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Dienekes has a interesting, if not surprising, post on how names can mold how we perceive people. I've posted on this before. The most extreme illustration of this tendency I've ever read is the fact that during segregation some southern hotels allowed international travelers from African…

There has been a lot of talk of Barack Obama "expanding the map" this cycle for the Democrats. In mid-September when John McCain was at his polling-peak many were assuming that had just been a pipe-dream, and that the traditional Democratic strategy of winning big blue states was back in play. But…

There was a comment below on Indian American ethnicity in terms of proportion. By "ethnicity," I mean the dominant language-based groups which serve as the organizing unit of many Indian states. The usual figures I see quoted are that 50% of Indian Americans are Gujarati, 25% Punjabi, with the…

William Saletan has an article out on the tendency for many Americans today to always be "hooked in" to technology through mobile devices (cell phones, iPods, etc.). I recall a woman loudly talking about her boyfriend leaving her, and the consequent emotional devastation, in front of me in the…

Linux Is Making Me Insane: Grappling with Ubuntu, the free, open-source operating system. I have Ubuntu on my PC through a dual-boot. I also purchased a USB wireless card which was guaranteed to be compatible with Ubuntu plug-and-play. It does work...80% of the time. The problem is that it "…

Obviously the most prominent Indian American politician today is Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana. But Jindal is not very representative of Indian Americans: ...Additionally, there are also industry-wide Indian American groupings including the Asian American Hotel Owners Association and the…

Dienekes points to another paper on European population substructure, Genome-Wide Analysis of Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms Uncovers Population Structure in Northern Europe: In this study, we analysed almost 250,000 SNPs from a total of 945 samples from Eastern and Western Finland, Sweden,…

John Wilkins points me to a piece by Pascal Boyer,* Being human: Religion: Bound to believe?: So is religion an adaptation or a by-product of our evolution? Perhaps one day we will find compelling evidence that a capacity for religious thoughts, rather than 'religion' in the modern form of socio-…

David's penultimate post on Sewall Wright, Notes on Sewall Wright: The Shifting Balance Theory - Part 1: Two catch-phrases indissolubly linked with Sewall Wright are the adaptive landscape, and the shifting balance. In preparing my note on Wright's concept of the adaptive landscape I was surprised…

As you can see to the left Gene Expression hasn't raised that much money this year. That's not so hot, but, some of the other ScienceBloggers have raised a bunch, so that's heartening. I also wanted to add that Seed will be "padding" our contributions this year, but right now the amount that Seed…

Most of you know that Europe (like Japan and South Korea) has very low fertility; below replacement even. One of the main explanations is that with the decline in religiosity it naturally follows that fertility will decline (the psychological or sociological proximate models vary). Atheism kills…

Matt Yglesias moots the reasons behind America's anti-socialist/individual tendencies. This is no illusion. America's Left party, the Democrats, have links with the Centrist Democrat International. This is an organization which roughly represents the international Center-Right, e.g., the…

If you are interested in the Personal Genome Project, you can get the all the down-low over at Genetic Future. Really, just go read Genetic Future.

Finding Hidden Tomb Of Genghis Khan Using Non-Invasive Technologies. Cool right? My first thought was Serpentor: ...He was created through a breakthrough in cloning research by Dr. Mindbender from the DNA extracted from the unearthed remains of the most ruthless and effective military leaders in…

There is a new blog some readers might find of interest, Culture and Cognition. Dan Sperber, who did a 10 questions nearly 3 years ago, is a contributor. Imagine, what if cultural anthropology was dominated by people who didn't behave like literary critics or aspire to be political revolutionaries?

A commenter points me to a post by Robert Frank, The Rich Support McCain, the Super-Rich Support Obama: More than three quarters of those worth $1 million to $10 million plan to vote for Sen. McCain. Only 15% plan to vote for Sen. Obama (the rest are undecided). Of those worth more than $30 million…

Check out Howard Fineman's new column, Why Is the Race So Close?. His method of "analysis" is simple; list a number of factors which should favor the generic Democrat, and then contend that Obama's average 6 point lead in the polls is not large enough. Actually, I put the 6 point lead part in…

If there is one "politics" book you should read this year, it is Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do. Now, this sort of acclamation does need to be tempered by the fact that I myself don't really read "political" books very often. But despite the…

Zoo Borns.

Thomas Mailund is having serious issues with Ubuntu....

FuturePundit reports on research which suggests that smoking removes 10 years from your life expectancy. It's nice to see a number on this; it isn't like this is a counterintuitive finding. But this sort of quantification is important. I don't smoke, and I never have, but my experience in college…

Photo Credit: Wired Wired has a story about pod cars! Awesome. Pod cars are one of those things ubiquitous in science fiction (like humanoid robots) that just never come to be. In contrast, computer technology has advanced so far in the past generation that older science fiction resembles some…

To the left is Bandar bin Sultan. To the right, Barack Obama. Bandar bin Sultan is the son of a Saudi prince and his Sudanese "servant" (probably a slave). So we know that Bandar bin Sultan is 1/2 Arab and 1/2 Sudanese. Anwar Sadat had a Egyptian father and a Sudanese mother. In any case, here…

The BBC interviews Steve Jones. Nothing new. I think Jones' fixation on natural selection as a function of parameters exogenous to the population is part of the problem. A lot of evolution is probably due to intraspecific dynamics, that is, individual vs. individual competition within a…

Over at Anthropology.net Emanuel Lusca has a post, Science As A Human Practice. I sniped a little in the comments, to which Emanuel responded: My intention was not to refine, clarify, or elevate science. My intention was to point out that science should not be put on a pedestal, that it is like any…

The August issue of The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, has a supplement of articles, Vitamin D and Health in the 21st Century Update. ScienceDaily has some quotes from one of the main researchers: ... Norman identifies vitamin D's potential for contributions to good health in the adaptive…

If the trolley problem is not known to you, I would recommend Kwame Anthony Appiah's Experiments in Ethics. It is one of those works which combines brevity with density, a feast of ideas laid out before you which is nevertheless consumable in a minimal span of time. And Appiah is an engaging…

Photo credit: AP In light of last week's posts about why human evolution continues, I think it is critical to make concrete the reality of reproductive variance. It seems highly likely now that Jamie Lynn Spears is pregnant again. This might be a moot point if she has an abortion, though now that…

Just an update on the DonorsChoose drive for this year. I've removed some funded challenges from my drive, and added a whole lot more. In general they're either bioscience related, or, they're projects from really poor schools. This year I haven't raised much money through my drive, though some…