razib | July 3, 2009Palin announces resignation:
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin announced Friday that she was resigning her office later this month, a stunning decision that could free her to run for president more easily but also raises questions about her political standing at home.
Palin disclosed the surprise news Friday afternoon from her home in Wasilla with her husband, Todd, and Lt. Governor Sean Parnell, who the governor said would take over the state on Saturday, July 25th.
By not running for re-election, Palin liberates herself from the political constraints that come with running for president while still…
razib | July 2, 2009Excellent chart via Calculated Risk. It looks like we're in a whole different territory of anti-superlatives in terms of length & depth in regards to the employment drought....
razib | July 2, 2009Lots of chatter about The Blogosphere 2.0, a post which has 7 bullet points:
- The A-List Doesn't Matter Anymore
- It's all about niche blogs
- Blogger Burn Out
- Reader burn out
- MSM yawns
- Huffington Post.
- Twitter and Facebook
Not much I'd disagree with in the generality. Multiple times that politics/general interest weblogs have linked to me it is noted that I'm a "specialist/technical weblog," but I really think everyone is focused on a specific area at this point. It's just that political and policy weblogs seem to think everyone has a general interest in their topic. Also, I do…
razib | July 2, 2009First Genetic Insight into Libyan Tuaregs: A Maternal Perspective:
The Tuaregs are a semi-nomadic pastoralist people of northwest Africa. Their origins are still a matter of debate due to the scarcity of genetic and historical data. Here we report the first data on the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) genetic characterization of a Tuareg sample from Fezzan (Libyan Sahara). A total of 129 individuals from two villages in the Acacus region were genetically analysed. Both the hypervariable regions and the coding region of mtDNA were investigated. Phylogeographic investigation was carried out in order…
razib | July 2, 2009Really funny scene of a reporter being harassed by a drunk guy (H/T Daily Dish).
razib | July 2, 2009Nicholas Wade is moderately skeptical of Robert Wright's new book, The Evolution of God:
Robert Wright's new book, "The Evolution of God," has a provocative title. But it's a disappointment from the Darwinian perspective. He doesn't mean real evolution, just the development of ideas about God.
He argues that our morality has improved over the centuries and that maybe the hand of the deity can be discerned in that progression, if one looks hard enough. But he leaves fuzzy the matter of whether he thinks a deity is there for real. There's a moral order in history, he says, which "makes it…
razib | July 1, 2009World Conference of Science Journalists - New media new journalism
The miracle of the falling cat
More on accomodationism
The Magic of Attraction (aka Attractors in Dynamical Systems)
Peak Psychology
razib | June 30, 2009
A little under 10% of South Africa's population are Cape Coloureds. They speak Afrikaans and generally worship in Reformed Christian churches, but exhibit discernible non-European ancestry, in particular African ancestry. In the United States anyone who manifests African ancestry is coded as "black." Though hypodescent started out as a tool for maintaining white racial purity against colored taint, today it is accepted within black America as the social norm. Barack Obama has obvious mixed ancestry but he is accept as fully black racially by both black and white Americans. In South Africa…
razib | June 29, 2009A friend of mine has a new weblog, Low Carb Art and Science, which some of you might be interested in (or not). I do think it is ironic since this is an individual who presumably is in favor of a diet of red beans & rice. If you want a more eclectic range of posts on diet you might want to check out FuturPundit.
razib | June 29, 2009A new version of FireFox is coming out today. You can already test drive the latest pre-release already. I've been using Chrome since last year for 95% of my browsing needs because of the speed. I miss plugins, and there are also pages that render a bit idiosyncratically and AJAX apps which get confused. Because of low market penetration naturally designers and developers don't always make sure that their sites work appropriately for Chrome. In any case, now Farhad Manjoo has a review up of the new Firefox browser, and seems to think that it has revived the brand. His points are:
1) Almost as…
razib | June 29, 2009Arnold Kling highlights this section from a Scientific American article, The Science of Economic Bubbles and Busts:
But behavioral economics experiments routinely show that despite similar outcomes, people (and other primates) hate a loss more than they desire a gain, an evolutionary hand-me-down that encourages organisms to preserve food supplies or to weigh a situation carefully before risking encounters with predators.
One group that does not value perceived losses differently than gains are individuals with autism, a disorder characterized by problems with social interaction. When tested…
razib | June 29, 2009I don't post much on contemporary politics, mostly because I don't have much value-add, but also because so much of it from the blogosphere is simply a critique of the mainstream press. In fact I think the mainstream press is essential and invaluable in many domains. The current crisis in print journalism is going to cause problems because these organizations serve as primary sources for many webloggers on abstruse or specialized topics. Who do you think puts bread on Carl Zimmer's table?
But, I do believe that almost all "political analysis" and "commentary" in the mainstream media can be,…
razib | June 27, 2009
Why should government welfare mean less religion?:
This was a question that Anthony Gill and Erik Lundsgaarde tackled by in 2004. They analysed the data from a range of countries, and found that the greater proportion of GDP that was spent on government welfare, the more non-religious people there were and the lower church attendance was. This held true even after statistically adjusting for other factors, like per-capita GDP, urbanization, government regulation of religion, and religious pluralism.
The standard explanation for this relation is that religion & government provide…
razib | June 26, 2009Richard Wrangham has done a podcast over at World Science (see my review of Catching Fire). You can ask questions in the forum, Wrangham will be participating all week.
razib | June 25, 2009She's trying to leave New York for Antarctica. What you have to do to make it happen is vote for her essay.
razib | June 25, 2009I was out and about doing errands when a friend called me to tell me that Michael Jackson had died. My first reaction was to utter an expletive. I wasn't sad, I didn't think this was a false report. I didn't know how to react. It's as if a friend calls you and tells you that the Rocky Mountains had disappeared. The very configuration of the pop culture firmament has shifted before our very eyes. Jackson's music career had long waned in the United States, for most of my lifetime he'd been more of a cultural than musical phenomenon. I didn't think of Michael Jackson very often, but I always…
razib | June 24, 2009I saw the newest Transformers movie today. In terms of the cast, there were really only two who I felt were necessary in any way to the development of the film. Optimus Prime and Megan Fox.*
Slate has a spoiler filled review which hits many of the aspects which I think are relevant. I don't watch many films in the theater, on average about 1 every 6 months. I've loaded up this spring since I saw the Star Trek reboot. I'm not a huge Trekkie, I've seen most of TOS & TNG episodes, but not so much of Voyager or DS9, and hardly any of Enterprise. I also didn't watch many of the films. But I'…