Razib Khan’s Content Aggregation Site
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Internet usage by country
In my post below on the rise of China, I ran into the data on internet usage by country again. I was online regularly by the spring of 1995, and it’s amazing to think that there are hundreds of millions of Chinese on the internet now! The World Bank estimates that both China and […]
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Latitudes and continents
Thanksgiving in the tropics: Finally, here are some pictures I took today. It was way too hot and humid when we first got to Taiwan, but now we’re getting some lovely winter weather – Taiwan is about the same latitude as Hawaii It sure doesn’t feel like Thanksgiving or Xmas around here! One aspect of…
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Taking the end of the age seriously
I am about two-thirds of the way through Why the West Rules-for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future, and I have to agree with Tyler Cowen’s assessment so far. The author is an archaeologist, and though a little less shy in regards to general theory than most in his…
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Open Thread – November 27th, 2010
Hope Thanksgiving went well for Americans. I didn’t gain weight at all, 142lbs as of Friday morning! Out of curiosity, what fiction do you read? Also, check out Dienekes post on the ability to generate disjoint clusters in the DODECAD sample set. He asserts that one may now be able to generate extreme fine-scale assessments…
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Assorted links related to this weblog
23andMe kits are discounted to $99 from $499 today. My twitter account: http://twitter.com/#!/razibkhan My total content feed: http://www.razib.com/wordpress (rss: http://www.razib.com/wordpress/?feed=rss2) The blog’s Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/GeneExpression (content gets fed onto this page via Networked Blogs) My ResearchBlogging page: http://researchblogging.org/blogger/home/id/1604 (65 posts) The original Gene Expression: http://www.gnxp.com And finally, my “personal home page”: http://razib.com If you have…
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Friday Fluff – November 26th, 2010
1. First, a post from the past: Innate social aptitudes of man. 2. Weird search query of the week: ‘evolutionary biologist studies porn.’ 3. Comment of the week, in response to The cult of Korea: Razib, as you say they are literate, but not in a free way. Note that I didn’t say North Koreans…
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Eating, and eating well
Credit: tuchodi Happy Thanksgiving Day to all the Americans out there. This is a day to loosen the belt a bit, but after the Holidays you probably want to think about slimming back. So, ScienceDaily, Obesity Riddle Finally ‘Solved’, and, Diets with High or Low Protein Content and Glycemic Index for Weight-Loss Maintenance. The upshot…
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We were all Africans…before the intermission
Quick review. In the 19th century once the idea that humans were derived from non-human ancestral species was injected into the bloodstream of the intellectual classes there was an immediate debate as to the location of the proto-human homeland; the Urheimat of us all. Charles Darwin favored Africa, but in many ways this ran against the…
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North Korea vs. South Korea
There isn’t a lot of good data coming out of North Korea, but I thought the following charts would be of interest. USA and Mexico included for comparison. In case you don’t know, the South Korea = Republic of Korea, North Korea = Democratic…
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The rise of men & the fall of the non-men
Dienekes Pontikos ruminates on the changes in human genetic variation on a world-wide scale over the past 10,000 years based on an MDS plot of East Eurasian genetic variation which he generated. I’ve taken his plot and added geographical labels, so you can see the difference in scale between geography and genetics in terms of…
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The cult of Korea
There are currently some scary goings-on in the Korean peninsula. If you have some time, I recommend Inside North Korea from National Geographic. Here’s the final scene. Jump to 5 minutes.
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Eurogenes 500K SNP BioGeographicAncestry Project
Since I have been promoting the Dodecad Ancestry Project, it seems only fair to bring to your attention Eurogenes 500K SNP BioGeographicAncestry Project. The sample populations are a bit different from Dodecad, but again ADMIXTURE is the primary tool. But the author also makes recourse to other methodologies to explore more than simply population level…
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A positive rate of rate of change
A Cheaper Plan at Netflix Offers Films for Online Only: Netflix said Monday that it was introducing a subscription plan for customers who want to watch movies only online, underscoring yet another step away from its roots in DVD rentals by mail. The new plan offers unlimited access to Netflix’s library of streaming movies and…
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Of interest around the web & elsewhere – November 22nd, 2010
Epilepsy’s Big, Fat Miracle. Two points to note: 1) modern medicine seems to have strongly resisted the ketogenic diet because of ideology, 2) this treatment works, but they don’t really understand why. It shows the importance of empiricism in medicine, but the reality that even an empirical discipline can be shifted by ideology. Grumpy Kvetching…
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The flux of genes on the South Seas
Huli Wigman from the Southern Highlands, Painting of Tahitian Women on the Beach by Paul Gauguin Many demographic models utilized in genetics are rather simple. Yet the expansion and retreat of various demes in post-Ice Age Europe seems to be far more complex than had previously been assumed, though I suspect part of the rationale…
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Open Thread – November 20th, 2010
A friend pointed me to Mapping the Measure of America. It allows for the creation of maps really quickly without any nerd-grease needed. To the left is a a map of life expectancy at birth by Congressional District. West Virginia’s 13th Congressional District has the lowest life expectancy in the USA at birth at 73.93…
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Too clever by a half
On a recent BHTV Jeff Sharlet and Amy Sullivan discuss a recent trend in the conception of Islam among the military: As I listened to them I got really annoyed. It is not accurate to say that Islam is an ideology and not a religion, but it is also not without foundation. Many Muslims would…
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Why H. L. Mencken is popular with nerds
The 800-Pound Mama Grizzly Problem: Ms. Palin, in fact, draws almost as much search traffic worldwide as the man she would face if she wins the Republican nomination: Barack Obama. And her name is searched for about 30 percent more often than the President’s among Google users in the United States. Some members of Ms.…
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Asian Buddhists are not atheists
In response to my two posts below on atheism statistics, people in the comments and around the web (e.g., Facebook) have pointed out that Buddhism is necessarily/can be atheistic, and that Buddhism, is not/not necessarily a religion, and therefore that explains the statistics. Some of these people are lazy/stupid judging by the way the argument…