Culture
razib | February 26, 2008In the comments to my post, Why brown people are midgets, a reader pointed me to this paper, which tabulates and analyzes some data from the 1960s for males. There isn't anything too surprising in the data set; Punjabis are tall compared to non-Punjabis, higher castes are taller than lower castes. There is a lot of unaccounted for variation. This was before Indian Shining, and the Green Revolution probably hadn't sunk in yet (I wouldn't be surprised if the between-state differences increased, while the between-caste differences decreased, in the past 40 years). So appropriate caveats.…
razib | February 25, 2008Despite the fact that the mainstream media likes to write a lot of stories how religious revival in the United States one of the great unreported facts of the last 15 years is the rise of the proportion of Americans who are not affiliating with any religion. The reason this isn't reported much is that it won't sell that much copy; the irreligious by their nature don't get that excited by irreligion. In contrast religious people want to read about how religion is on the rise. There will always be stories about how religion & science dovetail in the media because that sells magazines; the…
razib | February 24, 2008Well, sort of. I'm reading Henry Kamen's Empire: How Spain Became a World Power. Kamen is no Charles C. Mann, his story isn't 1491. For him the conquest of the Aztecs and Incas were haphazard affairs driven more by entrepreneurial intent than religious zeal or Spanish patriotism; his lens is that of social and economic history. Kamen's goal is to debunk those who would attempt to assert that the colonization of the New World was part of some grand imperial plan. It obviously wasn't, the personal correspondence of Charles V, the titular sovereign under whom the original New World…
razib | February 10, 2008An Association Between the Kinship and Fertility of Human Couples:
Previous studies have reported that related human couples tend to produce more children than unrelated couples but have been unable to determine whether this difference is biological or stems from socioeconomic variables. Our results, drawn from all known couples of the Icelandic population born between 1800 and 1965, show a significant positive association between kinship and fertility, with the greatest reproductive success observed for couples related at the level of third and fourth cousins. Owing to the relative…
cmooney | January 25, 2008So: I don't know if I said that I'm in New Orleans at the moment. Being busy and traveling, it has been hard to blog, as always.
I am here for the American Meteorological Society meeting, where on Wednesday I spoke on this panel about science communication. Audio should be available at some point. I'll link it.
And I'm sticking around until next week, when I do a Storm World speech at Tulane University. More info on that here.
But I'm also hanging out with the hometown crowd, and in that context, I recently went to a New Orleans Hornets game. Fun stuff, and the Hornets beat the Blazers, 96-…
sheril | January 25, 2008A Leopard in Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, South Africa. The region is a spectacular desert landscape comprised of scrublands and red dunes. The park supports herds of blue wildebeest, leopard, gemsbok, springbok, black mane lions, raptors, and more.
~ Nicolas Devos, Biologist and Wildlife Photographer
vhughes | January 20, 2008What can I and can't I write on my blog?
Why hat-tip?
Should I censor my commenters?
Should the MSM be able to take quotes from my blog out of context?
These were the TUFF questions discussed at the first session I attended at yesterday's NC Science Blogging Conference: "Science Blogging Ethics," led by Janet. The discussion that followed Janet's talking points led to one great idea: A blogger's code of ethics. More below the fold...
"Some people still see the blogosphere as the wild west," Janet said. Which means that the laws of this wild land are few and far between. Many of the session…
razib | January 16, 2008Sun to Buy Swedish Software Firm for $1 Billion:
Sun Microsystems, the large American seller of open-source software, said Wednesday that it would spend $1 billion to buy MySQL, a Swedish company that is the world leader in open-source database software used by Internet powers like Google, Yahoo, MySpace and YouTube.
I remember the sneering jibes about MySQL on /. back in 2000. Good for them. If you are doing mission critical work DBAs that recommend MySQL should get fired. Not ready for primetime. But in a world of blue-screens and Microsoft there's a lot of space out there for "good…
razib | January 16, 2008Kambiz has a post over at Anthropology.net, On Human Genetic Variation and Human Identity, where he riffs on the discussion that Martin & I just had about the intersection of genes and culture. More broadly it is a rumination upon the methods and paradigms which might be brought to bear on the study of humanity, broadly interpreted. In the comments I have also had some harsh things to say about cultural anthropology. In short: I think most cultural anthropology is crap. But I should put it in context and be clear about my sentiment: I prefer fiction to literary criticism. In other…
sheril | January 16, 2008A dragonfly at Bako National Park, Borneo where there are 275 named species recorded and many more yet to be discovered. Forty percent are endemic to the region.
~ Nicolas Devos, Biologist and Wildlife Photographer
In the latest issue of Seed magazine, our scibling Jonah Lehrer postulates 'The Future of Science...Is Art?'
