Happy New Year!
And let’s have a great teens.
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The engineer terrorist
Slate reviews the scholarly literature. Explaining the mechanics of the over-representation of engineers at the higher echelons of transnational terrorism is a guessing game, but the empirical reality seems relatively robust. Though I suspect that soci…
Why do we delay gratification even when there is no downside?
Earlier this year, John Tierney reviewed several studies on how delaying gratification makes us feel better in the short term by preventing guilt but makes us feel more miserable in the long term by causing regret over missed opportunities. I added my …
One year after the financial collapse, Gotham in a downward spiral
Actually, not really. New York on Track for Fewest Homicides on Record. I assume that those who project long term fiscal problems due to a contraction in the financial sector in New York City are probably correct (assuming that the financial sector act…
New comment format
A lot of people (including paying readers! kidding!) are complaining about the new commenting format. I’ll be euphemistic and observe that it’s suboptimal. But I don’t have time to work on tweaking and beautifying it now, so please be patient. Over tim…
Mutation and selection in stickleback evolution
Understanding the precise molecular mechanisms underlying changes in animal morphology is a tricky problem–usually two species which have diverged morphologically (say, mice and humans) are now so unrelated as to make genetic study exceedingly difficu…
On Christmas
A few years ago I stopped saying “Happy Holidays” as my default and switched to “Merry Christmas.” The main issue for me is that I didn’t want to get hung up on a name. As someone who doesn’t accept that Jesus Christ was the Son of God I don’t celebrate the season for that particular […]
Merry Xmas
& a happy New Year.
The old old time religion
Ross Douthat, Into The Mystic:But as the Pew chart suggests, there is one sense in which religion was less influential in mid-century American life than it is today, and that’s the realm of personal mystical experience. Slightly more people went to chu…
The diversity of the east
Just a weird random thought. In the early 20th century the Ainu of Japan were considered by many physical anthropologists a branch of the white race. This fit in nicely with the historical fantasy of the period which often featured “Lost Races,” with a…
Transhuman Goodness
Most of the readers of this weblog probably have as much use for the Singularity as John Derbyshire, but for those of you who dig Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong, you might check out Transhuman Goodness. The author, Roko Mijic, is so normal he could alm…
Why are Mormons the American success story?
I was skimming through a book on Scandinavian migration to Utah the other day, these Scandinavians being converts to Mormonism. The author noted that while most Scandinavian Americans settled in areas where farming was relatively easy, these converts w…
Selection & African Americans
I already posted on the new paper on African American Genetics. I noticed that Frank Sweet says:It is interesting that the 18 percent mean of Euro DNA markers in A-As has been holding steady for about 8 years now, having replaced the prior estimate of …
The Trouble With Forgetting Your Own History
The Trouble With Standing Athwart History:
But of course this is the trouble with basing your political value system on things like authority and tradition. It’s always changing! William F Buckley’s determination to stand athwart history yelling stop led him to a robust defense of apartheid as a system of government for the American South. At […]
NPR has a science blog
Cosmos and Culture.
Reminder on comments, enter a handle
Please remember to enter a name when you put in a comment. Can be fake and such. Just something distinctive. I’m deleting comments from “Guests.”
Canada & North American theocracy
In the comments Europeans often point out that nations we Americans consider very secular, such as the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, actually provide state subsidy to religious schools. Part of the issue here is that Americans have a caricature o…
Brain size & microcephaly genes
Microcephaly Genes Associated With Human Brain Size:Highly significant associations were found between cortical surface area and polymorphisms in possible regulatory regions near the gene CDK5RAP2. This gene codes for a protein involved in cell-cycle r…
Brain size & microcephaly genes
Microcephaly Genes Associated With Human Brain Size:Highly significant associations were found between cortical surface area and polymorphisms in possible regulatory regions near the gene CDK5RAP2. This gene codes for a protein involved in cell-cycle r…
Crime way down. Who exactly knows stuff?
Despite recession, crime keeps falling:In times of recession, property crimes, in particular, are expected to rise.They haven’t.Overall, property crimes fell by 6.1 percent, and violent crimes by 4.4 percent, according to the six-month data collected b…