On the cusp
Lots of talk about how the “underwear bomber” was from a wealthy and cosmopolitan background in the media. Like the poverty = crime meme, the poverty & backwardness = terrorism meme is still floating around, though the evidence of the past decade o…
The unpredictable darkness | Razib Khan
In complex and non-linear systems, the only thing we know is that our predictions are unreliable. I fear the reliably unpredictableI fear the predictable unpredictable. Over the past decade there have been many warnings about Global Warming; precise ex…
The unpredictable darkness | Razib Khan
In complex and non-linear systems, the only thing we know is that our predictions are unreliable. I fear the reliably unpredictable
I fear the predictable unpredictable. Over the past decade there have been many warnings about Global Warming; precise extrapolations of temperature increases and projections of sea level rise. Such prognostication is understandable, they make the threat concrete to a complacent public. But the reality is that these physical processes are non-linear systems subject to wild fluctuations, with “flips” between alternative equilibrium states. Try to turn that into punchy prose!
How Chinese relate to each other and the Japanese
Last month I pointed to a paper on Chinese population structure, Genomic Dissection of Population Substructure of Han Chinese and Its Implication in Association Studies. One to note was that the average FST differentiation Han populations was on the or…
On signals & design
Somehow SR’s email address was added to Newsmax’s mailing list for ad buys. The pitch is that one will reach affluent readers. But they undermine their message by formatting their HTML emails in a garish 1997 Frontpage-generated style. I thought they were being ironic, but I think they’re sincere.
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The Royal Society on In Our Time
In Our Time has several episodes up on The Royal Society. You can listen online at the link, but I’d recommend that you just subscribe on iTunes to IOT.
The geographical distribution of autism in California
Geographic distribution of autism in California: a retrospective birth cohort analysis:Prenatal environmental exposures are among the risk factors being explored for associations with autism. We applied a new procedure combining multiple scan cluster d…
Random acts of ill-health
Stochastic epigenetic variation as a driving force of development, evolutionary adaptation, and disease:Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory is based on exquisite selection of phenotypes caused by small genetic variations, which is the basis of quantitati…
We are a social animal
Occasionally we get emails like this:
Up until now I thought I was the rarest of all ducks. A conservative atheist. I read Heather MacDonald’s piece in the Wall Street Journal today and was pleased to find I am not alone. I would love to know more about the organization.
Yours truly,
[name omitted]
One of the […]
Singularity Institute Research Challenge
The Singularity Institute is having a fundraising drive right now. Here are the details:…the Singularity Institute has launched a new challenge campaign. The sponsors, Edwin Evans, Rolf Nelson, Henrik Jonsson, Jason Joachim, and Robert Lecnik, have …
The “Jews” of Afghanistan?
Hazaras Hustle to Head of the Class in Afghanistan: For much of this country’s history, the Hazara were typically servants, cleaners, porters and little else, a largely Shiite minority sidelined for generations, and in some instances massacred, by Pash…
PRDM9 and the evolution of recombination hotspots
This week in Science, three papers report that the product of the gene PRDM9 is an important determinant of where recombination occurs in the genome during meiosis. Though this may sound like something of an esoteric discovery, it’s actually pretty rem…
Nicholas Wade & Razib Khan on bloggingheads.tv
Here. Or embedded:We talk about The Faith Instinct.
Estimating black-white racial tension from 1850 to present
As a New Year’s gift, here is a free copy of an entry I put up on my data blog (details on that here). It’s a quantitative look at the history of race and culture in America, together with qualitative examples that illustrate the story that the numbers…
Happy New Year!
And let’s have a great teens.
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The engineer terrorist
Slate reviews the scholarly literature. Explaining the mechanics of the over-representation of engineers at the higher echelons of transnational terrorism is a guessing game, but the empirical reality seems relatively robust. Though I suspect that soci…
Why do we delay gratification even when there is no downside?
Earlier this year, John Tierney reviewed several studies on how delaying gratification makes us feel better in the short term by preventing guilt but makes us feel more miserable in the long term by causing regret over missed opportunities. I added my …
One year after the financial collapse, Gotham in a downward spiral
Actually, not really. New York on Track for Fewest Homicides on Record. I assume that those who project long term fiscal problems due to a contraction in the financial sector in New York City are probably correct (assuming that the financial sector act…
New comment format
A lot of people (including paying readers! kidding!) are complaining about the new commenting format. I’ll be euphemistic and observe that it’s suboptimal. But I don’t have time to work on tweaking and beautifying it now, so please be patient. Over tim…