Culture
razib | March 9, 2010Two quantitative facts of note from When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order:
From page 33:
Although the passage to modernity universally involves the transition from an agrarian to service-based society via an industrial one, here we find another instance of European exceptionalism. European countries (sixteen in all)...are the only ones in the world that have been through a phase in which the relative size of industrial employment was larger than either agrarian or service employment. In Britain, industrial employment reached its peak in…
razib | March 8, 2010I'm starting to see Disqus and Echo all over the web. Anyone else notice this? I wasn't happy when I had to move Gene Expression Classic off Haloscan, so the whole "death of comments" fad isn't something I'm a fan of. But it seems like Facebook's creation of a successful private web is now driving the Facebookification of the public web. The main issue I have with all this revolution of the "discussion" is that in my experience as a blogger most "discussion" is retarded and most discussants are barely sentient.
razib | March 6, 2010Icelanders reject deal to repay British and Dutch:
The outcome of the referendum had not been in doubt since Iceland had recently been offered better repayment terms than those contained in the deal on which residents were voting.
Partial referendum results from around a third of the cast votes showed 93 percent opposed the deal and less than 2 percent supported it. The rest cast invalid votes.
But the rejection will still have major repercussions, keeping financial aid on hold and threatening to undermine the center-left government of Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir.
"This has no…
razib | March 6, 2010This is funny:
Raised as Scientologists, Christie King Collbran and her husband, Chris, were recruited as teenagers to work for the elite corps of staff members who keep the Church of Scientology running, known as the Sea Organization, or Sea Org.
They signed a contract for a billion years -- in keeping with the church's belief that Scientologists are immortal. They worked seven days a week, often on little sleep, for sporadic paychecks of $50 a week, at most.
Check this conclusion:
Ms. Collbran says she still believes in Scientology -- not in the church as it is now constituted, but in its…
razib | March 6, 2010Iceland Voters Set to Reject Debt Deal:
After the dust began to settle last year -- after the banks failed, the currency collapsed, the stock market crashed and the government fell -- the dazed inhabitants of Iceland woke up to another unpleasant problem: They owed, it seemed, some $5.3 billion to more than 300,000 angry people in the Netherlands and Britain.
These were the customers of Icesave, a now notorious online retail branch of the Icelandic bank Landsbanki, which went bankrupt in October 2008 along with 85 percent of Iceland's banking system. The British and Dutch governments…
razib | March 5, 2010It has been known for years that interracial marriages have higher than expected divorce rates. But I did not know that the rates varied quite a bit contingent on the combination of race & sex. Gori Girl* has a post up, Interracial Divorce in the U.S. - Statistics and How Much They Matter:
- Marriages that do not cross a race barrier, but do have different ethnicities (i.e. white/Hispanic white) have a rate of divorce just a little higher than white/white marriages.
- Interracial marriages that have one white person and one person of another race mostly only show higher divorce rates when…
razib | March 4, 2010Fantasy-nerd in-chief at The New York Times, Ross Douthat points me to an essay, Why is there no Jewish Narnia? As others have pointed out there are plenty of Jewish fantasy writers, including perhaps the most prominent mainstream fantasist today, Neil Gaiman. But this part caught my attention:
...and whether it is called Perelandra, Earthsea, Amber, or Oz, this world must be a truly alien place. As Ursula K. Leguin says: "The point about Elfland is that you are not at home there. It's not Poughkeepsie."
