I have often heard that the second law of thermodynamics is just a result of math (more specifically, statistics). Eliezer Yudkowsky would frame it in Bayesian terms as reflecting our ignorance about the microstates of component particles. I suppose the fact about the universe is that its initial state is uncommonly orderly (Julian Barbour instead says the initial state is initial by virtue of its orderliness).

bob sykes, you may be interested in this study which Thorfinn linked to in his previous post on the topic: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0010068

Mead's reputation may be making a comeback: http://savageminds.org/2010/10/13/the-trashing-of-margaret-mead/

I think you meant to link to this post on forgotten knowledge.

I didn't get the line about Brazil's "ascension graph".

Off-topic: has anyone here heard of Richard Rothstein before. A commenter at Crooked Timber said of one of his books "Race/IQ fanatics should have to read this book before posting their usual blather", a category which I assume was intended to extend to many of those who frequent this blog. Despite the use of his name as a synechdoce for all that is evil in the same thread, Steve Sailer seems to have a similar message that all existing and plausible educational cannot close the gap and that it would cost massive amounts of money to achieve.

Here's another attempt. Please delete this if the original comment is approved to avoid double-posting. First off, I’d like to say welcome to the blog! I’ve found you an interesting writer and think you make a good addition. Marginal taxes probably explain some of the U.S vs E.U difference, but I think there are a host of other differences that could contribute. “This country looks more free-market than European standards.” 78 on the Fraser Index. That makes it freer than Montenegro, Russia, Serbia, Macedonia, Moldova, Croatia, Bosnia & Herzegovina and Ukraine. I agree with your broader point about trust, but is South Korea a good example? I thought they were doing pretty well. In the Atlantic article you link to, Korea’s economy is said to be more like Japan’s than China/Taiwan (which I believe Fukuyama contrasted in his book). Speaking of Helen Thomas, Lebanese also probably do better outside their homeland. Thomas Sowell discussed them as a “middleman minority” in Are Jews Generic? I believe Carlos Slim is of Lebanese descent. Many Israelis actually do seek a better life in America, a “reverse aliyah“. Apparently that rather than the actual threat of nuclear attack is the bigger fear regarding Iran nowadays. Someone should tell Chris Coyne & William Easterly about that Acemoglu et al paper. “Moving the Jewish or Palestinian population out of Israel en mass isn’t a feasible option” There aren’t all that many Palestinians, and there are plenty of Arab countries for them to go to (I believe Jordan is majority Palestinian already). Greece & Turkey were able to exchange populations before, and large numbers of ost-deutsche were transferred to Germany with the end of the second world war. The Palestinian issue is unusual in that people have maintained camps to preserve the narrative that over all these generations they are still temporary refugees. But even after removing the Palestinians, I think Israel still wouldn’t be doing that great economically. The claims that military spending isn’t a drag because of indirect benefits cause the sound of broken windows to ring throughout my head. Directly spending the money on research for X is a much better bet than spending on P and hoping to get X or Y by accident. Barry Youngerman, I don’t have any data or anecdotes to compare communities in Venezuela/Columbia. Yehoshua, how does the government stifle Israeli-Arabs? The one complaint I’ve heard is that they don’t have mandatory service that a lot of opportunities are supposedly based on bonds formed at that time. Sailer makes an important point. The appeal is supposed to be non-monetary. If it had been up to me they certainly would have chosen a more opportune location than a desert* referenced in some book of fables, but unfortunately I hadn’t yet been born and wasn’t available to set them right.

I had also heard that diversity makes people less inclined towards socialism. It may incline them toward cronyism & spoils though.

I watched some of a Brit-made video series on youtube about mathematicians driven mad that featured Cantor & Godel. I think I just watched the Cantor part. Hat-tip to this crank. On being female, the most egregious example that comes to my mind is Hypatia. This medievalist has done yeoman's work enlightening the blogosphere on the topic. I'm surprised there is so little discussion of Curie. I read Derbyshire's book on algebra. I was psyched to hear why polynomials of degree >= 5 don't have general analytic solutions, but I didn't fully grasp it. Reading up on quantum mechanics & some other math stuff has got me interested in learning some group theory, but I'm not aware of any good layman's intro to the subject.

Jason Malloy tipped me off to this study estimating heritability not by familial relation but genome similarity between full siblings: http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pgen.0020041

How do scientists distinguish introns and exons?

Thanks, p-ter.

I know some other species (insects & birds, I believe) have different sex-chromosome systems. What does that suggest about their most recent common ancestors?

Wicked cool.

Cosma Shalizi on the topic: http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/656.html

When did Daniel MacArthur get so smug looking?

The dashes break the hyperlink to your previous post. You should enclose the url itself with an href. I will again plug Greg Cochran's pathogenic theory.

A Canadian says Gladwell is wrong about hockey: http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2010/05/are-we-wasting-half-our-hockey-talent.html

http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_9.html#miller

"Indian writing systems derive from the alphabets of the Levant" I did not know that. I might have already asked this before, but what are some good books on the history of the Persian empires? Because I'm a westerner I generally just read about them getting smacked by the Greeks/Muslims or killing Crassus (and in fact I had initially thought the Parthians were just some barbarians rather than an empire comparable to Rome).