razib | May 4, 2009Via Andrew Sullivan, One nation, seven sins: Geographers measure propensity for evil in states, counties. Here's the methodology:
Greed was calculated by comparing average incomes with the total number of inhabitants living beneath the poverty line. On this map, done in yellow, Clark County is bile (see map on Page 2).
Envy was calculated using the total number of thefts -- robbery, burglary, larceny and stolen cars. Rendered in green, of course, Clark County is emerald.
Wrath was calculated by comparing the total number of violent crimes -- murder, assault and rape -- reported to the FBI per…
razib | May 4, 2009Late last year I reviewed a book by an American sociologist on Danish secularism. The book was titled Society without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment, and apparently its publication resulted in some controversy in Denmark, in large part due to perceived misrepresentation of the Danish populace by the author. I suspected at the time that part of the issue was that of cultural miscommunication; what "secular" and "religious" are in the United States and Denmark vary a great deal, and the author was attempting to communicate primarily to an American audience…
razib | May 3, 2009I still remember when L. L. Cavalli-Sforza's The History and Geography of Human Genes was a candle in the dark, illuminating human history with slivers of genetic data laboriously gathered and analyzed over decades. We've come a long way. Dienekes points me to a new paper, Fine-scaled human genetic structure revealed by SNP microarrays:
We report an analysis of more than 240,000 loci genotyped using the Affymetrix SNP microarray in 554 individuals from 27 worldwide populations in Africa, Asia, and Europe. To provide a more extensive and complete sampling of human genetic variation, we have…
razib | May 2, 2009Calculated Risk has a great chart showing GDP fluctuations which puts into perspective just how big a downtown the Great Depression represented, and how it compares to the current one. For the population ~30 and under the current downswing is already 3 times more extreme from the peak than any recession they have memory of. In fact, we're already approaching the biggest downswing since World War II and the recession will certainly be the longest as well. On the other hand, we're as far from the commonly accepted definition of a Depression of a 10% decline in GDP as the 1991 one recession was…
razib | May 2, 2009David Brooks has a column out where he mulls over the role of time invested in amplifying talent:
If you wanted to picture how a typical genius might develop, you'd take a girl who possessed a slightly above average verbal ability. It wouldn't have to be a big talent, just enough so that she might gain some sense of distinction. Then you would want her to meet, say, a novelist, who coincidentally shared some similar biographical traits. Maybe the writer was from the same town, had the same ethnic background, or, shared the same birthday -- anything to create a sense of affinity.
...
The…
razib | May 2, 2009Low Vitamin D Causes Problems For Acutely Ill Patients:
Dr Paul Lee, Professor John Eisman and Associate Professor Jackie Center, researchers at Sydney's Garvan Institute of Medical Research, examined a cohort of 42 Intensive Care Unit (ICU) patients. Forty-five percent turned out to be Vitamin D deficient.
...
When the team correlated the Vitamin D levels with a disease severity score, there was a direct correspondence between sickness and Vitamin D deficiency. In other words, the sicker someone was, the lower the levels of Vitamin D. Out of the 42 patients studied, there were 3 deaths. The…
razib | April 30, 2009Unlike many bloggers I'm not too invested in politics, nor do I have a deep knowledge of the topic (though I do have a strong interest in quantitative political science). But I read political pieces in the same way I read sports columns: entertaining analyses which serve as brain candy. Nevertheless, the candy needs to pass a minimal threshold of intellectual palatability. I'm a Celtics fan, and was excited to see their first championship of my adulthood last year, but any sports writer that throws up a column which asserts that the 2007-2008 team was the greatest of all time would be too…
razib | April 30, 2009I've been fine tuning Ubuntu all day with goodies and getting drivers to work right, so I missed this paper on African genetics:
Africa is the source of all modern humans, but characterization of genetic variation and of relationships among populations across the continent has been enigmatic. We studied 121 African populations, 4 African American populations, and 60 non-African populations for patterns of variation at 1327 nuclear microsatellite and insertion/deletion markers. We identified 14 ancestral population clusters in Africa that correlate with self-described ethnicity and shared…
razib | April 30, 2009John Schwenkler points me to Rod Dreher's shock that religious people seem to support torture more than the non-religious:
And get this: the more often you go to church, the more pro-torture you're likely to be!
