Congratulations. "The founding editor of Gawker was an occasional contributor to the first incarnation of GNXP in 2002." Interesting - I never knew that.

"With respect to European countries, this makes sense. As I’ve argued elsewhere, America/Europe income differences are due in no small part to different taxation policies. Lower marginal tax rates do have long-term effects on standards of living." But Scandinavian countries have some of the highest tax rates in Europe, yet they're also the richest countries in Europe. They are small countries & arguably "outliers", but still. Also, it's not at all clear that Europe has a lower standard of living than the US despite lower per capita GDP, e.g. on measures like life expectancy & crime rates. w.r.t Israel, isn't comparing wealth between Israel and other developed nations spurious because Israel started "from scratch" (mostly) so recently?

Though Israel is similar. Generally speaking this is Google trying to do Wolfram Alpha better than Wolfram Alpha, right?

The Yang paper is very interesting but the methodology relies on some assumptions: in particular, they found that the SNPs on the chip accounted for about 40% of the variability - which leaves half missing, since the narrow sense heritability of height is 0.8. But they argue that the true value is 80% if you "correct" for the fact that the analysed SNPs may not be the casual ones, and may only imperfectly tag the true causal variants especially if the causal variants are rare. However I'm not sure how valid that is... the peer reviewers approved it, I guess.

But do the Hadza have the concept of "man hands"? They do seem to care about grip strength...

Why are there so many movies about remote-controlled surrogate bodies at the moment? "Surrogates", "Gamer", now "Avatar"... is this because it fits with the 2009 zeitgeist, or it because Hollywood writers are plagiarists?

Assuming the Vietnam data are nonsense & discarding them: 
 
The median is 5.6 & the mean is 5.61. But only 20 samples have a score of 5 or below, while 36 have a score of 6 or above. 3 are 4.5 or below, while 17 are 6.5 or above (although this includes Bangladesh, Columbia, Puerto Rico & Indonesia twice).

But Seinfeld also taught us the manifold dangers of wearing a wedding ring to attract women.

Happens in the UK. But it could just be that it happens to us because we don't look like typical thieves...

American libraries are obviously a lot more fun than British ones. We don't get bums or porn.

So basically the Onion was right except the guy's name was U'Neill?

What's up with Morocco? Male - 65.6 the highest; Female, 20.1, very low. 
 
How would that even work? Methinks some Moroccon men have an inflated opinion of their own prowess...

Actually yes in the case of LiveJournal. Some LJers recently created a clone/rival, DreamWidth, and there was some degree of drama about people swapping over.

If we allow gay marriage, human-chimp marriage is next! :P

The contours of this map are eerily reminescent of the map you did a couple of weeks ago showing where male life expectancy deviates from income predictors. 
 
Does this mean liberal whites live longer, even controlling for income? (Or liberal states make people live longer...)

Fascinating, but, one question - is this life expectancy at birth (and if so how is it estimated), or actual recorded age at death? Because the obvious outlier on your map is southern Florida, which is far from Canada but long-lived. But is that just because old people retire there? 
 
Looked at another way, do people born in the South really die earlier (vs what you expect from income) or is it that people who live long enough move out of the South and die somewhere else?

Interesting - I'd never heard of telogeny before but I'm not surprised it's still around. I'm sure if you looked hard enough you would find breeders who still believe (although maybe only implicitly) in IAC too. Both ideas make a certain degree of intuitive sense.

Surely it depends why the monopoly organisation got its monopoly. If it's a state organization whose raison d'etre (at least partly) is innovation that's different to if it's a profit-making enterprise that happens to be better at making profits than competitors.

On a related note, PLoS One have just run a paper arguing that the more popular a field is, the less reliable are the results in it. The example they use is from molecular biology but it is clearly relevant to genetics as well. Every field has a "gene-de-jour" - in psychiatry it was 5HTTLPR at least until a few days ago.

"Bing"? Oh dear.