Culture
razib | November 12, 2009Greg Laden vs. Matt Springer. Here are some Nidal Hasan headlines (via Steve).
razib | November 9, 2009I have made reference to an epic fantasy series, The Wheel of Time, several times before on this blog. The series' author, Robert Jordan, died in 2007 and left the story incomplete. Jordan had made it to book 11 over the past 20 years, but the finale was left unwritten. So I hear, as I stopped keeping up with the series around volume 5 (I got bored with it and never finished). Nevertheless, The Wheel of Time has interested me because it was an empirical test of issues which crop up in literature. For example, it was noticeable when I was reading the series that Jordan's plotting was becoming…
razib | November 8, 2009Tom Rees, Income inequality drives church attendance:
...we find that attendance rates are particularly high in countries with more socioeconomic inequalities and fewer social welfare expenditure. This effect equally applies to both poor and rich people, which is in line with the idea that because of economic mobility and the possibility of unemployment in the (nearby) future also the more affluent population feels more insecure in countries with more inequalities and without a well-developed social welfare system.
We also see that people with a lower income and who are unemployed attend…
razib | November 8, 2009No Islamic Landmarks Were Harmed in the Making of '2012' (via Unreligious Right):
The trailer for 2012 plays like a highlight reel of civilization falling apart all over the world, but it's religion that gets the brunt of Emmerich's digital pounding: A Buddhist temple gets hit by a tidal wave. The Sistine Chapel crumbles to pieces as a split tears right down the middle of Michelangeo's painting of God touching Adam's finger. St. Peter's Basilica rolls over onto a crowd of devoted worshipers. Rio de Janeiro's iconic Christ the Reedemer statue falls to earth as its wracked by shockwaves. The…
razib | November 8, 2009In reviewing a paper which sketches out the boundary conditions under which group-level natural selection would result in the emergence of altruism as a genetically encoded trait, I stated:
... I would look to cultural group selection, because there are many cases of women being assimilated into a dominant culture, and their offspring speaking the language, and expressing the values, in totality of their fathers. One inherits 50% of one's genes from one's mother and one's father, but inheritance of cultural traits which are distinctive between parents may show very strong biases. Partitioning…
razib | November 7, 2009I recently finished reading The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures, a new book by Nicholas Wade, a science writer for The New York Times. Before giving it the "full treatment" I thought it behooved me to revisit some of the scientific literature which Wade relies upon to give form to his argument. One of the pillars of The Faith Instinct is group selection, and one of the scholars who Wade specifically cites is the economist Samuel Bowles. Bowles was an author on a paper I reviewed earlier this week, on the empirical assessment of the extent of heritability of wealth…
razib | November 2, 2009As I gave a nod to statistical tricks and subtle shell games very recently, the material I review subsequently should be viewed with skepticism and caution. A few days ago I also pointed to a paper which describes and models intergenerational transfers of wealth across various societies. In other words, what parents transmit to children. From the perspective of someone who reads this blog, obviously parents transmit genes to their offspring.
To the left is an old scatterplot from Francis Galton which shows the dependence of the height of children upon the average height of parents.…
razib | November 1, 2009Early (2002) reader of Gene Expression, William Gunn, is leaving a biotech company in San Diego and is looking for another job. Here's his Linkedin.
razib | October 31, 2009I rarely post much political commentary here, because it would add little value as I have nothing distinctive to say in that domain. At Secular Right I am wont to do data analysis because I think data is something that needs to be injected into political discussions and commentary. But in any case, today I put up an essay, Religious diversity & its discontents. In it I make clear my distaste for multiculturalism, so if you are a reader who would find such opinions to your distaste, I invite you not to click! My own opinion is that multiculturalism as it is presented is not a noble lie,…
razib | October 31, 2009Andrew Gelman has started a new blog at ScienceBlogs, Applied Statistics. Someone should design him a header, perhaps a fancified Bayes' theorem?
razib | October 31, 2009Spotted Piglet Hiccups: Boozy Breslin Clashes With Mosque:
The much-hyped, soon-to-open Breslin restaurant, situated in the 12-story Ace Hotel on Broadway and 29th, is giving members of the Masjid Ar-Rahman mosque across the street some agita. "Five times a day, there's a hundred cabs on the street--the good news is you can always get a cab," co-owner Ken Friedman told the Transom the other evening. He said some mosque visitors "object to seeing people drink alcohol."