What on earth are these Christians hearing at church?! Very sad indeed.
John notes:
There are plenty of data showing that Christians' attitudes toward abortion, contraception, and the rest don't differ very significantly from those of the rest of society; the real factor, of course, lies in political affiliations, and I have little doubt that most of the relevant findings can be…
razib | April 30, 2009I blogged about this a few months ago, but Dan MacArthur reports that the firm which was going to roll it out first claims that it doesn't really work as advertised.
razib | April 30, 2009So claims Ali Eteraz:
Most people in the world, including some Pakistanis, live under the illusion that the country is secular and just happens to have been overrun by extremists. This is false. Pakistan became an Islamic state in 1973 when the new constitution made Islam the state religion. Under the earlier 1956 constitution Islam had been merely the "official" religion. Nineteen-seventy-three, in other words, represents Pakistan's "Iran moment"--when the government made itself beholden to religious law. Most western observers missed the radical change because the leader of Pakistan at the…
razib | April 30, 2009UN says Egypt pig cull real mistake:
The United Nations has called Egypt's move to cull 400,000 pigs as a precaution against swine flu "a real mistake".
The Egyptian government ordered the slaughter of the pigs on Wednesday, saying it could help quell any panic in the country that is largely Muslim, who view pigs as unclean.
No pigs in the country have been found with the new strain of H1N1 virus of the so-called swine flu and the World Health Organisation (WHO) says the disease cannot be caught from eating pork that is properly prepared.
I just heard on NPR that urban pigs apparently process…
razib | April 30, 2009
I'm in the mood for a "feel good" story with the past week's fixation in swine flu. Half A Glass Of Wine A Day May Boost Life Expectancy By Five Years:
The Dutch authors base their findings on a total of 1,373 randomly selected men whose cardiovascular health and life expectancy at age 50 were repeatedly monitored between 1960 and 2000.
Here are the findings:
And men who drank only wine, and less than half a glass of it a day, lived around 2.5 years longer than those who drank beer and spirits, and almost five years longer than those who drank no alcohol at all.
Drinking wine was strongly…
razib | April 29, 2009
In the wake of Predictably Irrational, check out Tyler Cowen's endorsement of Geoffrey Miller's new book, Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior. Miller is a good writer, so I'm assuming it will be a page-turner, but he does tend to be "provocative" in all the best & worst ways when it comes to popular science. Evolutionary psychologists have a tendency to make everything about sex & status, but within the field it seems Miller does come off as the "pimp daddy" always talking about the "bling" and "b**tches" as the raison d'être.
razib | April 29, 2009New Geochronologic And Stratigraphic Evidence Confirms The Paleocene Age Of the Dinosaur-Bearing Ojo Alamo Sandstone And Animas Formation In The San Juan Basin, New Mexico and Colorado:
...An assemblage of 34 skeletal elements from a single hadrosaur, found in the Ojo Alamo Sandstone in the southern San Juan Basin, provided conclusive evidence that this assemblage could not have been reworked from underlying Cretaceous strata. In addition, geochemical studies of 15 vertebrate bones from the Paleocene Ojo Alamo Sandstone and 15 bone samples from the underlying Kirtland Formation of Late…
razib | April 29, 2009Do you love or hate Cilantro?
K-T extinction debates: cranky "skeptics" or reasonable science?
Modularity and scalability
The elegant logic of dopamine
A Beacon from the Invisible Universe
razib | April 29, 2009Haplotypic Background of a Private Allele at High Frequency in the Americas:
Recently, the observation of a high-frequency private allele, the 9-repeat allele at microsatellite D9S1120, in all sampled Native American and Western Beringian populations has been interpreted as evidence that all modern Native Americans descend primarily from a single founding population. However, this inference assumed that all copies of the 9-repeat allele were identical by descent and that the geographic distribution of this allele had not been influenced by natural selection. To investigate whether these…
razib | April 28, 2009Installed Jaunty Jackalope with Wubi. Definitely feels like a smoother UI on my Lenovo.