Category Archives: Blog

Elitism in the Senate. Harvard Law School:Tokyo University::Congress:Diet. Perusing The Almanac of American Politics makes it pretty clear that Harvard Law is way overrepresented.
Barbara Billingsley Dies. All icons shall pass.

Common variants at TRAF3IP2 are associated with susceptibility to psoriatic arthritis and psoriasis. Will this pan out in replication?
Am I partly Jewish? Testing ancestry hypotheses […]

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Yesterday regular contributor “miko” announced two things. First, he’s signed up as one of the 1,000 for the Personal Genome Project. And, he’s fired up a weblog to chronicle his journey. I know at least one other reader, my friend Paul, is also among the 1,000. Combined with the recent reveal of Genomes Unzipped, we’re […]

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1. First, a post from the past: 10 questions for Jim Crow

2. Weird search query of the week: “black mormons in utah”. They exist. One of my friends from college ended up marrying one and they live in Utah (he is Mormon as well, though not black).
3. Comment of the week, in response to Facebook […]

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As you can see, I got the DonorsChoose widget to work. Here’s the Discover Blogs leader board. Sean Carroll et al. are “beating” me by an order of magnitude right now. Not that that’s the point….
It’s a Jersey Thing. New South Park episode. I noticed a bunch of references to The Lord of The Rings […]

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Gay Sex vs. Straight Sex. Is gay male sexual promiscuity a myth? “…in fact we found that just 2% of gay people have had 23% of the total reported gay sex, which is pretty crazy.”
Bloggers that deserve a wider readership. I second Andrew Gelman.

Fiber Meets Flavor in New Whole-Grain Pastas. I like whole-grain pastas!
Parallel Adaptation: […]

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So to make a long story short last Saturday I was going to rev up this year’s DonorsChoose but there were some technical difficulties which discouraged me, so I decided to point to other challenges. But my fellow Discover blogger Dr. Sean Carroll has stepped up to the plate, so I decided to buck up […]

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Incumbents Polling Below 50 Percent Often Win Re-Election, Despite Conventional Wisdom. ‘By the way, the theory espoused by Mr. Kraushaar and others isn’t coming out of nowhere: there is solid evidence that it used to be true, 20 or 25 years ago. Back then, the undecideds in a race usually could be counted upon to […]

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Good morning WWW.
Richard Dawkins publicized the “We Are All Africans” t-shirt on Bill Maher’s show, which resulted in a major backlog of orders. The shirt is factually true. But the “Out of Africa” model is not as clean or simple as it would have been 10 years ago. Ironically Dawkins himself tipped his hand as […]

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Fall is upon us. I do not recommend The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism. Too thin. Finally getting to Paul Bloom’s How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like. But after hearing him in interviews and reading his articles on the topic over the past six months as he […]

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1. First, a post from the past: Through the rugged roads of gene land

2. Weird search query of the week: “do estonians like finns”. Answer: no one likes Finns! (especially Swedes)
3. Comment of the week, in response to Things are looking up for the world’s poor!:
These are all percentages, and the rates of increases are […]

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Scientists and Soldiers Solve a Bee Mystery. It looks to be a combination of a virus and fungus. The paper itself is open access at PLoS ONE.
The READ: Washed Up. A panning of the attempts of Jersey Shore “cast” members to cash in on their fame. I think the reason that JS was such an […]

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Epigenome effort makes its mark. “This week, the Roadmap Epigenomics Project, a US$170-million effort to identify and map those marks — known collectively as the human epigenome — begins its first comprehensive data release.”
At Flagging Tribune, Tales of a Bankrupt Culture. The story of executives taking home millions while the ship goes down is […]

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Urban and rural differences in mortality and causes of death in historical Poland. Unfortunately good demographic data on urban vs. rural death rates only date from the early modern era, but here in this Polish data set from the 19th and early 20th century you see the large urban > small urban > rural rank […]

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I don’t think I’ll post about Mormons this week. Alas, less traffic.
Y chromosomes of Vlax Roma. Is it a coincidence that all these Roma genetics papers are coming out at the same time that the Roma are at the center of E.U. politics? Probably.
Not So Hidden Influences. Christopher Hitchens asks “Is it so offensive to […]

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Won’t be too long until Halloween and a Republican Congress!
I thought that today I would outline some implicit rules-of-thumb for comments on this weblog. I don’t have an official comments policy, and won’t write one out explicitly, because I don’t want to give people a false sense of security.

– I’d appreciate it if you didn’t […]

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1. First, a post from the past: Levels of selection & the full Price Equation

2. Weird search query of the week: “politcal correct cultures in science-fiction.” I direct you to Ursula K. Le Guin.
3. Comment of the week, in response to

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Should you go to an Ivy League School? “Clearly, going to a top-ranked school seems to deliver far higher earnings at age 28 than poorer ranked schools. In fact, the relationship is highly non-linear. Contrary to what you may have heard (“All top-ranked schools are the same”); it in fact looks like the difference between […]

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A Widespread Chromosomal Inversion Polymorphism Contributes to a Major Life-History Transition, Local Adaptation, and Reproductive Isolation. Edmund Yong has already written this paper up. Sheril Kirshenbaum offers up her thoughts, stimulated by personal communication with the first author.
Inferring the Dynamics of Diversification: A Coalescent Approach. The title is more forbidding than the topic: “Applying […]

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Just a minor note: if you want an admin update on this weblog, go to my twitter account. You don’t need to subscribe, as you might not be interested in all my random interactions with other bloggers. But if I don’t post for a few days, please don’t email me or post a comment in […]

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Wow, it sure feels like summer!
No one cares about your blog (part 2). “The thing is – it’s just writing, isn’t it? Talking extensively about science blogging is like having intense discourses about what you can do with pen and paper. “Should we staple all our pieces of paper together, or only the ones on […]

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Razib Khan