razib
Posts by this author
June 1, 2009
G.M. to Seek Bankruptcy and a New Start:
It also places the government in uncharted territory as a business owner, as it takes a 60 percent ownership stake in the company during its restructuring.
The commanding heights are back. We're socializing the means of production. Meanwhile, California is…
June 1, 2009
Family axes wedding plans, Egyptian cuts off organ:
A 25-year-old Egyptian man cut off his own penis to spite his family after he was refused permission to marry a girl from a lower class family, police reported Sunday.
This kind of reminds me of self-castration for religious reasons. It is a…
May 29, 2009
The AP, 13-year-old Kansas girl wins National Spelling Bee:
Cool and collected, Kavya Shivashankar wrote out every word on her palm and always ended with a smile. The 13-year-old Kansas girl saved the biggest smile for last, when she rattled off the letters to "Laodicean" to become the nation's…
May 29, 2009
Felix Salmon pointed me to The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street today. There really is a boom in these sorts of books recently! Are we overdoing the "irrationality" bit? Probably. Mike offers up some skepticism about the creeping of irrationality…
May 28, 2009
Nick Wade in The New York Times reports on new research where they inserted human FOXP2 genes into the mouse genome. Here are some of the findings:
Despite the mammalian body's dependence on having its two FOXP2 genes work just right, Dr. Enard's team found that the human version of FOXP2 seemed…
May 28, 2009
BusinessWeek, The Tough Road Ahead for GM and Chrysler:
The upshot is that some 30 significant players worldwide are fighting over a pie that has shrunk by more than 30% in the past 12 months. The industry can make about 90 million cars worldwide, but it's selling only about 55 million. Not exactly…
May 28, 2009
A few weeks ago I was pointed to Scitable, part of the Nature media empire. Here's how it's introduced:
A free science library and personal learning tool brought to you by Nature Publishing Group, the world's leading publisher of science.
Scitable currently concentrates on genetics, the study of…
May 27, 2009
I was at the supermarket today and saw some some before and after pictures of Kate Gosselin on the cover of Us Weekly. Pretty crazy, though not as extreme as some of the "pre" and "post" makeup photos of celebrities you always see in Star. I don't know much about the show but I get really…
May 27, 2009
The first is for science weblog posts. Nominations end the 1st of June. Steven Pinker is picking the winner out of 6 finalists.
May 27, 2009
Scientific American has a long piece reviewing the recent genetic insights into the origins and development of the most awesome pets of all:
It is by turns aloof and affectionate, serene and savage, endearing and exasperating. Despite its mercurial nature, however, the house cat is the most popular…
May 27, 2009
Return of the Quaternary
Jared Diamond hides behind the "it wasn't science" defense
Building your own Star
Opponent-Process Theory: Welcome to the dark side
Cloud Computing>
May 26, 2009
Kambiz of Anthropology.net is back. His first offering reports on a new paper on the evidence for leprosy in India 4,000 years ago.
...Lots of hallmarks in human existence occurred during this time period, some being inventions in system of writing, standardized weights and measures, monumental…
May 26, 2009
In light of my post on politics and personal perspective yesterday, I thought this "exchange" between Mark Levin and Conor Friedersdorf would be of note. Also see Rod Dreher on the controversy. In any case, here you have a case where the principals agree on the broad political issues at stake, and…
May 26, 2009
On this week's Science Saturday John Horgan interviews Richard Wrangham. The second half of the conversation focuses on Wrangham's new book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. I've heard pieces of the arguments mooted in the back & forth before, but it looks like in this book they're all…
May 26, 2009
The Onion presents an interesting spin on the financial retrenchment that's in vogue right now. I do wonder it's really the best for the real estate sector, as it seems like it would reduce aggregate demand for rental units. Also, note the shout out to Robert Ingersoll.
Nation's Girlfriends Unveil…
May 25, 2009
Brian Switek of Laelaps has an op-ed in on Ida. Here's the conclusion:
What could have been a unique opportunity to communicate science has quickly developed into a fiasco. Science proceeds through discovery and debate, and hypotheses do not become accepted by flooding the media with press releases…
May 25, 2009
Why We Stare, Even When We Don't Want To:
"When a face is distorted, we have no pattern to match that," Rosenberg said. "All primates show this [staring] at something very different, something they have not evolved to see. They need to investigate further. 'Are they one of us or not?' In other…
May 25, 2009
Dienekes points me to new research on MHC and mating:
The scientists studied MHC data from 90 married couples, and compared them with 152 randomly-generated control couples. They counted the number of MHC dissimilarities among those who were real couples, and compared them with those in the…
May 25, 2009
The Neurocritic points me to a paper, The brain structural disposition to social interaction:
Social reward dependence (RD) in humans is a stable pattern of attitudes and behaviour hypothesized to represent a favourable disposition towards social relationships and attachment as a personality…
May 25, 2009
Andrew Gelman has a post up titled Difficulties in trying to understand the views of others, responding to a Robin Hanson taxonomy outline the motivations of liberals, conservatives and libertarians. Gelman is skeptical of Hanson's glosses of each group.
The human ability to engage in Meta-…
May 24, 2009
A quick note. Two new ScienceBlogs: Christina's LIS Rant & Confessions of a Science Librarian. Also, Afarensis, John Lynch and John Wilkins have new locations.
May 24, 2009
Waves of stationary shape:
Over at Scienceblogs, people are talking about waves. Of course, everyone thinks that waves are in the domain of physics, and people always forget about one of my favorite subjects: waves of advance. Way back in the day, RA Fisher wondered what might happen if genes had…
May 24, 2009
People By Nature Are Universally Optimistic, Study Shows:
Data from the Gallup World Poll drove the findings, with adults in more than 140 countries providing a representative sample of 95 percent of the world's population. The sample included more than 150,000 adults.
Eighty-nine percent of…
May 22, 2009
Megan McArdle posts Edmund Andrews' response to her revelation of his wife's bankruptcies. Megan concludes:
On a very broad note, I don't see this as a story about the goodness or badness of Andrews or Barreiro--and I've been dismayed by some of the nastiness about her in comments here and…
May 22, 2009
It is well known that different ethnic groups vary when it comes to diseases such as Type II Diabetes. Or, more specifically they vary in terms of risk, all things equal (if you use an online Type II Diabetes calculator you'll see immediately as they sometimes have a parameter for ethnicity).…
May 21, 2009
Most people have probably read Edmund Andrews' piece in The New York Times, My Personal Credit Crisis (expanded into the book Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown). Many raised eyebrows when reading this:
We had very different ideas about money. Patty spent little on herself, but she…
May 21, 2009
A few years ago I commented a fair amount on the topic of prosopagnosia, face blindness. Turns out that ~2% of the population can't really recognize faces, and this is a cryptic trait as many of these individuals have developed compensatory tendencies so that people don't know. Not only that, but…