it out. Alas, I can’t inject script tags into the body of my posts, so that’s not feasible for me. Notice on Zack’s plot that I’m more East Asian th…

  • Sweeping through a fly’s genome

    Credit: Karl Magnacca The Pith: In this post I review some findings of patterns of natural selection within the Drosophila fruit fly genome. I relate them to very similar findings, though in the opposite direction, in human genomics. Different forms o…

  • Visualizing “typical” Eurasians

    A few weeks ago I started looking at the 23andMe raw files of some of my friends and integrating them into HGDP and HapMap population data sets. One of the first things I did is remove the African populations from my total data. The reasons is as you c…

  • The evolution of man is no cartoon

    I was semi-offline for much of last week, so I only randomly heard from someone about the “Science paper” on which Molly Przeworski is an author. Finally having a chance to read it front to back it seems rather a complement to other papers…

Razib Khan