razib | November 14, 2008Yesterday I implored the country not to save Detroit. Today Daniel Gross argues that Detroit's Big Three Are a National Disgrace: But we still need to save them. This is the only part which I think is on point:
But General Motors wouldn't be a typical bankruptcy. GM's management argues that the very act of filing for bankruptcy eliminates the possibility of recovery since people would be reluctant to purchase expensive, long-lived assets (cars and trucks) from a bankrupt entity. And because of GM's size and the place it occupies in the supply chain, the company's failure would likely…
razib | November 13, 2008Well, the title doesn't matter. I think it is a fait accompli. Some Coastal Democrats might be suspicious of the car culture, but they have empathy for the problems which emerge from de-industrialization. Republicans have no credibility or capital. A bailout will happen, but I believe that most people will see that it is going to simply put off the inevitable. Megan McCardle talks about the de-industrialization of the "Other Rustbelt," towns centered around less iconic firms:
Just as the auto industry made (and broke) Detroit, Rochester was the creation of Eastman Kodak. Kodak bonus day…
razib | November 12, 2008The map to the left shows the counties which voted for Obama (blue) and McCain (red) in the 2008 election. The blue counties are part of the Black Belt, the area where blacks are a majority of the population because of the economic concentration of cotton culture during the 19th and 20th centuries. The McCain Belt, those counties where John McCain beat George W. Bush, is getting some press, but obviously it is interesting to wonder about areas where large black populations which increased turnout are likely masking the shift of the white vote for John McCain. I have already shown on a…
razib | November 11, 2008A Test of Climate, Sun, and Culture Relationships from an 1810-Year Chinese Cave Record:
A record from Wanxiang Cave, China, characterizes Asian Monsoon (AM) history over the past 1810 years. The summer monsoon correlates with solar variability, Northern Hemisphere and Chinese temperature, Alpine glacial retreat, and Chinese cultural changes. It was generally strong during Europe's Medieval Warm Period and weak during Europe's Little Ice Age, as well as during the final decades of the Tang, Yuan, and Ming Dynasties, all times that were characterized by popular unrest. It was strong during the…
razib | November 11, 2008The New York Times has a piece up, After Breakthrough, Europe Looks in Mirror, which quotes people who wonder when Europe will have its own colored head of state. Let's ignore for a moment that the longest serving Prime Minister in British history was 1/8 Indian; that was nearly 200 years ago and despite his known and acknowledged colored heritage Lord Liverpool was first and foremost a scion of the British nobility. These sorts of self-flagellations make no sense. The United States is about 30% non-white (many Hispanics identify as racially white, but operationally the Hispanic/Latino…
razib | November 11, 2008You can watch Beyond Belief: Candles in the Dark online (Chris & Sheril have two segments). Unfortunately the neat Flash interface means you can't just load an audio file into your ipod....
razib | November 10, 2008In regards to the title, in a word, I don't think so. More on that later. Nationally the exit polls suggest that these are results for Barack Obama broken down by "Size of Place":
Urban: 63%
Suburban: 50%
Rural: 45%
There's a rather clear relationship here whereby Obama's vote totals in urban areas are higher than in suburban areas, which are higher than in rural areas. Various factors such as his liberalism, his blackness and his urban machine origins make this totally unsurprising. "Real Americans" in rural areas naturally are more averse to Obama. But what about states that buck the…
razib | November 10, 2008Michael Lewis has a very long piece up sketching out the fever dream that was the late great Wall Street:
This was what they had been waiting for: total collapse. "The investment-banking industry is fucked," Eisman had told me a few weeks earlier. "These guys are only beginning to understand how fucked they are. It's like being a Scholastic, prior to Newton. Newton comes along, and one morning you wake up: 'Holy shit, I'm wrong!'â" Now Lehman Brothers had vanished, Merrill had surrendered, and Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were just a week away from ceasing to be investment banks. The…
razib | November 10, 2008Chorus of demands to let doctor Bernhard Moeller stay:
The Rudd Government is under pressure from all fronts, even Labor colleagues, to overturn a decision denying German doctor Bernhard Moeller permanent residency in Australia because his son Lukas has Down syndrome.
The Immigration Department this week rejected Dr Moeller's application for permanent residency, saying the potential cost to the taxpayer of 13-year-old Lukas's condition was too great.
This is not to say that government backed health care is right or wrong, but it is a reminder that transferring responsibilities from the…
razib | November 10, 2008Recently I listened to an interview of the historian Joseph Ellis. Ellis observes that the decimation of Native Americans was a Greek tragedy, while the perpetuation of slavery for three generations of the republic was a Shakespearean one. The distinction which Ellis makes is that Greek tragedy is fated, while Shakespearean tragedies are subject to the whims of our own will and contingent choices. The latter we may theoretically forestall or alter, but the former is subject to the deterministic wheels of history.
