I’m finally getting settled in to this website. Basically I’m my own sysadmin at this point, so I’ll be making changes and tweeks…but if you want to bookmark this URL, it is probably fine now. As always, my permanent RSS, feeds.feedburner.com/RazibKhansTotalFeed, is always a good bet too. Right now https seems to be breaking formatting. I will fix that. Also, the database crashes too often. I have a 1 minute cron running but that’s not sufficient.
For a few days it looks like comments did not work because of a plugin I activated. If you have a problem like this you can contact me on Twitter or email me at contactgnxp -at- gmail -dot- com (you can find this on my own website too).
A long-time reader (as in, back to 2002) messaged me on Facebook a few days ago and asked if I’d stopped blogging, as they’d heard a rumor from another long-time reader. Instead of asking me, 15 seconds of checking on the interwebs, or razib.com, would have clarified things. Some day I may stop blogging. But I have been saying that since 2002.
Almost finished Reformations. Seems to be losing steam toward the end. This is reasonable, as no one would want to start getting into the Thirty Years War in any detail.
The New York Times has a piece up, ‘Age of Empires’: How 2 Dynasties of Art Forged China’s Identity. Reminds me of a book that is on my “essential reading” about China list, The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han. To me what is curious and notable about China is that Han dynasty mores and views are much more reflected in modern China than that of Augustan Era Rome is in modern Italy.
U.S. increasingly sees Iran’s hand in the arming of Bahraini militants. By the lights of our own values we are not the “good guys” here. Bahrain is ruled by a Sunni elite, around a Sunni royal family, which has placed the Shia majority in a position of subjugation. A relatively peaceful Shia protest movement was violently suppressed by an alliance of Gulf states during the Arab Spring, with the help of Pakistani mercenaries. The United States averted its eyes.
There are legitimate reasons to engage in realpolitik. But the press does not do us any favors when it implicitly misleads the American public on the broader context, as people abroad are quite often much more well versed in our duplicity and hypocrisy.
This is not to say that I don’t think the United States is on a balance a force for good, but over the last generation our portfolio has been decidedly mixed, but our political and journalistic elite has masked this from the public by and large unless there is a partisan angle to it. But really this is a problem of elite hubris, on both the Right and Left.
Human demographic history impacts genetic risk prediction across diverse populations is now out in AJHG. I might blog it again. It’s an important paper.
This week Alexander Kim tweeted from a conference with a lot of ancient DNA results. One datum is that pre-classical Egyptians did not have any Sub-Saharan African ancestry…at least based on the samples they had. I’m mildly skeptical of this finding. First, we know of the old presence of Nubian soldiers and slaves in Egypt. And second, it seems likely that there was some early mixing which was equally distributed throughout the population and recombined in the genetic background. We’ll see.
I assume that a bunch of ancient DNA papers will break before SMBE 2017. Speaking of which, I will be around then. Planning on meeting some friends and checking out the scene.
Finally, I have some free time in the next two weeks to read books. So I’d appreciate recommendations, though my reading stack is currently pretty high….