razib
Posts by this author
January 16, 2008
You probably know about B. Spears' new boy-toy, Adnan Ghalib. Judging from this photo published in The Daily Mail I am starting to wonder if he is a mole bent on corrupting Hollywood so that even the kuffar will become outraged and revolt against the haram that our entertainment industry produces…
January 16, 2008
Sun to Buy Swedish Software Firm for $1 Billion:
Sun Microsystems, the large American seller of open-source software, said Wednesday that it would spend $1 billion to buy MySQL, a Swedish company that is the world leader in open-source database software used by Internet powers like Google, Yahoo,…
January 16, 2008
Why men and women find longer legs more attractive:
While all of the people were the same height, the length of their legs was altered to make them equal to the Polish average or longer by 5%, 10% or 15%.
The team found that regardless of the volunteers' own body shape and leg length, people whose…
January 16, 2008
Kambiz has a post over at Anthropology.net, On Human Genetic Variation and Human Identity, where he riffs on the discussion that Martin & I just had about the intersection of genes and culture. More broadly it is a rumination upon the methods and paradigms which might be brought to bear on the…
January 16, 2008
Some of you may know that Christina Aguilera and music industry executive Jordan Bratman are now the parents of a son. In contrast, Britney Spears has two children by her ex-husband, Kevin Federline. Years ago I used to prognosticate about the future of the young Ms. Aguilera and Spears; my own…
January 15, 2008
Just a question for readers. Let's exclude Cosmic Variance, what else out there is good? Any diamonds in the rough?
January 15, 2008
Big Weddings Bring Afghans Joy, and Debt:
In Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world, bridegrooms are expected to pay not only for their weddings, but also all the related expenses, including several huge prewedding parties and money for the bride's family, a kind of reverse dowry.…
January 14, 2008
Over the past few weeks I've talked about the relationship of genes & biology to culture. First I noted the likely impact of the evolutionary arms race between our adaptive immune system and plagues & endemic infectious diseases upon the course of human history. Second, I pointed to the…
January 14, 2008
Anyone who has worked in IT knows about some shady practices here and there...and when it comes to databases many companies don't engage in much oversight. I suspect part of the problem is that the higher managers are distanced from the technological day-to-day and just assume that the nerds on…
January 14, 2008
Ron Bailey at Reason has a long piece where he surveys what the various presidential candidates in regards to their attitudes and beliefs about evolution. He also makes a case for why their beliefs on this topic are important.
January 14, 2008
A nice post over at evolgen about the evolution of pathogens in response to antiobiotics.
January 14, 2008
Martin has responded at length to my posts where I argue for an inclusion of genetic data in a synthetic model of human history and development. There are multiple issues here where we disagree, or differ in our interpretations. First, as Martin admits at one point, "Those are all my words put…
January 14, 2008
A few weeks ago I watched a Bloggingheads diavlog between Carl Zimmer and Peter Ward, the latter a paleontologist at the University of Washington. I had been developing a deeper interest in the broader patterns of evolution across Deep Time, so I really enjoyed the discussion and learned quite a…
January 13, 2008
The internet is a great thing. I've posted this link before, but if you haven't checked it out you really should poke through The Collected Papers of R.A. Fisher. There is so much archived genius on the internet; sometimes I wonder what a Ramanujan would have done with all the access to great…
January 13, 2008
I really love shrimp & hot sauce. A lot. Over Christmas I purchased some Mezzeta California Habañero Hot Sauce. I checked out the label, no carrot juice to ruin the flavor of the pepper, but likely no pure capsaicin to render the aftertaste chemical. I finished it up pretty quickly,…
January 13, 2008
Nature on PBS has a two-part special about dogs. Part I is on tonight, and Part II is next week. I'm sure both will be showing as reruns.....
January 13, 2008
Sign Up, Subscribe to the Feed and Learn More!
We've got 30 people signed up so far. I know more will come on board, so I'm looking forward to getting drowned in pure science in ~3 weeks.
Also, if you have a science themed blog post the link in the comments. Thinking about refurbishing the…
January 12, 2008
I purchased a new computer because I had to send my old laptop to a repair center and I didn't want to wait for it to get back. It's a Toshiba Satellite A215 7422 with Windows Vista Home Premier Edition installed. My immediate question is this: every now and then the screen goes blank and I'm…
January 12, 2008
Just noticed that Nature's Oracle: A Life of W. D. Hamilton is finally out. I haven't read it yet, but will have soon once my copy arrives. If you don't know who W. D. Hamilton is, you know his work. Hamilton's early theoretical papers on the evolution of sociality (e.g., kin selection) were the…
January 12, 2008
Several other ScienceBloggers have posted their Electoral Compass results. Jake, Josh, Bora and Greg (sort of) have posted there results. Here are mine....
January 11, 2008
Over the past two days I've been arguing that multiple avenues of insight are critical in historical scholarship. That's a general assertion; check out this bloggingheads.tv exchange between Carl Zimmer and paleontologist Niel Shubin. Carl points out that though Neil is a paleontologist focused…
January 11, 2008
Steven Pinker has a new essay in The New York Times Magazine, The Moral Instinct. Chris of Mixing Memory is critical of Pinker when he goes outside of his specialization in the psychology of language...but I did enjoy the ending:
Far from debunking morality, then, the science of the moral sense…
January 11, 2008
Martin had a comment below:
You equate language groups with ethnic, even political, groups. That's quite a stretch. Western archaeologists abandoned that idea in the 1970s.
I think I should expand a bit on my comment where I address Martin's assertion. I think I made it pretty clear that when it…
January 11, 2008
My post which sketched out the model of Slavic expansion northeast into the lands of the Finnic peoples generated a fair number of comments. I tend to agree with those who suggest that Slavic access to more efficient or superior agricultural traditions is probably the explanation for why they…
January 11, 2008
There have been a spate of articles about E. O. Wilson'sdrive to put group selection back into mainstream conversation among evolutionary biologists over the past year. Wilson has kept the torch alive for this particular paradigm since the 1970s, when it was prominently featured in his famous book…
January 10, 2008
Science Friday will have a show about ScienceDebate2008 this week. It will likely be on the NPR website tomorrow afternoon....
January 10, 2008
Turns out that Jamie Lynn Spears' baby daddy is expressing paternity skepticism. He might check out the paper How Well Does Paternity Confidence Match Actual Paternity? Evidence from Worldwide Nonpaternity Rates:
This survey of published estimates of nonpaternity suggests that for men with high…
January 9, 2008
Apropos of Mike Huckabee & Ron Paul's evolution skepticism and its relevance to their political runs Andrew Sullivan has been posting a series of comments from readers about whether evolution and gravity are laws or theories. I am generally somewhat averse to these semantical debates, and more…