Why Brown Pundits?
This post is in response to Zach and Zimriel. Why Brown Pundits? Why this blog? And why do I post here, as opposed to Gene Expression or Secular Right, or various other venues which I have access to? To a great extent the origins of this blog for me go back to the early 2000s, … Continue reading “Why Brown Pundits?”
Blogging on an island as opposed to an archipelago
On a Twitter conversation it came up yesterday that a lot of people know each other from blogging in the 2000s. It was a different world back then, and the pond was much smaller. To my knowledge Derek Lowe is the only continuously active science blogger who has been at this longer than me (there […]
Open Thread, 06/05/2017
Just a plug for Elements of Evolutionary Genetics by Charlesworth & Charlesworth. These are two great evolutionary geneticists, and we’re lucky to have a “core dump” from them on hand. The curious thing is that there is so much science that is tacit and implicit, that the passing of each generation of scholars means that […]
Open Thread, 05/14/2017
I’ve been working on some issues related to the website. Of most relevance for readers, https:// formatting should now no longer be broken. Also, please mention it if you get a 503 in the comments. Some people probably still get them, but they should be rare (I can track hourly hits, and there hasn’t been […]
Open Thread, May 7th 2017
I read some of Wendy Doniger’s translation of the The Rig Veda. It’s about ~10% of the hymns in the whole work, but the author claims they’re the more important and evocative ones. There is a reasonable amount of commentary as well. Two things so far. First, little similarities between Indo-European mythologies I was not […]
Open Thread, 05/01/2017
The survey suggests that 14% of my readers (or at least 14% of the 425 people who responded to the survey) consider themselves geneticists in some fashion. Above you see all the types of geneticists read this weblog. Remember that people can, and did, check more than one box. Not surprisingly, 75% of people who […]
Why do you read me and who are you
The first time I tried to get through Scott Atran’s In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion, I gave up because it seemed so pretentious and impenetrable. My curiosity was piqued by the fact that the subtitle alluded to evolution, and I was interested in evolutionary psychology. But though In Gods We Trust does […]
LaTeX notes
I recently installed a plugin that will allow me to render LaTeX. Mostly this is because I’ve long avoided writing out equations because it’s awkward in HTML, and it gets unintelligible quickly. This will allow me to explore population genetics in its “natural language” a little easier. But I just noticed on my RSS feed […]
Open Thread, 3/23/2017
The reader survey now N > 300. I assume it will stabilize in the next few weeks in the 400s. So far the biggest surprise that I’ve noticed is the ratio of married to divorced; 14o to 9. But, this aligns with research that college educated people do not get divorced at a high rate, and […]
2017 Gene Expression reader survey
Since I’m finally getting settled in here, I thought it was a good time to do a reader survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/MW3YFZH. So it’s open. You can only take it once, but it shouldn’t take more than a few minutes. There are 30 questions but the first 20 are mostly demographic and should go very quickly (e.g., […]
Only half of the traffic on this website is a personal ‘computer’
I spend way too much time semi-competently managing the VPS this site is hosted on. But at least now I can look at Google Analytics. I’ve found some interesting things. For example, 35% of the traffic on this site comes from phones, and 10% from tablets. That means that conventional computers are only somewhat more […]
Open Thread, 4/16/2017
Happy Easter. Spend most of the day figuring out how to restart Varnish. I don’t really know why there are so many database connection problems and caching…but I inherited the VPS. Might have to bone up on being a sysadmin more. Do any readers know if Varnish is really worth a modest site like mine? […]
This website is wicked popular in Boston
Traffic Feb 1 2017 to Apr 1 2017, top 10 cities GNXP.COM GNXP.NOFE.ME New York Boston London New York Sydney London Los Angeles Los Angeles Melbourne Chicago Madrid Washington Toronto San Francisco Chicago Seattle Washington Toronto Brisbane Dallas Weird pattern in terms of top cities that read this new version of GNXP. I’m comparing to […]
Open Thread, 4/9/2017
Roger Lowenstein’s When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management was influential in turning me against naive market libertarianism. Market can correct for errors, but when that takes the whole global economy down…. (also, hedge fund guys are genuine assholes who don’t give a shit in many cases) Why ISIS Declared War […]
On monetizing this website
For ten years I have not given much thought to monetization of this weblog. Other people took care of that for me. The upside of running my own ship is obvious in terms of control. The downside is I’m now my own sysadmin, and I’m not getting paid to do that (not to mention hosting, […]
What should I blog about in the next two weeks?
Any thoughts/suggestions? Only thing off limits would be anything too personal. I already asked on Twitter and got some responses so no need to be redundant unless you want to add to the weight of a preference. Also, now that I finished Reformations* I’m finally reading Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence front to back. But I have […]
Open Thread, 11/24/13
One of the stranger call-ins on my interview with Kathleen Dunn last month was when a woman who proudly declared that she was a math major in college asserted that 23andMe had told her she wasn’t at risk for many diseases which now in her 60s she had developed. I didn’t want to be too pointed […]
The post Open Thread, 11/24/13 appeared first on Gene Expression.
Open Thread, 11/24/13
One of the stranger call-ins on my interview with Kathleen Dunn last month was when a woman who proudly declared that she was a math major in college asserted that 23andMe had told her she wasn’t at risk for many diseases which now in her 60s she had developed. I didn’t want to be too pointed […]
The post Open Thread, 11/24/13 appeared first on Gene Expression.
The end of the blogroll
One of the major annoyances with the redesign of this weblog was that its precipitous nature was such that many of the sidebar links, etc., were removed. But, it did make me admit a major point: blogrolls are pretty much dead. In the early years of the blogsophere they served as a way to share […]