The naked years: the end of privacy
I do talk periodically on this weblog about the coming ‘transparent society.’ The main reason I bring up the issue is that I think it is probably inevitable, and, I think we’re sliding toward it without even reflecting on it too much. Many people are very surprised at how little time it takes to find […]
Of interest around the web & elsewhere – November 29th, 2010
Goodbye November.
Male Reproductive Problems May Add to Falling Fertility Rates. There’s an implication that there may be epigenetic and developmental reasons for this phenomenon. But check out this quote: “Today, at least one in five 18-25 year old men in Europe have semen quality in the subfertile range.” I’m starting to wonder about genetic load […]
No Romans needed to explain Chinese blondes
Uyghur boy from Kashgar
Every few years a story crops up about “European-looking” people in northwest China who claim to be of Roman origin. A “lost legion” so to speak. I’ll admit that I found the stories interesting, amusing, if implausible, years ago. But now it’s just getting ridiculous. This is almost like the “vanishing blonde” […]
Slouching toward transparency
In regards to the WikiLeaks story, it seems that:
– The explosive stuff is really a shift from assumed understanding to explicit acknowledgment. For example, that Arab nations are just as terrified of Iran’s nuclear program as Israel.
– The surprising stuff is more funny or strange. More like gossip you wouldn’t have guessed, but isn’t really […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 of likely […]
Assorted links related to this weblog
23andMe kits are discounted to $99 from $499 today.
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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 were illiterate, just […]
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 seems […]
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 […]
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…
The inevitable social brain
One of the most persistent debates about the process of evolution is whether it exhibits directionality or inevitability. This is not limited to a biological context; Marxist thinkers long promoted a model of long-term social determinism whereby human groups progressed through a sequence of modes of production. Such an assumption is not limited to […]
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 […]
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.
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 […]
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 TV shows […]
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 of […]
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 for […]