I wish you were right. Totally obsolete nuclear plants, that have radioactive escapes now and then are not just being kept active for much longer than scheduled and paid largely by the taxpayer but the current trend, on light of increasd fuel prices, is that they will be allowed to operate indefinitely. The next Chernobyl is just a matter of time with such policies, of course. I just can hope it's not too close to my home.  
 
 
Heh, so we can look forward to 50,000 or more deaths then, can we?

toto says: 
 
IMHO they're not, it's just that there are fewer loonies to confuse the issue in the eyes of the general public. 
 
Heh, I know what you mean. Seems that plenty in the "climate science" brigade have problems with principle components analysis and keep finding hockey sticks wherever they look. 
 
Perhaps in another 10 years (or maybe even after solar cycle 24 really starts or if the trend of the earth's rotation rate speeding up--however small the speedup is--continues) we will truly be able to state who the loonies are. 
 
Personally, I prefer it warm anyway! As Leif Svalgard says, these bones are getting older every year, and cold does them no good.

It seems that no one wants their study to be used to answer questions about racial differences in intelligence.

The intent of the aphorism is something like don't overprotect your immune system. You have to expose yourself to the environment for your immune system to work.

sufficiency is not necessity. be careful about the power of post facto abduction. 
 
Well, that is true, however, I think we can be certain that there were many would-be leaders who aspired to become great. 
 
Also, the situation today seems contingent on many past missteps and lucky breaks on the part of many players, but there seems to be no lack of aspirants willing to step into the void and try to make things work to their advantage.  
 
And, of course, with plenty of data points, some of them are bound to be more than just ordinary. 
 
Oh, wait ...

????????????????

Just to back up Long Ma's point: Confucian scholars and linguists generally agree that it's Cantonese which is the conservative language and hence closer to more archaic forms. If you want to know what Confucius sounded like, it's plausibly much closer to Cantonese than Mandarin, especially in the number of tones. Mandarin was imposed from the North. Also, it may be worth nothing that the birthplace of Chinese civilization is traditionally taken to be between the two great rivers (Yellow and Yangtsze), not to the north or south. 
 
Hmmmm, it is my understanding that Middle Chinese had four tones, and that the present 6/7 tones in Cantonese results from splitting of some tones in Middle Chinese into separate high/low forms. 
 
Note, the claims by some people that Cantonese has 9/10 tones is a result of miscounting tones based on the Chinese schemes for tones. They claim that ?? are three additional tones over and above high level (plus high falling), mid level, low level, mid rising, low rising and low dipping, but accding to Sydney Lau, the three clipped tones (??) which all have consonant endings, are actually pronounced in the same tone as high level, mid level and low level (except, of course ?? where the second character -- dip6/2 -- is technically a low level tone but is pronounced by most speakers, including me because I copied my relatives, as a mid-rising tone). 
 
Of course, I do agree that Cantonese is more conservative, but then ????????.

predatory elites 
 
This seems to ascribe evilness to elites that is not necessary. 
 
It should be unremarkable that elites might have divergent interests to the rest of the population they are members of.

Well.. Rawls certainly seems to think that, but I see no reason to accept his belief. Prima facie, it seems to make more sense not to accept the maximin criterion but rather to accept some sort of expected value criterion. After all, in real life, that is what everyone does ? otherwise, we would spend our entire lives frantically trying to avoid quite unlikely catastrophes and would make ourselves utterly miserable (better live a few hundred feet underground, just in case a meteorite hits your humble abode!). 
 
Actually, I am not sure that everyone uses an expected value criterion. 
 
Rather, I think that we have evolved dispositions to pay extraordinary attention to risks that have been salient in our recent evolutionary past. 
 
For example, conspiracy theories and paranoia would seem to be common and entirely justified ways of looking at the world if the social lives of P. trog were ratcheted up among early hominids and our recent ancestors. 
 
Meteorites killing people were such uncommon events that we don't have ways of evaluating their probability, however, being attuned to the probability that others are planning bad outcomes for us had such benefits that we can be manipulated to take action at the suggestion that this might be so. Blame some readily identifiable group for some current situation and lots of people are all too ready to believe.

The findings of this study show that which parts of the brain light up under a specific mental exercise that they test for are based on culture, not genetics. I don't see how that can be spinned to suggest that such a finding supports a hereditarian point of view about group differences in brain function. 
 
It seems to me that to rule out any genetic component you would also have to look at east asians raised in the US (preferably several generations in to remove cultural transmission from parents) and also caucasians born and raised in, say, China (also after several generations).

Of course, arcane math does have its uses ? I actually am co-patentholder on several patents that successfully apply ?Galois field theory? to error-correction in digital storage and communication systems. It?s a very broad and commercially successful field (you may have had some of my inventions running on your hard-drive controller a few years ago). 
 
A current generation of Intel Storage Controller does P+Q in hardware ...

This is the sort of thing I would expect to come out of Cultural Anthropology: 
 
An interesting conclusion on a pressing social issue from Hebrew University

[Cultural] Anthropology ... testable conclusions that are accepted by a consensus 
 
 
I think that word there (consensus) is the problem. 
 
As far as I can tell, science does not proceed by consensus.

 
And there is another point about anthropology that I do not think anyone has mentioned in this thread: by teaching us concepts and examples such as patrilocal/matrilocal/neolocal, parallel cousin/ cross cousin, rite of passage, etc., it causes us to view our own culture and society through new spectacles. I doubt that anyone who is well-read in anthropology can look at the Pledge of Allegiance or a Thanksgiving dinner in quite the way that the average American views those traditions. 
 
