Daily Data Dump – Tuesday
The Democrats’ New Normal. It’s looking real bad. On the other hand, the Dems passed Health Care Reform. What’s the point of being in power if nothing is achieved? I’m sure the Republicans would have lost bigger if they’d passed Social Security Reform, but they would have achieved a big goal of their party.
Guardian science […]
The New World in three easy steps
One aspect of human demographic expansions seems to be the fact that we often model them as a constant diffusion process, when in reality there were likely pulses (economic historians can conceive of this as the periodic gaps between land and labor factor inputs). I don’t know much about the human movements prior to H. […]
Science with soul sells
Vivienne Raper who analyzed the Wikio Top 100 Science Blogs left a comment below:
I’m now curious to find out why there are no ‘popular’ blogs in certain subjects. Do working condensed matter physicists who want to engage with the public write about astrophysics? Or are astrophysicists the only physicists who want to blog for the […]
Open Thread – August 30th, 2010
I always forget about open threads! Anyone read any good books over the summer? Bad ones to avoid? I’ll have a review of The Tenth Parallel up soon, but after reading it, and several other books…I’m beginning to think that for most Americans they should stick to American history if they want to read history. […]
Daily Data Dump – Monday
Hope you had a good weekend! Winter is not quite coming…but summer is ending.
Phoneme Inventory Size and Demography. Some original data analysis in this post! Turns out that phoneme segment length is positively correlated with population density. Too often culture is viewed as something we can only have a qualitative understanding of, but these sorts […]
10 Questions for Hugh Pope
I have posted a Q & A with author Hugh Pope over at Discover. Other 10 Questions can be found here.
When the ancients were wise
I picked up The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization on the run, as I was about go traveling somewhere. I didn’t look at the contents or even the jacket summary very closely. My interest specifically was to get to know a little more about the Abbassid House of Wisdom, which like […]
What do science bloggers blog about
What do science bloggers blog about? My study of the Wikio Top 100:
As a former scientist, I like evidence-based blogging so I needed a dataset to test my theory that ‘all top bloggers are biologists’. To get a randomish sample of big science bloggers, I did a dodgy analysis of the blogs in the Wikio […]
God’s trade
One of the issues with pre-modern trade is that international banking and communication as we understand it did not exist, and trust was a major problem across distance and time. This is why dispersed ethno-religious groups could be the vectors by which private trade occurred between civilizations, because there was a circle of trust which […]
Marc Hauser’s consequences
Update: Results so far….
Too harsh – 3.0%
About right – 15.0%
Not harsh enough, though he shouldn’t be ostracized – 26.0%
He should be ostracized from science – 56.0%
The editor of Cognition believes that Marc Hauser was guilty of fabrication in light of what he’s seen in the Harvard report on Hauser’s misconduct. Marc Hauser is on on leave, […]
Nigerians agree despite religious differences
I am currently reading Eliza Griswold’s The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam. The first half of the book is about Africa, and much of that is given to religious conflict in Nigeria. Africa’s most populous nation happens to be split down the middle religiously, with a Muslim north and a […]
Daily Data Dump – Friday
Have a good weekend.
The ratio of human X chromosome to autosome diversity is positively correlated with genetic distance from genes. This is in my RSS, but not on the Nature site, so here’s the snip I have: “The ratio of X-linked to autosomal diversity was estimated from an analysis of six human genome sequences […]
Not the origin of genome complexity
Over the past decade evolutionary geneticist Mike Lynch has been articulating a model of genome complexity which relies on stochastic factors as the primary motive force by which genome size increases. The argument is articulated in a 2003 paper, and further elaborated in his book The Origins of Genome Architecture. There are several moving parts […]
Chosen genes of the Chosen People
Last spring two very thorough papers came out which surveyed the genetic landscape of the Jewish people (my posts, Genetics & the Jews it’s still complicated, Genetics & the Jews). The novelty of the results was due to the fact that the research groups actually looked across the very diverse populations of the Diaspora, from […]
Size doesn’t always matter
The autosomal genome of Ötzi the Austrian “Iceman” is apparently in the pipeline (from what I can tell they’re doing the analysis right now). What can we learn from one sample? Ann Stone, who was a graduate student on the original team which recovered his body, says:
A specialist in anthropological genetics, Stone is excited by […]
Daily Data Dump – Thursday
Essential Science Fiction Movies. People always put Metropolis on the list, or bemoan the fact that they haven’t seen it. What do you think of it? I quite enjoyed, but much of the greatness of the film seems to be that it prefigured so much of what was to come.
The Real Estate Collapse. Jonah Lehrer […]
Hitler’s “Jewish genes”
A reader asked about the bizarre story of Adolf Hitler having “non-Aryan” ancestry. Specifically, The Daily Mail title is: “DNA tests reveal ‘Hitler was descended from the Jews and Africans he hated.’” Since it’s a British newspaper I frankly wouldn’t put it past them to simply pass along a hoax…but I think if they were going […]
The past in color
I don’t know about you, but I have a weird mental problem whereby my visual model of the past is strongly shaped by the constraints on the various representational modes which preserve images from a particular era. For example, the paintings of the 18th century shape how I imagine the 18th century, while the black […]