“Gross national happiness” in numbers
Bhutan famously espouses “gross national happiness”:
The term “gross national happiness” was coined in 1972 by Bhutan’s former King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, who has opened Bhutan to the age of modernization, soon after the…
The revolution swallowing Powell’s Books?
A friend asked me today if I thought that Powell’s would be around a year from now. I had no idea what he was referring to. By that, I don’t mean that I didn’t know he was referring to Powell’s Books of Portland. I mean that I h…
The power of one (Nubian that is)
Maju pointed me to a new paper on the genetics of Sudanese today. My interest was piqued, then not so much when I looked more closely. Genetic variation and population structure among Sudanese populations as indicated by the 15 Identifiler STR loci:
Ba…
Toward evolutionary monism
Is there any substantive difference between natural, sexual, and artificial selection? Or is it just semantic sugar, useful for humans in our own cognitive bookkeeping? I lean toward the latter proposition. To some extent I would think that this is an …
Twitpic, all your photos are ours
We’re in a brave new world when it comes to our conception of property. I’m on the skeptical side when it comes to the current aggregate long term utility of IP law (I think the value of property rights may be overwhelmed by the abuse which…
Let a thousand Thiel fellows bloom!
Now that the Thiel Fellows have been announced the media has been pouncing. If you don’t know, Peter Thiel is giving a bunch of bright-young-things some money to drop out of college (or not go to college). Here are the details:
As the first membe…
AIBioTech Sports X Factor is not worth the money
Last week I posted Don’t buy AIBioTech Sports X Factor kit! I laid out my rationale explicitly:
I’ve been pretty vocal about the impending specter of genetic paternalism in relation to personal genomics, which I believe to be futile in the long ter…
The rise of real meat factories
I’ve been taking about ‘meat things’ for nearly 10 years, so I was really excited by the new Michael Specter piece in The New Yorker about artificially grown meat, Test-tube Burgers. You can’t read most of it online, so I want t…
Biology to the masses
Josh Roseneau, when he’s taking time off from the evolution-creation wars, is poking around his own genome. Some sage advice:
On DNA Day, 23 and Me had a sale on their personal genomics service. They’d do their standard scan of your genome …
Against the “Thinking Machines”
Steve Hsu points me to this essay which discusses ‘high-frequency trading’, How to Make Money in Microseconds. This might elicit a takfir from my friends at the Singularity Institute, but that piece makes me less ill-disposed to a Butlerian…
Against the “Thinking Machines”
Steve Hsu points me to this essay which discusses ‘high-frequency trading’, How to Make Money in Microseconds. This might elicit a takfir from my friends at the Singularity Institute, but that piece makes me less ill-disposed to a Butlerian…
Is the University of California putting politics before science?
Kennewick Man produced a cottage industry of journalism ~10 years ago, thanks to the political controversy around the science. Today the stakes are different. Consider this from John Hawks, “Agriculture, population expansion and mtDNA variation&#…
Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey
Since most international migration is apparently between “developing nations”, I thought the Iran-Iraq-Turkey-Syria border would be interesting to look at in terms of differences in economic and social indices.
Giant enjoying eating humans
(the baby is laughing slow-mo)
Proper methods and false results
The Pith: Honorable intent and punctilious adherence to proper form and method does not guarantee a set of results which flesh out a genuine phenomenon. Much of science is tragic.
Most of the time I point to and review papers on this weblog which excit…
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created
For obvious reasons I don’t usually post about material I haven’t read, but Tyler Cowen points me to the fact that Charles C. Mann has a new book coming out this summer. If you haven’t, I would highly recommend his previous book, 1491…
Camping’s Wager
I’ve had to deal with vulgar* expositions of
Facebook finally plateaus in 2011!
I’ve been using Google Trends to track the rise of Facebook and the fall of MySpace for years. To my surprise Facebook has kept ascending up the Google search traffic for years past when I thought it would hit diminishing marginal returns of mind…
Kissing and cancer
I recently listened to Paul Ewald talk about how a lot of cancer is due to infection on the radio show To the Best of Our Knowledge. That wasn’t too surprising, Ewald has been making the case for a connection between infection and lots of disease…
Comments in the republic of Khan
So today I received an email from regular commenter German Dziebel:
Razib, what’s your relationship with the Discover Magazine? Up until now I thought of your blog as more or less a public forum, rather than a private franchise. Please clarify, s…
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