After the recent FergusStock, a festival during which famed British chef Fergus Henderson cooked whole pigs for a rapt crowd…
razib | October 31, 2009In a piece that outlines SEC follies:
In fact, Mr. Madoff said in the jailhouse interview that, on two occasions, he was certain it was only a matter of days or even hours before he would be caught. The first time, in 2004, he assumed the investigators would check his clearinghouse account. He said he was "astonished" that they did not, and theorized that they might have decided against doing so because of his stature in the industry.
"I'm very proud of the role I played in the industry," he said. "Of course I destroyed that now."
In Mr. Madoff's second close call in 2006, investigators…
razib | October 31, 2009Intergenerational Wealth Transmission and the Dynamics of Inequality in Small-Scale Societies:
Small-scale human societies range from foraging bands with a strong egalitarian ethos to more economically stratified agrarian and pastoral societies. We explain this variation in inequality using a dynamic model in which a population's long-run steady-state level of inequality depends on the extent to which its most important forms of wealth are transmitted within families across generations. We estimate the degree of intergenerational transmission of three different types of wealth (material,…
razib | October 30, 2009Ruchira Paul has a post up, "Religious, superstitious, nonsense" and other harsh words. The point at issue is the fact that a teacher who expressed anti-Creationist views in harsh tones was sued. Ruchira asks somewhat rhetorically as to the sort of things parochial schools say about other religions and atheists. The bigger issue is one of public decorum, and decorum is very contextual. When my 7th grade teacher had us read Medea she explained a bit about the context of Greek society, including the nature of their religion. She spoke of "their gods" and "our God." Her reference to "our God"…
razib | October 29, 2009
In the wikipedia entry for "ballad" there's the image with caption to the left. Am I weird for finding that just really, really, funny? I start having these weird flashbacks to lots of pink hair,screaming weirdos, and Every Rose Has Its Thorn. Am I the only one who feels that the fashions and styles of the 70s and 80s were just way stranger than those of the 50s and 60s? Or is it just that the 50s and 60s are so far back that we've forgotten their own variant of Cherry Pie?
razib | October 28, 2009This critique by Ted Goertzl, Myths of Murder and Multiple Regression, is making the rounds. It made me think of this old apocryphal story:
There is a famous anecdote inspired by Euler's arguments with secular philosophers over religion, which is set during Euler's second stint at the St. Petersburg academy. The French philosopher Denis Diderot was visiting Russia on Catherine the Great's invitation. However, the Empress was alarmed that the philosopher's arguments for atheism were influencing members of her court, and so Euler was asked to confront the Frenchman. Diderot was later informed…
razib | October 27, 2009I show that Protestants like Israel; Midwesterners not so much, at Secular Right. Also, many nations are getting more religious, but young people are still less religious, at Gene Expression Classic.
razib | October 26, 2009The US State Department has released International Religious Freedom Report 2009. Here the list of countries where "violations of religious freedom have been noteworthy."
Afghanistan
Azerbaijan
Brunei
Burma
China
Cuba
Egypt
Eritrea
Fiji
India
Indonesia
Iran
Iraq
Israel
Laos
Malaysia
Nigeria
North Korea
Pakistan
Russia
Saudi Arabia
Somalia
Sudan
Tajikstan
Turkey
Turkmenistan
Uzbekistan
Venezuela
Vietnam
Yemen
H/T: Talk Islam.