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Yanked out of google analytics, below the fold....

10 - Why is porn legal but prostitution illegal?
9 - IQ comparison site.
8 - Converting between IQ and SAT scores .
7 - Genetics of Hair Color (again).
6 - German penises 'too small for EU condoms'.
5 - Porno Arabica (this is due to Assman over-utilizing our search boxes!)
4 - Pigmentation variation in Europe.
3 - James Watson Tells the Inconvenient Truth: Faces the Consequences.
2 - 10 Questions for Heather Mac Donald.
1 - Intercourse and Intelligence.

Hm....

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John Derbyshire has a tribute up for a passing in the family.

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Two posts to check out over at Half Sigma. First, he suggests that John McCain's daughter is hot. I don't have a huge N, but that looks like a good picture, and it certainly benefits from any contrast effect, if you know what I mean. But you can't discount the photo, and her mother seems relatively well preserved. If you check out the video on this page you also note Meghan McCain has a feminine voice (apparently she thinks Barack Obama is cute). Second, in John Rawls, human biodiversity, and redistribution of wealth, Half Sigma is surprisingly sympathetic to a "liberal" position (I say surprisingly because anyone who reads the blog knows of his almost visceral dislike of liberals, though it is not without foundation from where he stands). I've been making the argument that liberals could make the case that Half Sigma suggests they should be making for a while now. Of course, my own values are not the same as John Rawls', so I can't deliver the redistributionist line with any sincerity. Because of my innate empathy deficit the "original position" thought experiment has always been a stretch cognitively, and I also don't accept the max-min rule as necesarily optimal (i.e., you accept lower total summed utility to maximize the minimum value across the distribution). But I do know that some readers of this blog of Leftish inclination have always held to this position implicitly, if not fully elucidated in a formal sense....

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One of those generic de-lurking threads if you are in the mood.

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Big Think is getting some press. Personally, seems a bit of weak tea next to Meaningoflife.tv and Beyond Belief. But I guess they're new, so we'll see....

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Manish sent me this story about the rise and fall (at least in substance) of Gawker. Long time readers will note that Liz Spiers, one of the original contributors to GNXP, looms large.

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Sign Up, Subscribe to the Feed and Learn More!

We've got 30 people signed up so far. I know more will come on board, so I'm looking forward to getting drowned in pure science in ~3 weeks.

Also, if you have a science themed blog post the link in the comments. Thinking about refurbishing the blogroll....

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So I read that Andrew Olmstead has died. I didn't read his blog and only vaguely knew of the name, though Gene Expression is on his blog roll.* 5 years ago when I started blogging it was a relatively new medium; people shouted at each other with disembodied voices. But slowly blogging and real life have become intercalated so it doesn't seem as much of an escape or release, it's just another part of life for many of us. I thought about that when I heard that triticale had died. He wasn't a frequent commenter on this weblog, or my other one, but I have a hard time remembering when he wasn't a commenter. I suspect he goes back to the blogspot days of the summer of 2002. It's all very strange and we grow up at some point I guess. I'm sure that the adults in the readership know what I'm talking about....

* Admission, I read very few blogs (on the order of a half a dozen) with any regularity.

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Overcoming Bias has a post up about good comment boards. I think one's premises/ends matter on these sorts of things. What are comment boards about? What do you want to get out of them? We've run this weblog for quite a bit longer than Overcoming Bias has been in existence. I would say two specific issues crop up:

1) Stupid people. If you don't have a base of knowledge or the ability to think deeply then there is going to be a problem (a fair number of "elite" comment contributors came to this blog without much knowledge but their aptitude meant that they had no issues picking up the material over time).

2) People whose premises vary so sharply from your own that one can never have a fruitful conversation in regards to the primary issue at hand (that is, all debates devolve into explorations of alternative axioms and whether the axioms are valid or not).

A third general issue

3) The modal comment contributor (as opposed to the value added elite comment contributor) has little invested in the system. They don't police, they might never read their rant or check follow up responses. It's like someone shitting in a swimming pool for fun. It happens. And their happiness function is maximized at the expense of the health of other human beings.

I think the comment which praised ./ is spot on. I have considered implementing Slashcode, but I don't have the inclination to enter into that much work for a hobby like this. As it is, as long time readers know, I along with the other posters keep a very close eye on the comments. We prune those with little reputation on the slightest pretense and we allow those with more capital built up more freedom of expression (in substance and delivery).

Note: for those who wonder why have the crappy haloscan system, it is because it is off site. In previous years GNXP's comments were the primary reasons why we overtaxed our servers.

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Heads up, Just Science 2008 is on. You can sign up to contribute now! Here are those who have signed on so far. The dates are February 4th-8th, 2008. More notifications soon!

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Mendel's Garden #21.

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Paul asked for recent comments. Look to the right. Just one note: that's a Haloscan widget, I can't fiddle around with the parameters or anything. Also, there are apparently Greasemonkey extensions which can give you a lot more control over Haloscan if you want. Just google it.

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Greg Mankiw on why he closed comments. What do people think of /.'s moderation system? I don't comment there much, but I remember people would complain that unpopular views would be moded down too much. Of course, a forced registration would probably filter out the drive-by-tards who can't be bothered....

