Culture
razib | February 14, 2010Wait Ends as Canada Wins Gold at Home:
Three men stood in the sea of red at Cypress Mountain on Sunday, their chests bare except for paint. Euphoria surrounded them, men and women, young and old, who waved Canadian flags and clanged cowbells and danced to the Black Eyed Peas.
Minutes earlier, Canada had secured its first gold medal of these Winter Olympics, a men's moguls triumph from Alexandre Bilodeau in the last event on the second day of competition. It was also the first gold medal won by a Canadian in an Olympics in Canada.
As Bilodeau raised his arms, his nation followed suit.
"This is…
razib | February 13, 2010I have pointed before to dating research which shows a stronger race-bias from women than men, correcting for physical appearance. In other words, if a man found a woman attractive the extra bonus for being of the same race was relatively marginal compared to the inverse. Well, it seems that this strong element of race-consciousness in the fairer sex might manifest in an even more evolutionarily relevant context. Race Bias Tracks Conception Risk Across the Menstrual Cycle:
Although a considerable body of research explores alterations in women's mating-relevant preferences across the menstrual…
razib | February 12, 2010Critics Say Google Invades Privacy With New Service:
When Google introduced Buzz -- its answer to Facebook and Twitter -- it hoped to get the service off to a fast start. New users of Buzz, which was added to Gmail on Tuesday, found themselves with a ready-made network of friends automatically selected by the company based on the people that each user communicated with most frequently through Google's e-mail and chat services.
But what Google viewed as an obvious shortcut stirred up a beehive of angry critics. Many users bristled at what they considered an invasion of privacy, and they…
razib | February 12, 2010Over at Slate Jack Shafer talks about Gerald Posner's plagiarism. Weirdly Posner seems to be positing an "efficient markets" model of why he couldn't be a plagiarist:
Clearly, if I were a serial plagiarizer, I would have scanned my own drafts with such [plagiarism detection] software before submitting to the Beast.
The Ben Domenech case actually shows that yes, internet-age plagiarists can be pathologically dumb. There are plenty of cases of small-time plagiarists; my friend Randall Parker of FuturePundit was pointed to another blogger who was copying his posts almost verbatim. Small potatoes…
cagapakis | February 11, 2010BioShock2 came out a couple days ago, the sequel to the wildly successful video game BioShock. BioShock is a first-person-shooter video game set in Rapture, an underwater city overrun by violently insane genetically engineered mutants called "Splicers", creepy zombie-like girls, "Little Sisters", that harvest corpses for "ADAM"--sea slug stem-cells that provide super-human strength, regenerative powers, and the ability to rewrite the human genome with the injection of "plasmids"--and genetically engineered "Big Daddies" that protect them, mentally blank superhumans grafted into enormous…
razib | February 9, 2010At least in my book. How to split up the US. The author took social networking data and split up the United States into clusters. Here's the map:
Clicking through you can find the top fan pages of various nations. I noticed Megan Fox came up high on a list of many. She's #8 in Pakistan, and #2 in India. #7 in England. #6 in Saudi Arabia! Isn't that haram? #1 in Canada, #2 in Australia, #6 in USA and #4 in Mexico.
Anyway, read the whole post.
razib | February 8, 2010That time of the year. Please take the Gene Expression Survey. I'll put up the analysis and the csv file next week. I have the usual questions, but also added a few more that might seem a bit weird. There are 30 questions total, and you don't need to answer all of them, but as I said the more you answer the more data there'll be. I did a trial run and it took less than 5 minutes; most people can answer a question about their sex or religious identity pretty quickly.
Update: You can view the results of the survey here.
cagapakis | February 5, 2010Synthetic biology is still a new field, and victories are small and incremental. Much of the promise and peril of synthetic biology still lies in the future: genetic devices made to order, computer aided genome design, organisms specially constructed for specific industrial purposes. Will we use this biological technology for good--new more affordable and accessible drugs, better vaccines to emerging diseases, and clean energy--or evil--new deadly pathogens and immortal super soldiers? I think it's safe to say that almost everyone hopes that we'll get all of the good stuff without any of the…
razib | February 4, 2010I went and saw Creation today. I enjoyed the film, though personally I am a bit tired of the religion vs. science angle. To some extent I felt that there was a conflation between the views & emphases of Thomas Huxley and Charles Darwin. Paul Bettany's character seemed to be expositing a view of evolution which was less subtle than what the real Darwin outlined so as to juxtapose his own stance cleanly against the simple narrative offered by traditional religion.
But a movie is a story about characters, not a perfect reenactment of history. One thing that struck me about Creation was the…
razib | February 4, 2010Check out what has learned from being on ScienceBlogs. Some of the comments are funny.
razib | February 1, 2010I got the following chart from Wikipedia, and it suggests that on a per capita inflation-adjusted basis we're spending more on defense today than we were during the Reagan build-up, or Vietnam! Is this for real?
razib | February 1, 2010PLoS Biology reviews Why We Cooperate:
What makes us human, what sets us apart from other animal species, and which traits do we share with our closest living relatives? Ever since Darwin introduced the notion of continuity in his theory of evolution, humans have been obsessed with the question of how to distinguish themselves from all other species. In the postwar period, our species became known as "Man the Toolmaker," until in the 1960s Jane Goodall watched chimpanzees using sticks to fish for termites, and that was that. We then distinguished ourselves using the term "Man the Hunter," but…
razib | February 1, 2010A comment at Secular Right:
Ever since the Revolution the Mullahs have wanted to erase all traces of the pre-Islamic Persian society. They realized they couldn't go and raze Persepolis and other relics without losing the support of the people. I've heard that it is common for people in Iran to complain openly that worst thing to ever happen to them was the Arab invasion.
A similar strain in Egyptian Islamist clerics and leaders exists but again, they cannot destroy the pyramids without losing legitimacy. Too many Egyptians are attached to their history, whether for economic or cultural…
razib | February 1, 2010Pew has a new report out, Almost All Millennials Accept Interracial Dating and Marriage. Pretty straightforward. But one thing that I found interesting, if not surprising, was that the gap in black-white attitudes had basically disappeared over the generations. I made a chart to illustrate this:
In fact, in more recent generations whites seem somewhat more accepting of interracial marriage within the family than blacks. I suspect that the black-white gap for Millennials and Gen-Xers is within the margin of error, but it's suggestive that the gap grew from the latter to the former.
Also, Pew…
razib | January 30, 2010Two interesting graphs from Calculated Risk. The first shows that the changes in GDP seem during the last recessive are on a par with those of the early 1980s and before (though we don't know if we're in a U or V shaped recession yet, though the odds are probably more U than V right now). But the second shows that in terms of employment we may be in uncharted territory, the worst of both worlds in terms of the jobless recoveries of the shallow recessions of the 1990s and early 2000s as well as the deep declines in employment of earlier recessions.
I've been hearing about the soon-to-come…
razib | January 29, 2010A comment below prompted me to slap together a post quickly displaying some data which illustrates just how religious South Asians are compared to East Asians. Anyone with an interest in world history will not be surprised by this assertion. When reading surveys of East Asian history I would occasionally reach a chapter titled "Religion," and the author would offer a quick explanation and apologia for why the topic was not given pride of place. By contrast, some have argued to a first approximation South Asian history is a history of South Asian religion. (Though I do not focus on that issue…