Open Thread, 2/11/2018
I just found out that @insitome has a weekly podcast about human genetic history: https://t.co/yzNY3dyVmb. I just listened to the one with @razibkhan and @spwells, on what changed since the publication of Journey of Man and now I’m looking forward to listening to the others! — Philippe Lemoine (@phl43) February 11, 2018 The podcast that […]
Unlurking thread
Basically, a thread to unlurk if you want.
Open Thread, 2/4/2018
One of the things that reading Land of Liberty has prompted in me is the need to read Matt Stoller’s book, when it comes out. Land of Liberty in many ways was a historical foil of Stoller’s article, How Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul. And yet both exhibit an intellectual honesty which I generally find […]
Open Thread, 01/28/2108
For various reasons we focus Classical Greece and Rome, but neglect the Hellenistic period, with the exception of the biography of Alexander. If you want to read something besides Alexander to Actium, check Dividing the Spoils. A heads up, this week on The Insight we’ll be talking to Joe Pickrell of Gencove. The main topic […]
Open Thread, 01/21/2018
Don’t know when I’ll get to Kyle Harper’s book, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, but it looks very interesting (Patrick Wyman interviewed him for his podcast). One thing though: climate always changes. It’s how organisms react to that change and why that is perhaps more informative. The way […]
Open Thread, 1/14/2018
Steven Pinker is one of my favorite public intellectuals. The Language Instinct is probably my favorite book from Pinker. Last week I started seeing scientists who I respect(ed) starting to tweet that Steven Pinker, a moderately liberal academic of Jewish background, is a fan of Neo-Nazis. This stuff started to litter my timeline since I […]
Predictions for 2018
I don’t normally do year-end stuff. But I figured, why not? After all, I put up a post at my work blog about the major things that happened in historical human pop gen this year. Indian population genomics will move forward notably. The ancient DNA work really feels like vaporware sometimes. Some of the researchers […]
Open Thread, 12/24/2017
Well, Merry Christmas Eve! I’ve been rereading Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. Recommended. A little different now that I’ve been involved in start-ups. I would say that a lot of it is a pretty straightforward application of stuff you’ll encounter in economics and economic history to Silicon Valley […]
Open Thread, 12/11/2017
Thinking back to The Turks in World History the author points out that even the most explicit Islamic of the late Turkic empires, that of the Ottomans, persisted with a customary law similar and cognate to the Mongol yasa. Perhaps then the folkway of the nomadic Turk was sublimated and integrated into the Islamic superstructure […]
Open Thread, 12/11/2017
Thinking back to The Turks in World History the author points out that even the most explicit Islamic of the late Turkic empires, that of the Ottomans, persisted with a customary law similar and cognate to the Mongol yasa. Perhaps then the folkway of the nomadic Turk was sublimated and integrated into the Islamic superstructure […]
Open Thread, 11/4/2017
A disproportionate number of submissions to the South Asian Genotype Project have been Bangladeshi. That surprised me. Though I’ve gotten a few obscure submissions, so all for the good. I’ll update submitters by email in the next day or two and probably note something on next week’s open thread. If my original post wasn’t clear: […]
Open Thread, 11/4/2017
A disproportionate number of submissions to the South Asian Genotype Project have been Bangladeshi. That surprised me. Though I’ve gotten a few obscure submissions, so all for the good. I’ll update submitters by email in the next day or two and probably note something on next week’s open thread. If my original post wasn’t clear: […]
Open Thread, 11/26/2017
A few days ago there was a Twitter thing about top five books that have influenced you. It’s hard for me to name five, but I put three books down for three different reasons: Principles of Population Genetics, because it gives you a model for how to analyze and understand evolutionary processes. There are other […]
Open Thread, 11/19/2017
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 […]
Open Thread, 11/12/2017
One of the major insights of contemporary cognitive psychology is that a lot of human mental processes emerge from the intersection of lower level intuitions/models/instincts. The key is to remember that a lot of mental operations occur implicitly and rapidly, and we often construct ad hoc rationalizations after the fact (see The Enigma of Reason). […]
Open Thread, 09/05/2017
Over the weekend DNAGeeks put up some Gene Expression t-shirts. Check it out!
Saudi Crown Prince’s Mass Purge Upends a Longstanding System. This is a big deal with major ramifications.
Genomic Signatures of Sexual Conflict.
Finished Red Flag: A Histor…
Open Thread, 10/29/2017
Read some of The Red Flag: A History of Communism. In the interests of being candid, I do have to say that many intellectuals today who are skeptical of Communism might be much more open to the ideology in the early 20th century. Marxism literaly hadn’t been tried. The key issue is that it has […]
Open Thread, 10/22/2017
Reading The Turks in World History and confused how any state whose elite were non-nomads held out before the gunpowder revolution. Also, the persistent defection of Chinese generals and soldiers to the side of the barbarians is interesting light of other conversations we’ve had. Are there any (post-)Roman examples of this? I know that an […]
Open Thread, 10/15/2017
E. O. Wilson has a new book out, The Origins of Creativity. Did you know about it? Honestly totally surprised. Wilson’s been retired for a while now, so his profile isn’t as high as it was. He’s 88, so you got to give it to him that he can keep cranking this stuff out. The […]
Open Thread, 10/08/2017
What’s going on?