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A comment below asked about a notation in a particular passage in a book I referenced. As it turns out the book is fully searchable on Amazon. Myself, I do searches on google books, and if there isn't a "view" of the book I'm looking for (or that page isn't viewable), I will check for the book on Amazon. This covers a large proportion of the "fact checking" one might need to do. Also, google scholar is pretty well integrated with books, so you might just want to start out there. Here are the libraries who have signed on to google books, so you can imagine that the coverage is pretty good.

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I didn't smoke out any interesting correlations in the GNXP Survey. For example, can you believe that those with more education tend to be of higher economic status? Assman was right, my questions were rather boring, so the analysis was going to yield boring as well. In any case, I've put the survey results up as a cross-tab text file in GNXP Forum Files if you want to play with it. N = 449. Long time readers will note relative stability in the profile of users on the site. The only thing I will offer is this:

How long have you been reading GNXP?

Male, N = 384
1 month to 1 year 28.65%
1 year to 3 years 42.45%
3 years to 5 years 22.66%
Since the beginning 6.25%

Female, N = 63
1 month to 1 year 36.51%
1 year to 3 years 42.86%
3 years to 5 years 20.63%
Since the beginning 0.00%

Some have suggested we have erosion of female readership because of the sexism. What do you think? I think the N's are small, and the blogosphere was much more male in 2002.

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Note: For those who need no explanation: Survey here, enter 55004 in Take A Survey box. Current results here.

Every now and then I do a "survey" on this website. Usually we get on the order of 300-500 responses. Generally we don't learn anything new (i.e., a disproportionate number of the readers tend to be young atheist libertarian males). But I've decided to try out a new hosted survey which might give us some correlation structure across the responses. There are 9 questions, and they shouldn't require much thought. Go here and enter survey number 55004 in the Take A Survey box. The link should open in a new window/tab, so don't worry about writing down the number, just look for the box at the right of the screen. You should be able to see the responses up to the moment, but I'll post the data breakdown across each question next weekend (e.g., atheist conditional upon being a libertarian, etc.). Thanks ahead!

(This post will remain at the top of the page for several days)

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Matt MacManes is hosting Tangled Bank #88, go check it out.

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Our local unicorn rider TGGP has a blog up. Check it out! (TGGP has 'evangelized' GNXP posts and views on a wide variety of blogs so he deserves a front page link for sure) He has good taste, using the same them as Chet Snicker (whose blog has gone dead it seems....).

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Over at 2 Blowhards there's an interview with Greg Cochran. Greg is of course a "friend of the blog," and you mostly know him because of his work in the area of evolution. But he does have strong opinions on other topics, as you might have noticed if you subscribe to The American Conservative. Part II is coming up tomorrow.

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Check out this new interview with Steven Pinker. It ostensibly focuses on his new book, The Stuff of Thought, though it covers a lot of ground. My own feeling is that the interviewer should have let the focus be more on Pinker than his own pet theories, but there's a lot of good stuff in there.

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Just a quick question for readers: does social networking software help out in your professional life? I'm a very tepid user of the various sites, I accept invites and so on, but it isn't something I invest a lot of time on in building a large of number of friends/contacts or fleshing out my profile. I know that some research has shown that a professional contacts are often found through your second-tier relationships, that is, not close friends but good acquaintances and what not. People who you know, but whose contacts don't overlap much with yours. So I suppose that's the point of something like linkedin. But does it really work? I've receive much better contacts through the blog, email, e-lists and so on.

(note, I am not disputing that social networking software helps your personal or social life. I know many people who've gotten action through friendster or myspace, but no one who has made professional gains via linkedin)

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Most of you have probably already seen/heard about this, but check out true porn clerk stories.

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When you've blogged for a while, and with some frequency, you wonder what this is all about. I don't generally get too caught up in that, there's more interesting stuff to contemplate. But, check out this from Google Analytics for the past 30 days of traffic for this website:


I've long known that most GNXP "readers" are "one off" events. I have no problem with that, if they find what they're looking for then you've done some good. That being said, I was a little shocked (and pleased, frankly) to see that over 8,000 visitors have arrived over 200 times in the past 30 days! I don't know, or care, about the details of how Google calculates this, rather, I'm interested in the gestalt sense of what's going on. Obviously the same people don't come everyday, but our unique visitor traffic has been in the 2,000-4,000 range for years, so these data together suggest that many people skip days (perhaps refreshing the site a lot on the weekend, or during one particular post where they participated in the thread?).

(click image for larger view)

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People have bugged me about the "open thread" for a while, so by popular demand, it's back. It will be to the right indefinitely, though I'll purge it of old/tardish comments regularly. Please place interesting links/sites, etc. (this includes items of interest to young straight males, *hint*, *hint*).

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The American Scene has just premiered as a new group blog with a fresh look & feel. Daniel Larison is a contributor. Now, keeping in mind that many of you use spiffy RSS readers with AJAX functionality which entails a non-trivial client side computational overhead be careful if you're on an older machine. Larison has a tendency to go "machine gun" in regards to post frequency and he might blow up your computer's CPU.

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Is at Epigenetics News.

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