razib | December 20, 2008The paperback edition of "Dow, 30,000 by 2008" Why It's Different This Time came out on the 1st of this month on Amazon. I guess publishing schedules are fixed so that at a date is a date? Here's the most amusing of the "reviews" on Amazon (4 out of 4 stars by the way):
A Prescient Mind - Spot On!
What a brilliant, insightful tome on investing cycles. The author makes an iron clad case as to why the Dow will skyrocket to the stratosphere by 2008. I can find NO FAULT in his logic. Leverage is the key to success in this world of ours. Everybody should borrow against ANY asset that they have,…
razib | December 20, 2008Mark Chu-Carroll has a "must read" post, Fitness Landscapes, Evolution, and Smuggling Information:
If you look at the evolutionary process, it's most like the iterative search process described towards the beginning of this post. The "search function" isn't really static over time; it's constantly changing. At any point in time, you can loosely think of the search function for a given species as exploring some set of mutations, and selecting the ones that allow them to survive. After a step, you've got a new population, which is going to have new mutations to explore. So the search function…
razib | December 19, 2008The New York Times just published the definitive Bernie Madoff piece so far, Madoff Scheme Kept Rippling Outward, Across Borders. Reading about Madoff, I can't help but think about this conversation attributed to J. P. Morgan:
Untermyer: "Is not commercial credit based primarily upon money or property?"
Morgan: "No sir. The first thing is character."
Untermyer: "Before money or property?"
Morgan: "Before money or property or anything else. Money cannot buy it...because a man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom."
That sir, was the problem of course. And…
razib | December 19, 2008This is really weird, New World Post-pandemic Reforestation Helped Start Little Ice Age, Say Scientists:
Stanford University researchers have conducted a comprehensive analysis of data detailing the amount of charcoal contained in soils and lake sediments at the sites of both pre-Columbian population centers in the Americas and in sparsely populated surrounding regions. They concluded that reforestation of agricultural lands--abandoned as the population collapsed--pulled so much carbon out of the atmosphere that it helped trigger a period of global cooling, at its most intense from…
razib | December 19, 2008Science and God: An automatic opposition between ultimate explanations:
Science and religion have come into conflict repeatedly throughout history, and one simple reason for this is the two offer competing explanations for many of the same phenomena. We present evidence that the conflict between these two concepts can occur automatically, such that increasing the perceived value of one decreases the automatic evaluation of the other. In Experiment 1, scientific theories described as poor explanations decreased automatic evaluations of science, but simultaneously increased automatic…
razib | December 18, 2008I don't know much about this topic, but I thought this paper was cool, Avian Paternal Care Had Dinosaur Origin:
The repeated discovery of adult dinosaurs in close association with egg clutches leads to speculation over the type and extent of care exhibited by these extinct animals for their eggs and young. To assess parental care in Cretaceous troodontid and oviraptorid dinosaurs, we examined clutch volume and the bone histology of brooding adults. In comparison to four archosaur care regressions, the relatively large clutch volumes of Troodon, Oviraptor, and Citipati scale most closely with…
razib | December 18, 2008On today's Talk of the Nation there was a show with the title, Obama And The Politics Of Being Biracial. Here's the intro:
President-elect Barack Obama defines himself as African-American. His mother is a white American, and his father is a black African. This hits a nerve with some people, who wonder why Obama doesn't use the term biracial to describe his race.
The obvious answer is that the United States Barack Obama looks black. Some of the guests noted this. That being said, I was a bit peeved with the fact that there wasn't even a nominal nod to the fact that there are many biracial…
razib | December 18, 2008Jake Young has a skeptical take on the contention that science can save the economy. He ends:
In short, I think the suggestion, while well-meaning, is misguided. If all that would happen in this project was that more brains would be applied to the problem, I would support it. It would probably be harmless even if it was ineffective. However, I think it may be worse than that. Given the dismissiveness bordering on contempt with which most scientists hold economic problems, I think their participation would be actively unhelpful. What would result is a lot of acrimony and very little progress.…
razib | December 18, 2008Mike White finally left a comment on my post Complex traits & evolution:
I'm trying to make a distinction between what geneticists call complex or quantitative traits (traits affected by different alleles of many different genes, with a quantitative range of phenotypes), and something I would call a physiologically complex (or complicated) trait.
