So we put up a 3rd reviewer mug. Kind of an “inside joke”, but we liked it. One thing we have noticed: people really like the DNA helix logo. They click it. They buy it. More visual, less wordy.
One thing that’s funny, when it paternal haplogroups I1 clicks a lot, but they never buy (in contrast to R1b).
Thousands of horsemen may have swept into Bronze Age Europe, transforming the local population. The piece is pretty expansive, though something of a mess. But it’s a mess because there are still unresolved issues.
There’s a Digital Media Crash. But No One Will Say It. Privately my friends in the media tell me exactly this. It’s going to get worse before it gets better. There are many reasons, but it’s happening.
The Evolutionary Genomic Dynamics of Peruvians Before, During, and After the Inca Empire. Similar thing in Mexico: old population structure is still there!
Singleton Variants Dominate the Genetic Architecture of Human Gene Expression. Genomics is a little overhyped, at least in evolution, but it can really do incredible things nailing down the specific details of what’s going on.
The nature of nurture: effects of parental genotypes and Estimating heritability without environmental bias.
I’ve spent a little time reading Oathbringer this week, mostly before I go to sleep. It’s a little hard to keep track of everything because it’s been seven years since the first book and over three since the last one. Since Brandon Sanderson projects ten books in the series I doubt I will finish this out. At the current rate of production I will be thinking about retirement when the Stormlight Archive is near completion!
But reading Oathbringer it did come to my mind that Sanderson has done a really good job in building a world which is fundamentally not just a European Middle Ages retread, as is the norm in much of fantasy. There are so many new words and characters to keep track of I think I didn’t internalize this in the earlier books. So I did a little Googling and found that Sanderson was trying to do the same thing that Frank Herbert did in Dune, by creating a whole new and novel ecology.
Secondly, he has mentioned that most of his characters are not white and that he has struggled to make sure that they are not depicted in stereotypical European fashion in cover art. The primary protagonists are in fact a people who he imagines to be a hybrid between East Asians and Middle Easterners (his time in Korea as a Mormon missionary inflected his world-building), though that is simply the closest analog. He specifically states that the one human race without epicanthic folds, and look the most European in feature and complexion, are often assumed to be East Asian in by readers because of their exoticism and name (Shin).
Charles Manson has died. I haven’t read it, but have heard good things about Jeff Guin’s Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson (it seems like it’s a cultural history).
Precise dating of the Middle-to-Upper Paleolithic transition in Murcia (Spain) supports late Neandertal persistence in Iberia. What we’re learning is that our patchy understanding of the human past also understates how patchy and uneven many dynamics were.
The day the Pintupi Nine entered the modern world. The story of nine people who were totally isolated from the modern world until 1984. They were scared when they met relatives who had lived in a town. To convince them to stay the relatives had them taste sugar.