I believe that as a factual matter Ellis is correct; the indigenous peoples…
razib | November 10, 2008You know what the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) is implicitly, they're the list of populations you've seen in many human genetics papers already. Now the Pritchard lab has put up a nice browser to query the data in a manner analogous to Haplotter. One of the major improvements, aside from the fact that you're looking at 52 populations instead of 3, is that it uses GET to pass parameters instead of POST. That means I can link to the queries for KITLG and SLC24A5. Try it, it works! Under instructions it is laconically stated that:
Search using a sequence name, gene name, locus, or…
razib | November 9, 2008Politico is the pleasure of the pundit-class. That being said, Andrew Gelman's site makes it rather clear that Politico is also US Weekly for politicians. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but their fixation on epiphenomenal froth should really have "for entertainment purposes only" disclaimer. I'm picking on Politico because I don't want to crucify Howard Fineman again lest the dead shall rise to rebuke my abuse.
This post is prompted by Andrew's post, A Democratic swing, not an Obama swing:
I think Charlie Cook was closer to the mark when he wrote, "The political environment and…
razib | November 9, 2008E.O. Wilson shifts his position on altruism in nature:
It is a puzzle of evolution: If natural selection dictates that the fittest survive, why do we see altruism in nature? Why do worker bees or ants, for instance, refrain from competing with those around them, but instead search for food or build nests on behalf of their companions? Why do they sacrifice their own reproductive success for the good of the group?
In the 1960s, British biologist William Hamilton offered an explanation in a theory now called kin selection. When animals, often insects, help siblings or other relatives survive,…
razib | November 9, 2008Notes on Sewall Wright: The Shifting Balance Theory (Part 2):
Part 1 of this note dealt with Sewall Wright's Shifting Balance theory of evolution (the SBT) in its original form, as propounded between 1929 and 1931. This final part deals with subsequent developments in the theory. These include refinements and elaborations, some changes of emphasis, one major addition, and one major change of substance. In particular I will cover:
1. The role of new mutations
2. The concept of selective peaks
3. The effect of changes in environment
4. The adaptiveness of evolution
5. The process of intergroup…
razib | November 9, 2008Political Behavior through the Lens of Behavior Genetics:
These are all fascinating questions and Fowler and colleagues are only beginning to uncover the answers. I anticipate that Fowler and his partners in crime will continue to leave a trail of evidence from which we can build an even stronger case for a political science which does not make assumptions that are at odds with stylized facts from behavior genetics. Or, for that matter, at odds with facts derived from any of the other scientific disciplines from which the "genopolitics" crowd draw inspiration.
Read the whole thing, as the…
razib | November 9, 2008A new story about Vitamin D, Could Vitamin D Save Us From Radiation?. I don't even post most of the stuff on Vitamin D that shows up in my RSS. I have to wonder: is there some industry group pushing this? I know that there are often fads for "miracles cures" and biochemical silver bullets.
razib | November 8, 2008Earlier this week Andrew Gelman suggested that it looks like Barack Obama's election had less to do with "realignment" then an overall tilt in the electorate, which just managed to "tip" a few borderline states. This is rather clear when you look at maps of the results from 2004 to 2008. But today Gelman reports data which suggests that the gains in 2008 were disproportionately in wealthier regions. This makes sense when you inspect the McCain Belt, those counties where Republicans actually did better in 2008 than they did in 2004.
razib | November 7, 2008Anthropology.net & prefonal both have posts up which survey a new paper, A Functional Genetic Link between Distinct Developmental Language Disorders:
We found that FOXP2 binds to and dramatically down-regulates CNTNAP2, a gene that encodes a neurexin and is expressed in the developing human cortex. On analyzing CNTNAP2 polymorphisms in children with typical specific language impairment, we detected significant quantitative associations with nonsense-word repetition, a heritable behavioral marker of this disorder (peak association, P=5.0x10-5 at SNP rs17236239). Intriguingly, this region…
razib | November 6, 2008Over the past few months I've been reading books on American history seeing that I am American and I should know a bit about the country which I call home. For example, right now I'm reading Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era 1829-1877. I was surprised when I stumbled upon Richard Mentor Johnson, the 9th Vice President of the United States, between 1836 and 1840:
Following the war, Johnson returned to the House of Representatives, and was elevated to the Senate in 1819 to fill the seat vacated by John J. Crittenden, who resigned to become Attorney General. As his constituency…