Amber refers to Roger Zelazny's Amber series. Roger Zelazny's father was an immigrant…
razib | March 4, 2010My posts below on IQ, politics & religion resulted in a fair amount of blogospheric response, and weird comments. A few quick points
1) I think results on standardized tests are informative and correlate reasonably with a host of life outcomes. If you don't think they do, that's fine, I don't particularly care. But just do note that your dismissal of IQ carries no weight with me. Additionally, though I believe IQ to be substantially heritable, even that's not necessarily important in this case (since I am not focusing on evolution). Rather, realized test scores correlate with other…
razib | March 3, 2010Since Canadians seem to have an obsession with American health care policy (a nation of Ezra Kleins?), I thought I would pass along this weird Intrade screenshot:
OK, I assume my liberal readers have cleaned themselves up after seeing that screenshot. I check Intrade as part of my "morning reads" and I really don 't know what's going on here, the health care prices have been between 20 and 50 for all of 2010, and usually between 30 and 40. Perhaps a speculative bubble driven by the magic of Obama's voice? Or Democratic staffers with "inside knowledge" starting buy up shares because they knew…
razib | March 2, 2010Last spring I posted a review of Scitable at Nature. Since then Scitable seems to have expanded a bit, and I have given some more thought on its possible role in the ecology of the infosphere. Back in 2004 when I began to use Wikipedia regularly I was very impressed by the quality of the technical articles, but now that it's 2010 I have to say that far too often the Wikipedia entries are a bit thin in some domains. I suspect that my own expectations have started to outrun what is possible with Wikipedia, and probably I notice the "lack" because I've stopped going to Google as the first option…
edyong | March 1, 2010Souvenir shops in South Africa are full of lamps made out of ostrich eggs. The eggs are so big and strong that you can carve and cut intricate designs into their shells. The egg's contents are emptied through a hole and a bulb can be inserted instead, casting pretty shadows on walls and ceilings. The results are a big draw for modern tourists, but ostrich eggs have a long history of being used as art in South Africa. The latest finds show that people were carvings symbolic patterns into these eggs as early as 60,000 years ago.
Pierre-Jean Texier from the University of Bordeaux discovered a…
cagapakis | February 28, 2010My labmates and I love Lady Gaga. Like, love love love. Enough to make a parody fan video of Bad Romance. It is my pleasure to present to you "Lab Romance", a production of Hydrocalypse Industries. Enjoy!
Lyrics after the jump!
ø⸨°º¤ø⸸âø¤º°¨¸âø¤º°¨ ¨°º¤øâ¸LADYâø¤º°¨ âø¤º°¨ GAGA `°º¤ø¨°º¤ø⸸âø¤º°¨¸âø¤º°¨ ¨°º¤ø
Music by Lady Gaga, lyrics by Tami Lieberman and Jake Wintermute, performed by Jake Wintermute, editing by me and Patrick Boyle, dancing by the Silver Lab.
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oooh!
Oh-oh-oooh-oh-oh!
Caught in a lab romance…
razib | February 26, 2010US routs Finland 6-1, will play for hockey gold. It's really not even fair; this is a nation which was oppressed by Swedes for nearly a thousand years. I really hope those losers beat Slovakia so we can face them for the gold. Most of the time we don't have to think about them, except in the areas of humor and hockey.
cagapakis | February 26, 2010Some of the responses to my post about synthetically expanding the genetic code have highlighted some of the weaknesses in my argument about the safety of using a different genetic code. Namely, that "life finds a way", that we can't really ever know for sure what will happen when we release a synthetic organism in the wild, or how natural selection will act on them. The science fiction scenarios where engineered organisms escape, break out of the designed restrictions on their growth and take over in new and terrifying ways are compelling, frightening, and instructive for thinking about…
razib | February 25, 2010Citing shame, danger, one Madoff seeks name change:
Stephanie Madoff, who is married to Madoff's son Mark, has asked New York Supreme Court for permission to change her last name to Morgan and also, according to local media reports, made similar requests for her two young children.
razib | February 25, 2010Mike the Mad Biologist has a post up, Yes, We Have a PhD Glut... Which is interesting, because it isn't has if getting a doctorate is financially lucrative. Though getting a medical doctorate is financially lucrative. Perhaps the medical profession has the right idea, control labor supply?* Right idea for medical doctors at least....
* At least the medical profession hasn't opened the floodgate and enabled the overproduction of those with MDs who will never practice the profession and so be saddled with a lot of debt, which is the case with the legal profession (and for those who do pass the…