I have lived in a variety of urban situations. When I lived in a larger city, or visit them, people rarely make much note of me. When I lived in a medium sized city in upstate New York in the early 1980s, people would often ask if I was from India (I would say "Yes" […]

Just read parts of A Brief History of the Human Race by Michael Cook, and it brought up an interesting point which I’ve often reflected upon, though without any great original insights. Southeat Asia, Indo-China and the Malay archipelago, are about equally distant from the heartlands of Chinese and Indian culture, and rather far from […]

Recently, I have come to the conclusion that American culture, influenced by Protestant propoganda, has unfairly painted the Roman Catholic Church as an enemy of science & progress. Even anti-religious secuarlists like Richard Dawkins use the Church as their special foil, the relic of a demon haunted age. On the other hand, there are essays […]

Father love isn’t the same as mother love, that’s for sure…. The Namboothiri Brahmins of Kerala in southern India had a peculiar tradition. Only the the eldest son married a Namboothiri woman. The younger sons entered into relationships with Nair women (the ruling caste of Kerala). All their children would have the status of the […]

While on the subject of dubious ‘experts’ (see my post on African AIDS), the British newspapers in the last week have had a lot of coverage of Professor Sir Roy Meadows. Sir Roy is about as eminent as doctors get: recognised as one of the world’s leading p(a)ediatricians, top professor at a medical school, recipient […]

This book is gaining attention: “Seductress: Women Who Ravished the World and Their Lost Art of Love” by Betsy Prioleau. A study of “50 of the world’s most famous seductresses — from Cleopatra to Catherine the Great to Mae West” it makes the point “that physical beauty was not — and is not — a […]

I finally read the paper on Indo-Europeans that gave support to the "Anatolian Farmer" hypothesis. It was very compelling. I’m mildly convinced. Update: OK, here is the link zizka pointed to about linguists criticizing the study. Follow the links within the link, and you can find many attacks and pot-shots of the study. A few […]

Katy posted a comment on Saddam in the message board. If any of you care about that…. Posted by razib at 03:34 PM

Interesting article in this week’s Spectator (UK) by Rian Malan, headed ‘Africa isn’t dying of AIDS’. Here’s a link. The gist of it is that estimates of the incidence of HIV infection and deaths from AIDS in Africa are grossly exaggerated. They are not based on actual observed infection rates among representative samples, but on […]

Following the overwhelming popularity (joke!) of a couple of geometrical puzzles posted by Ole and myself, here’s another one. Ivor Grattan-Guinness’s Fontana History of the Mathematical Sciences, p. 566, mentions a neat little theorem in Euclidean geometry. Draw a square, ABCD. On one of the sides, AB, construct a right-angled triangle AFB, with the hypoteneuse […]

The Station Agent. Go see it! Posted by razib at 12:40 AM

George Will once wrote a book titled “Statecraft as Soulcraft.” For many years historians have known that the modern handmaid of the state, the nation, is mythcraft. In the past ten years genetics has begun to highlight very sharp divergences from national myths and even linguistic and historical analyses (the latter often influenced by and […]

Manish Vij keeps up on all things brown (desi) so I don’t have to…. Posted by razib at 07:34 PM

Excavating Y-chromosome haplotype strata in Anatolia (PDF, full article online). Posted by razib at 02:42 AM

Human beings have a problem "recognizing" numbers of objects much beyond half a dozen, at which point they start "counting." One, two and three seem almost primally hard-wired into the human conception of numeracy[1]. I have spoken several times about the problem of human typologies, where people tend to enforce you into their own conceptions. […]

Dienekes links to an abstract calculating that the peoples of Japan are a hybrid population that has issued out of mixtures between the Jomon and Yayoi. Roughly speaking the latter are the most recent arrivals (from Korea, circa 0-500 C.E.), bringing the general cultural core of "Japaneseness," while the Jomon heritage is to be found […]

In a series of recent posts – A, B, C and D – I questioned whether differences in IQ between nations necessarily had a genetic basis. Dienekes also has some excellent posts on the subject (November 28 onwards). I promised not to return to the subject. I am now breaking that promise, but there are […]

Religious attire is a big deal in France now. Here is the deal: France has a super-high barrier of separation between Church and State, and public displays of religiosity are generally frowned upon and sometimes legally proscribed (though there are exceptions, read the articles linked above). Here are some more details that are adding fuel […]

Letter From Gotham ruminates on Jews & anti-Semitism. Posted by razib at 11:50 PM

On my post Ms. Math Amy Greenwood comments: My general feeling is that women tend to be a bit more pragmatic about education than men. I have no data to support this except anectodal observations. For me, math and physics are only marginally interesting at best…. until I need to build something, at which point […]