Below Razib writes: Though militarily and politically the Song were a subpar dynasty, in terms of cultural and economic production they were exceptional. This is peripheral to Razib’s main point in the post, but it’s an intrinsically important question which to my knowledge has not been adequately discussed anywhere. The weakness of the Sung was […]

High Blood Pressure Could Be Caused By A Common Virus, Study Suggests: A new study suggests for the first time that cytomegalovirus (CMV), a common viral infection affecting between 60 and 99 percent of adults worldwide, is a cause of high blood pressure, a leading risk factor for heart disease, stroke and kidney disease. Interesting […]

Or is it more like “letting sleeping dogs lie?” On the issue of that new statue: That Proto-German sex toy is fun enough, but it’s time the media stopped elevating things like it as evidence that our species only learned to think abstractly among its subset who, if the lifespan of our species were 24 […]

When I first used Google in 1998 I was amazed. The search experience was qualitatively different. All of my friends who I encouraged to use Google in 1998-1999 had the same experience. WolframAlpha doesn’t seem to be in the same league. So the NationMaster bookmark stays. Google:WolframAlpha :: Michael Jordan:Harold “Baby Jordan” Miner? I hope […]

Full-Figured Statuette, 35,000 Years Old, Provides New Clues to How Art Evolved. It’s a story based on the new finding of a 35,000 year old “Venus”. The sexually explicit aspects are kind of funny, but we’ve seen technologies such as VHS, DVD and web video streaming being driven by porn in the modern era. Perhaps […]

From page 17 of Neo-Confucianism in History: …Already by the 1050s southerners accounted for the majority of the literary men; within a century southerners would tower over intellectual culture, as they would continue to do for centuries to come. By the 1070s officials from the south had come to dominate policy-making offices. Literati knew this, […]

Alan Jacobs, GLADWELL’S GENERALIZATIONS: Gladwell is always fun to read, but he invariably commits one of the sins we English teachers most warn against when we’re teaching freshman writing: he loves to make vast generalizations from one or two particular cases. One obvious point is that a style of play which is effective at one […]

Many readers have probably heard that the ACLU has sued Myriad Genetics for its patent on genetic testing on BRCA1/2 (these genes account overall for a small fraction of breast cancer cases, but for many of the strongly inherited cases). Many companies hold gene patents, so why sue Myriad? The answer is simple: in the […]

India: Rural villagers say, “no toilet, no bride”: In Ladravan, a village of farms and brick kilns about an hour’s drive from Delhi international airport, one bride has already divorced her groom when she learned that his family lied about having a toilet, says Anil Kumar Chhikara, one of the village leaders. Another young woman, […]

Life histories, blood revenge, and reproductive success among the Waorani of Ecuador: The Waorani may have the highest rate of homicide of any society known to anthropology. We interviewed 121 Waorani elders of both sexes to obtain genealogical information and recollections of raids in which they and their relatives participated. We also obtained complete raiding […]

I was in the bookstore and decided to look through God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World. The authors work at The Economist, so I assumed it was going to be more reportage than a popular distillation of scholarship. I haven’t read the whole thing, but that seems about […]

Check out the results (you can also get the data yourself). Here’s a sample: Out of 166 respondees: 160 (96.4%) were male, 5 (3%) were female, and one chose not to reveal their gender. The mean age was 27.16, the median was 25, and the SD was 7.68. The youngest person was 16, and the […]

Analysis of genomic diversity in Mexican Mestizo populations to develop genomic medicine in Mexico. The title says it all, so I won’t post the abstract. The article is OA, so you can read the whole thing, but I thought this figure from the supplements was pretty informative: Sonora is exactly where you would expect Mestizos […]

Via Steve Sailer and Half Sigma, we have this New York Times op-ed by David Brooks on work (pdf) by Will Dobbie and Roland Fryer on the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ). Brooks writes: The fight against poverty produces great programs but disappointing results. You go visit an inner-city school, job-training program or community youth center […]

To test how sensitive Google Trends is to fundamental changes in the thing you’re asking about, I decided to see if it could pick up the seasonality of fruit availability. Sure enough, it does. Just check blueberries or pomegranate: when the fruits are plentiful, people are very interested in them; outside the peak season, interest […]

A Genetically Mediated Bias in Decision Making Driven by Failure of Amygdala Control: Genetic variation at the serotonin transporter-linked polymorphic region (5-HTTLPR) is associated with altered amygdala reactivity and lack of prefrontal regulatory control. Similar regions mediate decision-making biases driven by contextual cues and ambiguity, for example the “framing effect.” We hypothesized that individuals hemozygous […]

Julian Sanchez has a post up, A “God-Shaped-Hole” Shaped Hole. He notes: Which brings us around to the core problem with Stuttaford’s claim. As James Joyner observes, it’s a little doubtful whether the need to worship deities can really be an ineradicable, hardwired human trait when polls show that in much of Western Europe, the […]

Calculated Risk points to this piece in The New York Times about the increased savings rate: This shift back to thrift may seem to be a healthy change for a consumer class known for spending more than it earns, but there is a downside: American businesses have become so dependent on consumer spending that any […]

One thing that many of us worry about is how well educated the educatable public is about biology and evolution — are they reading superficial stories, or are they being exposed to the deeper ideas? (Set aside whether they’ll remember any of it in a few years.) Actually, what most really worry about is whether […]

mongolian bling teaser from benj binks on Vimeo.