Technical difficulties
There were some difficulties with the site overnight. Probably best place to check for updates is my twitter feed, http://twitter.com/razibkhan. 99% of the stuff there are just re-posts of my blog content. If you don’t have my email address, you can al…
Finding the missing heritability
In a recent special issue of The Economist magazine, evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller of the University of New Mexico writes that there is a “looming crisis in human genetics”. Setting aside a number of mistakes Miller makes, a core truth he r…
Religious identity vs. religious activity (and God is not back!)
One of the more irritating things which seems to crop up in popularizations of international trends is the idea that religion is reviving all over the world. It is probably not as plainly false as the idea in common currency from the Enlightenment down…
The Ottoman years
Frustrated With West, Turks Revel in Empire Lost:
Mr. Osman’s send-off was just the latest manifestation of what sociologists call “Ottomania,” a harking back to an era marked by conquest and cultural splendor during which sultans ruled an empire stretching from the Balkans to the Indian Ocean and claimed the spiritual leadership of the Muslim world.
Ataturk’s […]
David Sloan Wilson & Razib Khan (me) on BHTV
Here. All I have to say is that 60 minutes really isn’t that much time.
On insults and religion
When I was a younger man I recall watching a documentary on missionaries in Mississippi. They were Southern Baptists who were on a mission to “save” everyone (this included Roman Catholics and Protestants who had not had a “Born Again” experience). At …
A shifting mode
Here’s the source. The fact that there’s been so much change since 1990 is what is striking to me.
The Deadweight Loss of Gift Giving
Q&A: Scroogenomics Author on the Holidays’ ‘Orgy of Wealth Destruction’.
Being a Popperian about charities
Reading The GiveWell Blog is interesting, as it allows one to exclude charities because they do all the leg-work. For example, a few days ago they put up a analysis of Smile Train’s usage of funds (or lack of transparency). Prompting an evasive respons…
Implicit Eurocentrism & the eternal infidel
A friend pointed me to this article, Outrage on Swiss minaret vote, but how do Muslim states handle churches?. You don’t need to click, you know the score. To be a kuffar in a non-Muslim land isn’t always the most pleasant experience. Instead of imagining, you could probably just ask a black person who lived […]
There is no society, just homicidal individuals
There’s a new book out, American Homicide, which has some interesting arguments:He concluded that people’s views about the legitimacy of government and how much they identify with their fellow citizens play a major role in how often they kill each othe…
“Old Europe”
A Lost European Culture, Pulled From Obscurity:The little-known culture is being rescued from obscurity in an exhibition, “The Lost World of Old Europe: the Danube Valley, 5000-3500 B.C.,” which opened last month at the Institute for the Study of the A…
Are over-leveraged counties seeing an increase in food stamp usage?
Since The New York Times put up the csv file which they used to generate their maps of food stamp usage, I thought I’d look at the data a little closer. In particular, look at this graphic of change in food stamp usage by county (dark equals more usage…
The grain dole of America
Ben points to the a new article in The New York Times, Across U.S., Food Stamp Use Soars and Stigma Fades. The county-by-county data are of interest. I’ve just snatched the csv file, which they made available. Andrew Gelman has a modest critique of the…
The white vote for Obama, by county & correlates
A friend of mine who was looking at the distributions on obesity and diabetes wondered about their political correlations. To do that and add anything new it seems that it would be best to estimate the white vote for Barack Obama in 2008 by county. Thi…
A nation without divine favor
Reading Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism I am struck again by the peculiarity of the American nation, and its fundamental radicalism. I have already stated that this is implicitly an Anglo-Protestant nation. As a point of fact Protestant churches were established and supported in most American states at the Founding, with Massachusetts not […]
The limits of pluralism, and the necessity of an identity
I just finished Vali Nasr’s Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World. Very much in the mold of Fareed Zakaria’s The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad. Nasr is the author of The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will […]
Reality check on American “hunger”
Hunger here vs. hunger there:There has been a fair amount of buzz lately (examples here, here, here, here) about “food insecurity” in the U.S. According to the Reuters headline, one in seven Americans is short of food. In looking into the data, what ha…
Diabetes and obesity
Update: I made a major error in the algebra of estimating “white diabetes rates” per county. So the last set of correlations was junk. I think fixed the issue. Thanks to “bayesian” who noted that something was off with them.The CDC provides data on dia…