Monthly Archives: May 2011

So over the past few months there has been an issue where manual comment spam is getting more sophisticated. The strategy is to leave an anodyne comment with really vague references to how the post is “great” and “very informative&#82…

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All the talk about the ladies, I poked around The World Values Survey. I was going to post the results in relation to “women” related questions, but I’ll leave it to you. I will say this: – Muslim and East Asian societies are the least forthrightly supportive of female political and social equality – There […]

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I don’t post Creationist related stuff often, but Harun Yahya always brings out the funny in people. So check this out, In France, a Muslim offensive against evolution. First, some standard dullness:
Dressed in a traditional black robe decorated …

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Woman takes attacker’s penis to cop: A 40-year-old Bangladeshi woman cut off a man’s penis during an alleged attempted rape and took it to a police station as evidence, police in a remote part of Bangladesh said on Monday. The woman, a married mother of three, was attacked while she was sleeping in her shanty […]

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Seriously, sometimes history matches fiction a lot more than we’d have expected, or wished. In the early 2000s the Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes observed a pattern of discordance between the spatial distribution of male mediated ancestry on the …

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Kalki Koechlin: Kalki was born to French parents in a small village in Pondicherry. Her parents had come to India 38 years ago and settled there after they fell in love with the country. Her parents are devotees of Sri Aurobindo. As an American I really get aggravated at some of the exclusionary “race popery” […]

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Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Tests Neither Accurate in Their Predictions nor Beneficial to Individuals, Study Suggests:
Direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic tests give inaccurate predictions of disease risks and many European geneticists believe that some of…

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Recently an evolutionary geneticist told me that his colleagues who worked with mice really didn’t have their stuff together. Actually, his language was a touch more colorful than that. But the gist of the argument seemed plausible enough to me. …

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I think it is pretty irrational to bet on the Mavericks against the Heat in the NBA Finals. And since my Celtics lost I haven’t been following what’s going on closely, but I hope Jason Kidd gets his ring. He’s had some ups and downs, …

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A reader pointed out that the BBC series The Incredible Human Journey is online on YouTube thanks to the WhyEvolutionIsTrue channel. You can find all the episodes here. I’ve embedded episode 1 below. For what it’s worth I am no longer am co…

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I have no idea when the paper will be on PNAS‘s website, so I thought I would at least point to the ScienceDaily release, Climate Played Big Role in Vikings’ Disappearance from Greenland:
Greenland’s early Viking settlers were subject…

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Happy Memorial Day, if you’re American!
Dienekes has some very interesting posts up over at Dodecad, How to create Zombies from ADMIXTURE etc., and More Zombies: Ancestral North Indians and Ancestral South Indians reborn. If you are playing with …

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A few people have pointed me to Google Correlate. Google says that this tool is like “Google Trends in reverse.” You know I love Google Trends, so of course I’m going to poke around Google Correlate. The tool shows you the strongest c…

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One of the reasons I tend toward a bit of hypochondria is probably the fact that what for others are inconvenient minor ailments often trigger my asthma. So nice to see this, Why Does Flu Trigger Asthma?:
When children with asthma get the flu, they oft…

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In the mid-2000s many regular folks knew that something was weird in housing. Of course everyone was aware that there was a short term windfall to be made if you could flip. But there were normal discussions about the bubble, and when it would burst, o…

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A new paper in Science, Differences Between Tight and Loose Cultures: A 33-Nation Study, is making the media rounds. Here’s NPR:
…The idea for this study really dates to the 1960s. Back then, an anthropologist decided to evaluate a few doze…

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Via Kevin Drum, Zanran, “Your source for data & statistics – graphs, charts and tables.” I am just checking it out, but I think it will be of use to readers.

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1) First, a post from the past: Personality variation by region (USA).

2) Weird search query of the week: “why are ligers so big?”
3) Comment of the week, in response to “AIBioTech Sports X Factor is not worth the money”:
As …

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1) First, a post from the past: Personality variation by region (USA).

2) Weird search query of the week: “why are ligers so big?”
3) Comment of the week, in response to “AIBioTech Sports X Factor is not worth the money”:
As …

Read more

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Razib Khan