razib | August 20, 2007Most of you know that I was in NYC this weekend and I hung with the ScienceBlogs crowd. Others have summarized the goings on with eminent competence, so I won't add more to that. There was lots of fun to be had, and I made sure I had some of it. But, I would like to give a shout out to two individuals: Lee Billings and Joshua "I like it brown!" Roebke. They're editors at Seed, and really fun guys when drunk/drinking. I do have to say that my memories are pretty pleasant since I schooled Roebke in a "Yo Mama!" face off, nerd style. He likes it dead and brown; that's all you have to know…
razib | August 20, 2007I went to Bacchus on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn tonight. Great food, great wine. But here is why I am giving them props: habanero tabasco sauce!. Yes, instead of offering me cayenne tabasco, they actually offered me a nice spicy condiment. And I shall remain eternally grateful. So:
Bacchus
409 Atlantic Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11217-1702
Phone: (718) 852-1572
Check it out. And ask for hot sauce!
razib | August 19, 2007Went to see Superbad with Jake, Kara & Jason Rosenhouse. I thought it was OK, only checked time once. But again, the pairing of fug dudes with un-fug chicks leaves me unsuspended in my disbelief.
razib | August 16, 20071 hour after I landed in NYC from the land of green trees and the Pacific I had to explain to another visitor that the E train could take him to Penn Station, that you could recognize it by the colored label affixed to the front and the sides. And yes, they would announce it when they arrived at Penn Station (and you could actually look out the window and note that it wasn't a typical stop by the bustle). My fellow stranger was from a state called New Jersey. Strange, eh?
razib | August 16, 2007For the Northwestern bibliophiles, did you know that Powell's started in Chicago? I did not. There is a small Powell's bookstore (the original) about 5 blocks east of the University of Chicago. Seeing the exact same font on the sign and the name is pretty strange if you aren't expecting to stumble upon it.
razib | August 14, 2007In a line.
Guy in front of me: Line's long, hey?
Me: You Canadian?
Guy in front of me: [surprised look] What! How'd you know? How could you tell.
Me: Well, you said "hey" in your first three words. I thought you were either joking and pretending to be Canadian for laughs, or actually Canadian.
Guy in front of me: I didn't even know I said "hey."
Me: Canadians are funny. Canada is funny.
Guy in front of me: We're a much bigger country than you.
Me: But you have a smaller population than California. And you're always frozen.
Guy in front me: [nervous laugh] Well, that's pretty much right,…
razib | August 14, 2007I'm on the road/traveling for the near future, so posting will be light, but these four papers look interesting (haven't had a time to look closely).
Accumulation of slightly deleterious mutations in mitochondrial protein-coding genes of large versus small mammals
Varying environments can speed up evolution
Evolution in the hypervariable environment of Madagascar
Innovation and robustness in complex regulatory gene networks
razib | August 13, 2007Ezra Klein asks "How Quickly Do Genes Change?" in response to Andrew Sullivan gushing over Greg Clark's new book, A Farewell to Alms. Clark offers the hypothesis that the industrial revolution in England was catalyzed in part by changes in behavior which might have been reinforced by selection for particular alleles. In terms of the specific hypothesis, I'm skeptical and would probably bet that Clark has overplayed his hand and put too many eggs in one basket. But, in response to Ezra's question I threw down a flurry of comments (with a lot of grammatical errors due to my haste) which you…
razib | August 10, 2007TNR has an interesting piece (here is a cache version of the first page) about Jewish-Christian polemics (in both directions). It is mostly a review of Peter Shaeffer's Jesus in the Talmud; a scholarly work which predictably appeals to anti-Semites. My comment on Noah Feldman and his perceptions of Orthodox Judaism elicited a lot of response. Most of it was interesting, though of course some individuals across the web became convinced that I was an anti-Semite who was a Muslim working against Jews. This missed the whole greater thrust of my point: it isn't always about you, context and…
razib | August 9, 2007Hung with old college friends last night. We kept referring to South Park episodes to illustrate a point or make an analogy so as to clarify an issue. Interesting that this is a common touchstone for my generation.
razib | August 9, 2007Update: Another post on this topic at my other blog.
A few days ago I pointed to a new paper, Evidence of Still-Ongoing Convergence Evolution of the Lactase Persistence T-13910 Alleles in Humans. Knowing my interest in the topic you might assume that I would be "all over this." Well, I finally read the paper (twice) and I have to say it's a really interesting piece of work.
To the left is a map of the proportion of the T-13910 SNP near the LCT locus in selected populations. In Eurasia the correlation between this allele and "Lactase Persistence" (LP) is very strong (r ~ 0.97 in terms of LP…
razib | August 8, 2007/. has a post with the title Humanity's Genetic Diversity on the Decline, drawing from a recent paper which found that the mtDNA haplotype diversity in England was lower than 1,000 years ago. The authors were surprised because of course one presumes England is more cosmopolitan today than in the past, and so there would be more diversity. As a resolution to their finds they suggest that demographic dynamics, such as the Black Death with resulted in the death of 1/2 of the English in 1 generation, as well as selection for mtDNA variants (i.e., a haplotype is linked toward some functional…
razib | August 8, 2007The New York Times has an article up reiterating the fabled "bushiness" of hominid phylogenetic trees:
Scientists who dated and analyzed the specimens -- a 1.44 million-year-old Homo habilis and a 1.55 million-year-old Homo erectus -- said their findings challenged the conventional view that these species evolved one after the other. Instead, they apparently lived side by side in eastern Africa for almost half a million years.
My knowledge of bones is not strong, so I leave it to John Hawks or Kambiz to decompose the details. That being said, the big picture is that this is another strike…
razib | August 8, 2007In High-wire Act:
Before agreeing to work on the opera, Albarn and Hewlett made two trips to China with Shi-Zheng. While visiting the city of Yinchuan, in Ninzxia Province, Albarn spent an afternoon lying on the floor of his hotel room recording the sound of horns in the street.
There is no "Ninzxia province." Yinchuan is the capital of Ningxia. Or NÃngxià or Ning-hsia or Ningsia. Google turns out 5 results for "Ninzxia," one of which is the article in The New Yorker (the others look like purposeful hidden misspellings so that search engines will catch the sites).
Not a big deal, but if…
razib | August 7, 2007I mentioned earlier that Google News had kicked ScienceBlogs off their news feed, but left the Discovery Institute's blog. Well, look at what showed up today in my "Google Alerts" for the query "human evolution":
razib | August 7, 2007A few weeks ago the study about obesity being socially contagious was all the rage. For anyone interested in human behavior this shouldn't be surprising, we are a social creature and our peer group is an essential part of our 'extended phenotype'. The psychologist Judith Rich Harris has famously argued that the 40% of unattributed component of variation of personality is due to our peer groups (10% is parents and 50% is genes). In Harris' model the best thing that parents can do is choose a particular peer group with values which reflect their own priorities. In other words, buying a house…
razib | August 7, 2007TNR has a piece by one of the writers for Buffy and the Vampire Slayer (and an assorted other sci-fi shows) about the appeal of some stories (e.g., Harry Potter) and the lack of others. Her basic thesis is that the story needs a "Chosen One" central spoke to anchor the axis of the narrative. That sounds fine, though I have to wonder why David Lynch's Dune tanked so much (just a bad film?). I don't have any grand theory for why sci-fi and science fiction are ghettoized in the norm but occasionally break out to become cultural phenomena. It seems like one of those stochastic "Tipping Point…