razib
Posts by this author
March 11, 2010
The New York Times has a scary but numerically rich piece on the impending pension crisis in Europe. As in the days of yore Greece looks to be a pioneer. Here's an interesting pair of numbers:
According to research by Jagadeesh Gokhale, an economist at the Cato Institute in Washington, bringing…
March 11, 2010
I remember Craig Venter talking about synthetic life in the fall of 2007 with Carl Zimmer. Last summer he said that we'd have the first "synthetic species" by the end of the year. I haven't heard about it in 2010, have you? Anyone have info on what's going on here? No surprise that project…
March 10, 2010
Reviewed by other ScienceBloggers:
Prehistoric DNA reveals the story of a Pleistocene survivor, the muskox
Ancient DNA Isolated from Fossil Eggshells May Provide Clues to Eggstinction of Giant Birds
March 9, 2010
Two quantitative facts of note from When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order:
From page 33:
Although the passage to modernity universally involves the transition from an agrarian to service-based society via an industrial one, here we find another…
March 8, 2010
I'm starting to see Disqus and Echo all over the web. Anyone else notice this? I wasn't happy when I had to move Gene Expression Classic off Haloscan, so the whole "death of comments" fad isn't something I'm a fan of. But it seems like Facebook's creation of a successful private web is now driving…
March 7, 2010
I have mentioned before the current fad in vitamin D related papers in the medical literature. It's also broken into the pop culture Zeitgeist as well, I regularly get forwards on the topic. Here is a Google Trends chart for the United States:
The history of medicine is, unfortunately, rather…
March 7, 2010
Felix Salmon, Link-phobic bloggers at the NYT and WSJ:
The problem, here, is that the bloggers at places like the NYT and the WSJ are print reporters, and aren't really bloggers at heart. I discovered this a couple of weeks ago, after I posted a long and detailed blog entry on the court case…
March 7, 2010
The odds of knowing your cousins: 23andme Part 1:
Bizarrely, Jonathan Zittrain turns out to be my cousin -- which is odd because I have known him for some time and he is also very active in the online civil rights world. How we came to learn this will be the first of my postings on the future of…
March 6, 2010
Icelanders reject deal to repay British and Dutch:
The outcome of the referendum had not been in doubt since Iceland had recently been offered better repayment terms than those contained in the deal on which residents were voting.
Partial referendum results from around a third of the cast votes…
March 6, 2010
This is funny:
Raised as Scientologists, Christie King Collbran and her husband, Chris, were recruited as teenagers to work for the elite corps of staff members who keep the Church of Scientology running, known as the Sea Organization, or Sea Org.
They signed a contract for a billion years -- in…
March 6, 2010
Iceland Voters Set to Reject Debt Deal:
After the dust began to settle last year -- after the banks failed, the currency collapsed, the stock market crashed and the government fell -- the dazed inhabitants of Iceland woke up to another unpleasant problem: They owed, it seemed, some $5.3 billion to…
March 5, 2010
It has been known for years that interracial marriages have higher than expected divorce rates. But I did not know that the rates varied quite a bit contingent on the combination of race & sex. Gori Girl* has a post up, Interracial Divorce in the U.S. - Statistics and How Much They Matter:
-…
March 4, 2010
Over the history of this weblog I have blogged about pigmentation a fair amount. The major reason is that that's where the money is; unlike height, let alone intelligence, the genetic architecture and evolutionary history of pigmentation has been elucidated with relative clarity. That is, we know…
March 4, 2010
A new paper in PLoS, Rapid Assessment of Genetic Ancestry in Populations of Unknown Origin by Genome-Wide Genotyping of Pooled Samples:
Many association studies have been published looking for genetic variants contributing to a variety of human traits such as obesity, diabetes, and height. Because…
March 4, 2010
Fantasy-nerd in-chief at The New York Times, Ross Douthat points me to an essay, Why is there no Jewish Narnia? As others have pointed out there are plenty of Jewish fantasy writers, including perhaps the most prominent mainstream fantasist today, Neil Gaiman. But this part caught my attention:
...…
March 4, 2010
National Geographic has a coverage of the Kanzawa paper. The title: Liberals, Atheists Are More Highly Evolved? I get what's going on with terms like "highly evolved," but I think it's really problematic when media which serves as an interface with the public in regards to evolutionary ideas uses…
March 4, 2010
My posts below on IQ, politics & religion resulted in a fair amount of blogospheric response, and weird comments. A few quick points
1) I think results on standardized tests are informative and correlate reasonably with a host of life outcomes. If you don't think they do, that's fine, I don't…
March 3, 2010
I'm hearing about rumblings at 23andMe, and not in a good way. The company made a big splash a few years ago, and came highly recommended by friends (e.g., "They know their science, and have a bottomless pool of money"). This story at BNET got my attention though, and confirmed what many have been…
March 3, 2010
Since Canadians seem to have an obsession with American health care policy (a nation of Ezra Kleins?), I thought I would pass along this weird Intrade screenshot:
OK, I assume my liberal readers have cleaned themselves up after seeing that screenshot. I check Intrade as part of my "morning reads"…
March 2, 2010
Last spring I posted a review of Scitable at Nature. Since then Scitable seems to have expanded a bit, and I have given some more thought on its possible role in the ecology of the infosphere. Back in 2004 when I began to use Wikipedia regularly I was very impressed by the quality of the technical…
March 2, 2010
'Hero of Ukraine' Splits Nation, Inside and Out:
Half a century after his death at the hands of the K.G.B., Stepan Bandera, a World War II partisan, has not lost his ability to rally Ukrainians against Russia -- and against each other.
Monuments to Mr. Bandera have sprung up across western Ukraine…
March 2, 2010
As you know lactase persistence (LP), which confers the ability to digest lactose sugar as an adult, is an evolutionarily recent development. On the order of 1/3 of the human population exhibits LP, due to a variety of genetic mutations which seem to arise in the cultural background of the…
March 1, 2010
Update: Also see follow up post.
My previous post where I point to Satoshi Kanazawa's finding that liberals & atheists are smarter than conservatives & the religious was a little drop in the bucket in the blogospheric debate. I made it rather obvious that I wasn't too interested in the…
March 1, 2010
I have pointed to the fact that mtDNA genetics has suggested that the polar bear is actually a derived lineage of brown bears. And, more specifically, that some extant lineages of brown bears share a more recent common ancestor with polar bears than other brown bears. In other words, brown bears…
March 1, 2010
A few days ago I pointed to a paper which suggests the possible utility of looking at selection on standing genetic variation on quantitative traits to get a sense of the role of adaptation in the human genome. We humans like to think we're a complex species, so I see no a priori reason why our…
February 28, 2010
And more productive. FiveThirtyEight has a nice meme-buster post, US Manufacturing Is Not Dead. This was known to me, but Tom Schaller has all the charts put together nice.
Here's industrial output:
The labor force engaged in producing durable goods:
And per hour productivity:
The manufacturing…
February 27, 2010
Ends today. Last Chance to Contribute to 2010 Singularity Research Challenge!:
Thanks to generous contributions by our donors, we are only $11,840 away from fulfilling our $100,000 goal for the 2010 Singularity Research Challenge. For every dollar you contribute to SIAI, another dollar is…