Low IQ correlated with cardiovascular disease?
Second Only to Cigarette Smoking in Large Population Study:While lower intelligence scores — as reflected by low results on written or oral tests of IQ — have been associated with a raised risk of cardiovascular disease, no study has so far compared …
Jersey Shore nickname
What’s your Jersey Shore nickname? I like “The Prediction” for myself.
Books & guidance
Read More Books!:If you really want to understand any issue more complex than Brad and Angelina’s marital status, there’s really no substitute for a book. Not instead of blogs and newspapers and Twitter, but in addition to them. So: read more books! Th…
Gene Expression Survey
That time of the year. Please take the Gene Expression Survey. I’ll put up the analysis and the csv file next week. I have the usual questions, but also added a few more that might seem a bit weird. There are 30 questions total, and you don’t need to a…
Delayed childbearing & autism
Independent and dependent contributions of advanced maternal and paternal ages to autism risk: Reports on autism and parental age have yielded conflicting results on whether mothers, fathers, or both, contribute to increased risk. We analyzed restricte…
Beautiful butterflies & localized adaptation
Two new papers are out in PLoS Genetics which make inferences about adaptation using butterfly species which exhibit Mullerian mimicry. I’ll give the author summaries instead of the abstracts.Genomic Hotspots for Adaptation: The Population Genetics of …
Hayek vs. Keynes
You’ve probably watched the Hayek vs. Keynes rap by now:Am the only one who was a little weirded out by the incongruity of John Maynard Keynes kickin’ it with the honeys in the back of the limo? It isn’t as if he was exactly on the down-low. He was a f…
Language goes extinct, human race to follow….
Last speaker of ancient language of Bo dies in India:Professor Anvita Abbi said that the death of Boa Sr was highly significant because one of the world’s oldest languages – Bo – had come to an end….”It is generally believed that all Andamanese langu…
Ibn Khaldun In Our Time
Ibn Khaldun on In Our Time. Excellent program. Khaldun’s assessment that the Mamluks of Egypt had developed a system of rule which was robust against the decay of asabiyyah was born out by 450 years of subsequent history (that is, until the liquidation…
Jersey Shore coming back
They’ve been signed for $10,000 per episode the next go around. Years ago Joel floated the idea of using Reality TV to test theories in social science. Paying the cast of Jersey Shore this much is going to mean that they’ll be under serious pressure to…
Proud to be red
A friend pointed me to this YouTube clip of a young red-haired man objecting to the term “ginger,” and the opprobrium he’s been subjected to since the South Park episode “Ginger Kids” popularized ideas such as the possibility that redheads have no soul…
Darwin wuz wrong, part n
A review of a new book, What Darwin Got Wrong. Co-authored by Jerry Fodor, who has been continuing his war against natural selection. I’ve already read Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity, and Other Fables of Evolution (at the sugge…
Peer groups & bourgeois virtues
Self-Control and Peer Groups:However, according to a new study by Michelle vanDellen, a psychologist at the University of Georgia, self-control contains a large social component; the ability to resist temptation is contagious. The paper consists of fiv…
Maps of white teen birthrate and abortion rates by state
A supplement to the previous two posts. Below are maps which are shaded proportionally. Note how New York seems to be the abortion capital of the USA. Total surprise to me. Remember that these data are for white females from the ages of 15-19.
Red State, Blue State, Teen Birthrate, Teen Abortion rate
A reader pointed to this post in Free Exchange:Here are the 15 states with the biggest percentage drop from 1988-2005 in the ratio of teen abortions—the percentage of teen pregnancies that ended in abortion, not counting miscarriages. Crudely put, th…
Teen birthrates and abortion rates
The New York Times has a new article, After Long Decline, Teenage Pregnancy Rate Rises. The graphic is OK, but it focuses on aggregate teen pregnancy rates (age group 15-19) instead of splitting it out so as to show births and abortions. The original r…
Confucius biopic
I noticed that a new biopic of Confucius just opened in China. It’s pretty obvious that they “sexed up” his life, as you can see in the trailer. In terms of a big-budget biopic it seems to me that the life of Confucius is a very thin source of blockbus…
How much is “The Situation” worth?
‘Jersey Shore’ — MTV Tries to Divide and Conquer:Sources tell TMZ the network has told the cast if they don’t accept MTV’s deal by the end of business Monday, they will be replaced. And, MTV has told them it does not have to be a package deal — the c…
Lactase persistance in India
Frequency of lactose malabsorption among healthy southern and northern Indian populations by genetic analysis and lactose hydrogen breath and tolerance tests:Volunteers from southern and northern India were comparable in age and sex. The LTT result was…