In order to answer our most fundamental questions, science needs to find a place for the arts within the experimental process.
But maybe science already is art. The two have always been so intricately connected, they are fundamentally aspects of the same entity. Culture…
razib | January 16, 2008Some of you may know that Christina Aguilera and music industry executive Jordan Bratman are now the parents of a son. In contrast, Britney Spears has two children by her ex-husband, Kevin Federline. Years ago I used to prognosticate about the future of the young Ms. Aguilera and Spears; my own prediction was that Britney's career and life track would be rockier and less intelligently decided than Christina's. The main rationale I had at the time was that Christina has a greater quotient of native singing talent, while Britney relied on less durable strengths, so to speak.
I think my…
sheril | January 15, 2008Remember when I questioned my faith...
Well MacBook Air has arrived and I'm 'Saved'.
Hallelujah!
Cool, eh? What do readers think?
razib | January 15, 2008Big Weddings Bring Afghans Joy, and Debt:
In Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world, bridegrooms are expected to pay not only for their weddings, but also all the related expenses, including several huge prewedding parties and money for the bride's family, a kind of reverse dowry.
Bill Cosby may be right about African-Americans spending a lot on expensive sneakers--but he's wrong about why:
Economists Kerwin Charles, Erik Hurst, and Nikolai Roussanov have taken up this rather sensitive question in a recent unpublished study, "Conspicuous Consumption and Race." Using data from…
razib | January 14, 2008Anyone who has worked in IT knows about some shady practices here and there...and when it comes to databases many companies don't engage in much oversight. I suspect part of the problem is that the higher managers are distanced from the technological day-to-day and just assume that the nerds on the ground are taking care of things. I bring this up because today I had to resolve a problem with my cell phone provider. Apparently all my online administrative information was deleted when Sprint merged its databases with Nextel. This is a rather large corporation; you can imagine the sort of…
razib | January 14, 2008Martin has responded at length to my posts where I argue for an inclusion of genetic data in a synthetic model of human history and development. There are multiple issues here where we disagree, or differ in our interpretations. First, as Martin admits at one point, "Those are all my words put into Razib's mouth." Much of the post is a misunderstanding. Because I would rather devote my time to discussing positively my ideas, as opposed to misunderstandings or misconceptions of what I believe, I'm not going to deconstruct every single point which Martin attributes to my own sense of the…
voltagegate | January 14, 2008This week we have our first avian reference, a strange genus of heron.
In WoW, Nyctanessa is a level 44 demonology lock from the guild "42". There is only one other toon with the name, a 38 undead lock with the traditional spelling, but three others with the alternative genus name of Nyticorax (see below).
I'm assuming the GM is a Douglas Adams fan:
"Forty two?!" yelled Loonquawl. "Is that all you've got to show for seven and a half million years' work?"
"I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer, "and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with…
voltagegate | January 4, 2008I wrote this on nearly the same day last year, and since I've been reading some Asimov lately, thought I would repost. The dates have been changed for relevance.
On January 2, 2008, Isaac Asimov would have been 88 years old. Simultaneously, on the second, I turned 29 (edited).
Asimov died of AIDS from a tainted blood transfusion in 1983, a little known fact, even among his fans. It wasn't publicized until his wife, Dr. Janet Jeppson wrote a bit about it in the epilogue of Asimov's memoir It's Been a Good Life, published in 2002. Why wasn't it addressed until then? The following letter…
razib | December 31, 2007So, I just found out that Sayyed Qaboos bin Sa'id Al 'Bu Sa'id, the Sultan and autocrat of Oman, is a homosexual. Not that there's anything wrong with that! But that got me thinking, are there any other homosexual heads of state* out there? Please post a reference if you submit a candidate.
* Prime Ministers count in a parliamentary democracy.
sheril | December 29, 2007'I'm going to celebrate the new year when it's most convenient to me and, give or take 365 later, do it again.' - M.C. 2006
Many of us will spend the fleeting moments of 2007 toasting something that arguably rivals an odometer ticking over to a round number. Completely arbitrary. For even if space and time do exist, who's counting and to what end?
Those crazy Romans. In the midst of sport and spectacle, Ceaser and Virgil, and the cultural norms of man-boy love, their calender observed the new year in March. Then sometime around 153 BC, two consuls picked January 1st - conveniently later…
razib | December 23, 2007Found out something interesting today. In the Russian republic of Mari El there exists an indigenous pagan tradition which is not a reconstruction. That is, the pagans of Mari El trace their practice in an unbroken line back to their ancestors, as the Christianization during the period of Ivan the Terrible (the 16th century) was only partial. Other European pagans are by necessity neo- and must reconstruct their system of beliefs and rituals from extant records and folk traditions. The Saami were pagan until the 18th century, and with that I had assumed that all pre-Christian traditions…