Complex or quantitative traits include both height and intelligence. But I'm arguing that something like height is not physiologically complex the way intelligence is.
...
So, for example, in the case of height, you can imagine that it is easy…
razib | December 17, 2008Matt Yglesias has a post up, Illusions of Rationalism, where he seems to dismiss some of the anger in the Left-blogosphere at the coronation of Princess Caroline. Like Matt, I don't really care that much who gets anointed to the throne of the junior Senator from New York, though that has much to do with my relative minimal investment in the particularities of the Democrats within the legislative branch. Yglesias is correct to note:
But of course that's not how things work at all. The whole business of electioneering is full of irrationality and tradition all the way from top to bottom. The…
razib | December 16, 2008United States Death Map Revealed:
A map of natural hazard mortality in the United States has been produced. The map gives a county-level representation of the likelihood of dying as the result of natural events such as floods, earthquakes or extreme weather.
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Hazard mortality is most prominent in the South, where most people were killed by various severe weather hazards and tornadoes. Other areas of elevated risk are the northern Great Plains Region where heat and drought were the biggest killers and in the mountain west with winter weather and flooding deaths. The south central US is…
razib | December 16, 2008A Sale of Two Doorstops:
Well, that much is correct. I am thinking that this is what somewhat derivative fantasies patterned on George Martin rather than Tolkien are likely to look like (Acacia: Game of Thrones :: Sword of Shannara : Lord of the Rings). More political intrigue, a darker moral world with many shades of grey, a grimmer arc of character development.
Acacia is not terrible, as far as these things go. But it sure could be a lot better than it is, and most of the problem comes down to the basics of the prose. And that in turn maybe comes down to a bad combination of missing…
razib | December 16, 2008Sometimes social data are weird & unexpected. Below the fold are two charts which compare the self-reported happiness of people of various weight classes. From left to right: below average, average, above average and considerably above average. Red = very happy, blue = happy and green = not too happy.
The Inductivist has the full post.
razib | December 16, 2008A correspondent forward me this paper, The intelligence-religiosity nexus: A representative study of white adolescent Americans:
The present study examined whether IQ relates systematically to denomination and income within the framework of the g nexus, using representative data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY97). Atheists score 1.95 IQ points higher than Agnostics, 3.82 points higher than Liberal persuasions, and 5.89 IQ points higher than Dogmatic persuasions. Denominations differ significantly in IQ and income. Religiosity declines between ages 12 to 17. It is suggested…
razib | December 15, 2008Over at Genetic Future. Dan "the Man" MacArthur has been quite prolific recently. You should add Genetic Future to your RSS, or at least bookmark it if you are old school.
razib | December 15, 2008Six new loci associated with body mass index highlight a neuronal influence on body weight regulation:
Common variants at only two loci, FTO and MC4R, have been reproducibly associated with body mass index (BMI) in humans. To identify additional loci, we conducted meta-analysis of 15 genome-wide association studies for BMI (n > 32,000) and followed up top signals in 14 additional cohorts (n > 59,000). We strongly confirm FTO and MC4R and identify six additional loci (P < 5 10-8): TMEM18, KCTD15, GNPDA2, SH2B1, MTCH2 and NEGR1 (where a 45-kb deletion polymorphism is a candidate…
razib | December 15, 2008One of the major reasons that so much human genetic work is fixated on ascertaining the nature of population substructure is that different populations may respond differently to particular drugs. Of course population identification is only a rough proxy, but in many cases it is a good one. Years ago, Neil Risch reported the utility of genetic markers in differentiating individuals into distinct groups, and the high fidelity of these identifications with self-report. But this sort of generalization is contingent on particular conditions. In Brazil centuries of admixture have resulted in a…