The Dodecad ancestry project
Dienekes Pontikos, Introducing the Dodecad ancestry project:
1) Project goals
The Dodecad ancestry project has two goals:
– To provide detailed ancestry analysis to individuals who have tested with 23andMe; other testing companies may be included in the future.
– To build samples of individuals for regions of the world (e.g. Greeks, Finns, Albanians, Southern Italians, etc.) currently under-represented […]
Daily Data Dump – October 25th, 2010
Detailed admixture analysis of West Eurasian populations (+ GenomesUnzipped individuals). Dienekes looks at the Genomes Unzipped guys in the context of Eurasian variation. He explains why he prefers bar plots of inferred ancestral quanta over PCA and MDS charts.
A World Upside Down for Greeks. “In Greece, small businesses — defined as stores or workshops […]
History and Geography of Genes on a Desktop
In case you don’t know, Dienekes Pontikos has been posting a lot of analyses of available population genetic data sets with the ADMIXTURE program. You can find his myriad posts under the ADMIXTURE-experiments tag. Below is a bar plot he generated today. To follow up a debate which occurred last spring, it does seem from […]
Body odor, Asians, and earwax
When I was in college I would sometimes have late night conversations with the guys in my dorm, and the discussion would random-walk in very strange directions. During one of these quasi-salons a friend whose parents were from Korea expressed some surprise and disgust at the idea of wet earwax. It turns out he had […]
A relationship in attitudes toward Global Warming & evolution?
In my post earlier in the week I mentioned the possible relationship between attitudes toward evolution and the causes and likelihood of Global Warming. I haven’t seen any survey data myself relating the two, so naturally I wanted to poke into the General Social Survey. Two variables of interest showed up, both from 2006:
1) GWSCI, […]
The genomics future is almost now
Stephen Hsu on developments at the Beijing Genomics Institute:
I was floored today when the director of BGI told me they would soon reach a sequencing rate of 1000 (human) genomes per day (so, 10^5 to 10^6 genomes per year is right on the horizon). According to him, they can be profitable at a price of […]
Open Thread – October 23rd, 2010
Autumn is here. And winter is coming.
The fresco to the left is the cover jacket illustration for Why we’re all Romans, a new cultural history which attempts to argue for the unique debts of Western civilization to Rome (in particular as a mediator of the wisdom of the Greeks and Hebrews). If you’re on […]
The future is now, but more so
If you have some time to kill, the Paleo-Future weblog is really awesome. It shows what people thought the future was going to be like (often around the year 2000) from the 1870s through every decade of the 20th century. As usual with this sort of thing it tells you more about the salient aspects […]
Friday Fluff – October 22nd, 2010
1. First, a post from the past: The Round-Eyed Buddha.
2. Weird search query of the week: “straight jacket sex.”
3. Comment of the week, in response to Glenn Beck, Evolution, Global Warming & Tea Parties:
People who don’t believe in evolution don’t comprehend evolution. Evolution is a struggle to survive as a species. How else can you […]
A sign that Facebook has peaked
The other day NPR’s Planet Money quipped that the gold bubble was going to burst soon, as they’d decided to buy gold. Well, perhaps Facebook is nearing its bursting point…I created a Gene Expression fan page. I don’t have a good sense of the great utility of this sort of thing…you can after all find […]
A sign that Facebook has peaked
The other day NPR’s Planet Money quipped that the gold bubble was going to burst soon, as they’d decided to buy gold. Well, perhaps Facebook is nearing its bursting point…I created a Gene Expression fan page. I don’t have a good sense of the great utility of this sort of thing…you can after all find […]
…Those Germans
I have a long post reviewing Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century. Good book. In the process of blogging on the topic I found something kind of funny, but it was too immature to be posted there. I yanked some charts from Gallup Coexist 2009. Basically it shows […]
Borders we forget: Saudi Arabia & Yemen
There’s a lot of stuff you stumble upon via Google Public Data Explorer which you kind of knew, but is made all the more stark through quantitative display. For example, consider Saudi Arabia and Yemen. In gross national income per capita the difference between these two nations is one order of magnitude (PPP and nominal). […]
Daily Data Dump – October 21st, 2010
Bob Guccione, Penthouse Founder, Dies at 79. Playboy has been in decline too.
HUMAN GENE COUNT: MORE THAN A CHICKEN, LESS THAN A GRAPE. Going under 20,000. Hey, it’s just a number, not the measure of a man.
Robert Heinlein, We Never Knew Ye. Fred Pohl’s blog is really interesting.
Only You. And You. And You. This is […]
The wheel of history turns to the gods
About six months ago I read a history of modern Italy and was struck by a passage which observed that during the early years of the Italian state none of the prominent political leaders were practicing Roman Catholics. Part of this was specific to the history of the rise of modern Italy, Umberto I fought the […]
Glenn Beck, Evolution, Global Warming & Tea Parties
Glenn Beck said some dumb, but unsurprising, things about evolution:
How many people believe in evolution in this country? I’d like to see. I mean, I don’t know why it’s unreasonable to say this. I’m not God so I don’t know how God creates. I don’t think we came from monkeys. I think that’s ridiculous. I […]
Daily Data Dump – October 20th, 2010
My DonorsChoose page. Compared to previous years I’m kind of under-performing. I haven’t done any PBS-like incentives before, but perhaps I should. For example, anyone who gives $250 is owed a post from me on a topic of their choice of at least 2,000 words excluding quotations within the next 3 months. Those are just […]
Genetic watersheds on the Great Himalayas
One of the great geological landmarks on earth are the Himalayas. Not only are the Himalayas of importance in the domain of physical geography, but they are important in human geography as well. Just as South Asians and non-South Asians agree that the valley of the Indus and its tributaries bound the west of the […]
Daily Data Dump – October 19th, 2010
Use Cash, Not Cards, To Buy Better Food? Another of the upsides of the “pain of paying.” I wonder if the effect will be transferred to debit cards as we move away from cash? Or, perhaps the effect is tied to the concreteness of a currency, and cash is just more concrete than debit cards. […]
Did cavemen eat bread?
Food is a fraught topic. In How Pleasure Works Paul Bloom alludes to the thesis that while conservatives fixate on sexual purity, liberals fixate on culinary purity. For example, is it organic? What is the sourcing? Is it “authentic”? Obviously one can take issue with this characterization, especially its general class inflection (large swaths of […]