Thinking back to The Turks in World History the author points out that even the most explicit Islamic of the late Turkic empires, that of the Ottomans, persisted with a customary law similar and cognate to the Mongol yasa. Perhaps then the folkway of the nomadic Turk was sublimated and integrated into the Islamic superstructure of the Ottoman ruling ideology?
I went to a work-related Christmas party thrown by my company’s law firm. There were a lot of VC guys there. Two of them confused me for a blockchain entrepreneur (one of them was asking about a conflict with the CFO). I think I better get into blockchain….
So the website Everyday Feminism has an article, 10 Things Every Intersectional Feminist Should Ask On a First Date. I only know about this website because of conservative Twitter. It could be that 90% or more of the hits on this website are through viral “hate-clicks”.
Second, I feel the image that goes along with the article is problematic as fuck. The woman pictured seems to be geared toward appealing to cishet male norms of “attractiveness.” On the other hand, if intersectional feminists typically look something like Josie Maran…well, I won’t go there.
I will observe also that I find out about a lot of far-right movements and individuals through Left and Centrist Twitter (the two groups are interested for different reasons).
As noted in the comments, The Irish DNA Atlas: Revealing Fine-Scale Population Structure and History within Ireland. At this point, I think I can say this: unless it’s ancient DNA I’m done with the historical genetics of the British Isles. We know enough. Period.
Why the #MeToo Movement Should Be Ready for a Backlash. I don’t care too much about Al Franken, but digging a little deeper I think there might be some dirty tricks going on there…. I was rather dim on the prospects for Republicans in 2018, but at this rate, the Dems might “struggle-session” their way into defeat.
India Warily Eyes AI: Technology outsourcing has been India’s only reliable job creator in the past 30 years. Now artificial intelligence threatens to wipe out those gains. When I believed in the End of History and the Last Man this would matter to me. Now it’s all a big shrug.
The ancestral animal genetic toolkit revealed by diverse choanoflagellate transcriptomes.
Another reason that helper-AIs can’t come to medicine soon enough:
A striking example of doctor’s cognitive bias https://t.co/OK68MORKSP
via @BacaMotes (mis)diagnosis of heart attack in the ER d/t age partitioning pic.twitter.com/KCtxOTVmWR— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) December 10, 2017
Chronicler of Islamic State ‘killing machine’ goes public.
As home DNA tests become more common, people must grapple with surprises about their parents:
Until recently, Andrea Ramirez, 43, thought she was part Mexican.
But the results from an at-home genetic test from 23andMe revealed that she is a mix of Northern European, North African and a little Native American.
And not at all hispanic.
There can be no genetic test for being Hispanic because that is a socio-cultural identity. There are Korean, Arab, and Nordic Hispanics. Even the most common genetic profile varies, from mostly European Argentines to mostly indigenous Bolivians to Afro-Cubans and Afro-Colombians.
When I read stuff like this I really wonder what they teach journalists (the Census explicitly declaims the the idea that Hispanic is a racial category).
I spent a fair amount of time this weekend cleaning up scripts that can batch process 23andMe, Ancestry and FamilyTree DNA input files and push them down the pipeline toward generating admixture percentages. I have posted the most current results from the South Asian Genotype Project have been posted.
Two things
1) I’m not happy with the clusters that I used. I may change them (in which case I’ll rerun everything).
2) Once I’ve done that I’ll probably send some of my scripts to Zack Ajmal and he can run all the Harappa individuals with this new cluster.
Finally, people from the “Cow Belt” don’t get genotyped. No submissions from UP or Bihar so far. Very frustrating.
The word problematic is problematic in my opinion. I really want to punch people when they use that word. But I’ve lost that battle.
My friend Chad Niederhuth is starting his plant genomics lab at Michigan State. He’s looking for graduate students and postdocs.
My friend Nathan Pearson’s HLA genomics start-up, Root is out of stealth mode.
Looking at my Kindle stack wondering about which of these five books to tackle next:
- Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. I admire Peter Thiel much more than I did a few years ago.
- To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science. I enjoyed reading The First Three Minutes, but generally am out of sync with Weinberg’s full-throated scientism when I hear his public pronouncements. But that’s OK, I read people I disagree with.
- Venomous: How Earth’s Deadliest Creatures Mastered Biochemistry. Real biology and chemistry. Sometimes I miss them.
- The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century. This has been in my stack for a long time (3.5 years).
- The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War.