Miss Iceland wins Miss World! Now, of course, the title is kind of a joke, because she looks a bit different than Miss Sweden or Miss Denmark, though not as exotic as Miss Norway. In fact, though it is surely seeing what you want to see, she seems to resemble Shannen Doherty or one of […]

Over Crooked Timber Chris Bertram posts something titled Religious groups as ethnic minorities where he suggests that 1) Muslims are an ethnic group 2) there are can be atheist Muslims and atheist Catholics. My first thought is a Ph.D. in philosophy don’t mean you aren’t an idiot (though it probably makes you more confident about […]

Imagine yourself walking in some woods and you see something out of the corner of your eye. What is your thought as you turn toward the object, a bear, or an old refrigerator? I don’t know about you, but most “woods” in suburban and small town areas have a greater number of discarded junk, from […]

With all the ‘debate’ about Intelligent Design out there I’m sure some of you are curious about evolution. I just heard from an acquaintance of mine that he purchased Mark Ridley’s anthology Evolution (Oxford Readers). Good. Recently I happened to refamiliarize myself with some old articles in The Boston Review by H. Allen Orr, an […]

10 words or less, what is biological evolution? (I’m looking for layperson gestalt perceptions)

Seed magazine has an article on Pinker’s recent lecture at the Institute for Jewish Research, but the author recommends you listen to the podcast instead so you can hear her “authentic New York Jewish accent” which is vital to the piece, which doesn’t discuss the theory so much as make fun of the audience (the […]

A model who for whom ksh/bash vs sh might mean something? Yeah, well, I figure I’d post something since Wired just did a story on Anina, who has her own weblog. I first saw her when Bob Cringely interviewed her for Nerd TV, and I’ll admit I only listened to the first 15 minutes (Anina […]

Below are 10 questions for Warren Treadgold, author of A History of the Byzantine State and Society (and numerous other works). 1 – We hear quite a bit about the impact of Al-Andalus on the Western intellectual tradition, in particular the renaissance of Aristotelianism spurred on by new translations of Greek thinkers available from reconquista […]

Carl Zimmer has a post put, Tree or a Trellis, which summarizes Alan Templeton’s Out-of-Africa Again & Hypothesis. No biggie, Templeton’s point is that a one locus genealogy does not necessarily represent the whole of a species’ evolutionary population history. Allan Wilson’s work in the 1980s with mitochondrial Eve was a case in conflation of […]

According to the Australian, Mike Morwood, leader of the Homo floresiensis discovery team, has now raised the idea that they originally lived in Australia and were pushed out by the colonizing human aborigines. The article doesn’t go into the details of Morwood’s hunch, but we’ll see if it goes further than the Hobbit-as-Monkey theory.

My math is a little rusty, but I wanted to offer a little statistical observation relating to ID and being dumb. Let…ID = believe in IDdumb = are dumb Prior for being dumb: talented tenth (or if you have a certain someone in mind, fill in your own prior)P(dumb) = 0.9P(~dumb) = 0.1 Likelihood of […]

Sometimes when I’m bored I stumble over to the The Valve, where gnxp regular John Emerson also hangs out. Today I saw this post which addressed the testimony of a sociologist of science for the pro-Design side in the Dover case. Basically, the issue is that the sociologist in question isn’t a standard issue Post-Modernist, […]

For the last few years I have been working on a new architecture for the Internet, which you can read about here: Problem: How can we deliver applications as services, over the Internet, and get PC-like functionality, where each user can mix-and-match applications as if they are on a PC? (Note: The question does not […]

Newsweek has a piece up titled Women of Al Qaeda, coauthored by Lionel Tiger (The Decline of Males and Men in Groups). Just like the standard Left-Right spectrum compresses a considerable amount of the multi-dimensional character of genuine political opinion, so the liberal-moderate-fundamentalist spectrum in Islam masks the tensions and diversity within the various groups. […]

Paul Bloom takes his hypothesis that humans are innately dualist and applies it to religion in the most recent issue of The Atlantic in Is God an Accident? Here is his conclusion: Nobody is born with the idea that humanity started in the Garden of Eden, or that martyrs will be rewarded in heaven; these […]

Researchers have associated a variant of the IGF2R gene with lower IQ in males–by an average of 20 IQ points. From the Dallas Morning News article [registration required]: The researchers studied about 300 children with an average age of 10. The children, all Caucasian, came from six counties in the Cleveland area. As a group, […]

Yes. Though I’ve said it a million times, but I will say it again, over the past generation the tendency toward respecting cultural particularisms has come at the expense of expanding the rights of individuals. This is not an incoherent or particularly new position, the group as the operational unit of identity worked for the […]

This is cool. Southern Hemisphere Springtails: Could They Have Survived Glaciation of Antarctica?: …In contrast, the deep divergences found for the four endemic Antarctic species indicate that they represent a continuous chain of descent dating from the break-up of Gondwana to the present. We suggest that the diversification of these springtail species (21-11 MYA) in […]

About two months ago I posted an entry where I sketched out an extremely simple model for skin color assuming there were 6 loci and two alleles (on and off). There was a reference in the comments to “5 loci” for skin color as a quantitative trait. From what I can gather that assumption derives […]

In my previous post where I elaborated on “theological incorrectness” and the deceptiveness of the tendency for humans to ascribe their behaviors and actions to beliefs which are shown to be irrelevant upon further scrutiny, I might have given the impression that the ideas themselves do not matter. I didn’t explicitly say that, and I […]