Friday Fluff, 01/27/2012
They’re bbbaaaccckkkk!
Survey on genetics knowledge
A regular issue that comes up on this weblog is that many of my posts are difficult to understand. I am aware of this. Unfortunately a problem is that there is a wide variation in fluency in genetics knowledge among the readership. To get a better sense I have created a survey with 60+ questions. […]
Who you are thread….
I haven’t posted one of these in a long time. My own assumption is that I know the core readership of this weblog through various means relating to comments (many of you connect your email addresses to Facebook, and usually I can do an IP trace if that’s not feasible). But I know many people […]
The arcologies arise
How U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work: Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, […]
Moving Secularism Forward, March 2012
Because of scheduling conflicts* I can’t make ScienceOnline2012 (I had planned to make it). But I thought I would put in an announcement here that in a month and a half I’ll be at the Moving Secularism Forward conference put on by the Center for Inquiry. I’m going to be on a political panel on […]
Population around the Mediterranean
With the collapse various North African regimes there has been a great concern about the migration of people from the southern shore of the Mediterranean to the northern. The of the reasons for this concern is that there is an imbalance in population growth. So I thought I’d review some of the data on Mediterranean […]
Razib Khan’s predictions for 2012
People often make “year end predictions.” I haven’t done that because I just haven’t bothered. But, it’s probably a nice way to see how full of crap you are. You can look back at how many mistakes you made, suggesting to you that you’re really a lot more ignorant of the shape of reality than […]
Are genes the key to the Yankee Empire?
That’s the question a commenter poses, albeit with skepticism. First, the background here. New England was a peculiar society for various demographic reasons. In the early 17th century there was a mass migration of Puritan Protestants from England to the colonies which later became New England because of their religious dissent from the manner in […]
Top 25 referral keywords in 2011 to GNXP
About ~25 percent of the traffic to this website search engines. Mostly Google. Below are two sets of top 25 search results. The first is pretty straightforward. But the second has all the key words which are probably by and large people just looking for weblogs removed. The links are to search results are on […]
Top 25 referral sites in 2011 to GNXP
A few qualifications. First, I removed all Google referral sites except for G+. Second, I removed Discover Magazine urls. Some of these sites should perhaps have been omitted from the list as well because of my past or current association with them (gnxp.com, Secular Right, Sepia Mutiny and Brown Pundits). ScienceBlogs is mostly, though not exclusively, from my old website there. […]
Top 20 posts in 2011 by traffic for GNXP
Below are the top 20 accessed posts on this website over the year 2011. Note that some of them predate 2011, but due to search engines or other forms of referral they remain highly accessed. Your genes, your rights – FDA’s Jeffrey Shuren misleading testimony under oath Which undersampled groups would you like to see? […]
Charitable donations for the long term
My friend Holden Karnofsky always pings me at this time of the year. Holden is co-founder of GiveWell. If you’re curious, you can look up more on the outfit yourself, I’ve talked about it enough over the years for you to get why I’m interested and a supporter. Holden is a numbers and data driven […]
Have a merry Christmas!
And, if applicable, Hanukkah, and/or Kawanzaa, Yule!
The “best of” posts….
Sam Snyder has gone through my archives back to 2006, and complied a “best of” list. Snyder admits that his interest is in “primarily centered on human behavior and health, which is the subject of most of these links.” Also, I want to caution you that 5 years is a long time, so please don’t […]
An illiberal people
Over the past few days the American media has reacted with some consternation at the fact that it seems likely that Islamist political forces will probably control around two-thirds of the Egyptian legislature. This bloc is divided between a broad moderate element which emerges out of the Muslim Brotherhood, at around ~40 percent, and a […]
Tolerable jackfruit
When perusing Asian groceries I occasionally run into cans of jackfruit. Or should I say “jackfruit,” because often what’s inside of the cans resembles jackfruit flavored wax. Real fresh jackfruit is soft and mushy. Unfortunately the preservation process turns canned jackfruit into a turgid and far less flavorful product. That being said, I recently purchased […]
Around the web – 11/26/2011
I’ve gotten way behind on my RSS…though I caught up a bit over Thanksgiving. West Hunter. Greg Cochran and Henry Harpending’s blog. Eurasian Sensation. Liberal Eurasian Australian blogger. Matt Yglesias moved to Slate. This means that his salary is coming in large part from a firm which he has excoriated in the past. (Slate is […]
WALL•E + Idiocracy
Some ethologists should try and get some research funded to model the “scramble” for “patchy resources” that occurs at Walmart on Black Friday.
(NSFW)
Top 20 posts in 2011 by comments for GNXP
In this list I’ve limited it to posts which were published in 2011. For much of the blog’s history I didn’t autoclose comments after 2 weeks, so the comparisons aren’t appropriate. And comments tend to be less timeless in any case. Comments are a double-edged sword on a weblog, because they often invite the stupid […]
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