 
I think it was Samuel Clemens who said that travel broadens the mind. Even travel within one's own country does that. Far too many city people are totally out of touch with the life of people in the country. 
 
We don't need not steenkin' Anthropology.

m simon asks: 
 
Might not our war on "addicts" be a war on those trying to adapt based on their genetics and circumstances? i.e. it is bigoted. Mine might be called the endorphin deficiency theory of addiction. Or in milder cases the CB1 deficiency (cannabis to the rescue) theory of addiction. Or in the case of ADD/ADHD the stimulant deficiency theory of addiction. 
 
We can view a lot of human behavior as an attempt to prevent other people from taking advantage of things to improve their reproductive success. 
 
Not able to speak the dominant language well? Too bad, but that will affect your reproductive success. 
 
Made a mistake and got pregnant when it was not really a good time and is going to have a big affect on your reproductive success, or might even kill you? Too bad, 'cause you are a murderer if you kill that fetus. 
 
Made a mistake and managed to be born male into a poor family? Too bad buddy, you ain't gonna have any offspring and if you engage in forced copulations, well ... you are in trouble. 
 
Ratcheting up the complexity of society mainly benefits one group of people, but that's life.

JAH says: 
 
In polygynous societies (like the Mukogodo. ...should credit Lee Cronk and not Bobbi Low with this work) parents should invest in males only when the male has a high probability of being a breeding male and females at all other times. 
 
It was not my intent to suggest that Bobbi Low should have credit nor that she did not credit Cronk, because right there in the text she does exactly that. 
 
Here is a reference to a paper by Cronk which contains my point: Intention versus behaviour in parental sex preferences among the Mukogodo of Kenya. 
 
What I was pointing out that was that what people say and what people do are two different things, and that their actions are more likely to be aligned with their reproductive interests. 
 
In addition, even in (largely) monogamous societies, some people are better off to have daughters while others are better off to have sons.

Indeed, in the Why Sex Matters, Page 172, Low says: 
 
Occasionally, [in respect to China] an effect could be seen in first births: In two provinces in 1985, the sex ratio of children in single-child families soared to over 129. But it was primarily in later births that the sex biases became most pronounced (fig. 10.1). In a nationwide study in 1989-1990, the sex ratio of first births was 105.6, right at the worldwide average, but the sex ratio of later-born children depended on how many older brothers and sisters already existed. For example, the sex ratio of third-borns when there were two older sisters was 224.9 males per 100 females, and the sex ratio for third-borns with two older brothers was 74.1.  
 
She cites Wen, 1993 for the two province data and Yi et al, 1993, for the China-wide one-percent census data.

Also, Low claims that Guttentag and Secord in Too Many Women: The Sex Ratio Question that among Orthodox Jews the sex ratio is 147 males to 100 females. 
 
It strikes me as more than a little odd, then, that outrage is directed only at places like India and China, however, I have not yet read the above mentioned book, so I can't vouch for the veracity of Low's claim.

Razib says: 
 
in many asian societies the sons take care of parents and offer sacrifices on family alters. the lineage only goes through sons. 
 
Well, this might be so, but as Bobbi S Low points out on page 122 of Why Sex Matters people's stated preferences can be at variance with their actual preferences. For example, the Mukogodo in Africa state a preference for male offspring because that is the preference the Masai have, while the sex ratio and their differential treatment of female offspring vs male offspring demonstrate that their actual preference is for female offspring. 
 
It is to be expected that people will do what is in their reproductive interests while stating that they are doing what society around them prefers. 
 
Also, this all has the smell of a manufactured crisis, because the situation in China is actual far more complex than the simple claim that those nasty sexist Chinese are killing beautiful baby girls because they prefer boys, and Low points this out as well.  
 
What is even more interesting is that a high male to female ratio is actually in female interests, since it is clear from recent data that females find a large proportion of males unsuitable. 
 
PA says: 
 
 
FRom the parents' perspective, especially in East Asia, having a daughter darn near guarantees that you'll have grandchildren, while having a son is not so much of a sure bet anymore. 
 
 
Please read Low or indeed a number of Razib's postings. It has never been the case for all parents that sons guarantee grandchildren. Indeed, for those far down the pole in society, females are a much better guarantee of grandchildren and always have been. It is only for high status families that males are a guarantee of grandchildren. 
 
Moreover, with female offspring you can be damn sure that her offspring are your grandchildren; there is no such guarantee with male offspring. His wife might have chosen another man as the sperm donor (of course, this risk is low for high status males, somewhere around 2%, higher for medium status males, around 10% and really high for low status males, 30% or so).

There seems to be a number of factors affecting the sex ratio but for some reason most people obsess on the alleged preference by (some) parents for male offspring. 
 
For example, recent research suggests that lower blood-sugar levels might have something to do with it and Emily Oster seems to have found a correlation with Hep B levels in a population and excess males. 
 
Another factor that is confusing to me is that historically (well, from the early to mid 1800s) Britain had more females than males, and this situation did not change until the 1960s or 1970s. Now, while WWI and WWII would have had impacts for a while, Britain was not at war for all of that time, although there might have been two factors causing a lot of the excess females (who seemed to turn up from around 18): excess male deaths and males spreading out into the empire (or former empire) to seek fame and fortune. 
 
I wonder if it is possible, though, that the change in the sex ratio in Japan is simply due to bounce-back, because when there are fewer females, they become more valuable (although this is confounded by the fact that something approaching 50% or all males are of little to no interest to any female--when she has a choice). 
 
However, given the different interests of males and females and the economic contributions of males and females, I think this change in the ratio is a portent of disaster for the Japanese economy.