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…
Where the fat folks live
Since it’s after Thanksgiving and I’m feeling bloated, I figure a follow up to the post on obesity and diabetes might be apropos. I want to focus on obesity. I have the raw county-by-county data, but obviously it isn’t broken down by race. But, I do ha…
Liberty or Libel?
There has been much discussion in the blogosphere (for example by Olivia Judson here) of the current libel case between the science writer Simon Singh and the British Chiropractic Association. Most of the comments have supported Singh and criticised b…
The malleability of political religion
The Big Money has an entry up, Karl Who? China is a Communist country, but I have yet to meet an actual Communist. After reading the first paragraph I began to think of the clear analogies between conventional supernatural organized religion and Marxist-Leninism, in particular, in its ideological flexibility (e.g., the transformation of the cult […]
No support for birth order effects on personality from the GSS
In researching for a review of The Nurture Assumption, I read over the debate between Harris and Sulloway over birth order effects on personality. Sulloway’s thesis, explained in Born to Rebel, is that last-born children have more rebellious, agreeabl…
GWAS, population structure and the Han Chinese
Two new articles in AJHG, Genomic Dissection of Population Substructure of Han Chinese and Its Implication in Association Studies:To date, most genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and studies of fine-scale population structure have been conducted pr…
Maps of diabetes & obesity
Hope readers have a happy Thanksgiving. I assume this is also a day when you’re not going to think too much about your diet and eat what you want to eat. But I thought this map on diabetes and obesity for those age 20 and up was interesting. These are …