combination of size and distinctiveness. usually there's a big trade off. mormons have avoided it. as for that guy, i don't think JW, because they're realy anti-higher ed. they think it corrupts and anyway they're waiting for *the end*. i think a JW fam would have ostracized the kid, period.

There's also a time decay factor which could be expected to overrate economists even with agnostic's normalization:  a far greater fraction of the total economics winners have done their work recently than the fraction of winners in any of the other fields (since the economics prize is so new in comparison).  On the plausible-but-unverified assumption that citations to "Nobel Laureate X" are greatly biased toward somewhat more recent prizes (e.g. very strong bias to those laureates still alive, although the higher average age of economics versus hard science laureates partly compensates), we should expect economics to be overrepresented. 
 
(BTW I suspect that even if we could compensate for the temporal distribution, we'd probably still see economics overrepresented, for the obvious reason that emotional stakes are far higher where money / political power are concerned).

Texas isn't quite like the rest of the South 
 
You can say that again. Neither is Florida, in a different way (though Florida north of I-4 feels pretty generically Deep South to me - I've only spent extended time in Jacksonville and Ft Walton Beach, so YMMV). 
 
It is more Republican on the federal level than racial polarization into a white and black party would predict. 
 
Not sure what you mean by this - that the white Obama vote in TX is less than predicted simply based on the black fraction of the Texas population? Well, as you well know, Texas and Florida are unique in having (to the first order) three-cornered ethnoracial breakdowns rather than bipoloar, so I'd expect things to be different. 
 
Also, blacks in Texas and Florida are much more concentrated in the urban areas compared to the rest of the South (not surprising since both those states had much higher rates of immigration post Civil War) - I can probably dig up some quant indices on this. 
 
Indeed, I'd be very interested in regressing white Obama vote versus urbanization controlling for income/house price. Bet there would be a pretty consistent positive correlation. Note sure what the right index of mean urbanization for counties is ... 
 
Re the Latino majority counties (Rio Grande valley, more or less) in texas, unsurprising that they would be quite different than the rest of the country in that those places have a substantial, longstanding landowning class, which gave a different political and cultural trajectory (can't find historical demographic data at the moment, but my content-free guess is that the population growth rates in the Rio Grande counties over 1846-mid1960s are probably much less than the other substantially Latino counties of the Southwest, but maybe not New Mexico).

(Razib, feel free to cancel my previous comment) 
 
Why is the white diabetic proportion (per definiton in your comment above) positively correlated (though not too strongly) with the SES markers, when the total correlations (i.e. for whole county population) are negative (as you would expect: higher SES => lower diabetes rate). 
 
I don't get it - sorry to be so dim, but at least you've given me a good humility dose for the day.

on the theism principal component there doesn't appear to be a Europe clade either ("Europe considered paraphyletic"; sounds like a good paper). 
 
but you are right that the US clearly clusters separately on the nationalism component. OTOH, I'm not sure "proud of your country" is that good a basis function for nationalism; there's too much weight of history for the European countries. Probably need something relating to contempt for other countries in there also; the "Freedom Fries" index. I don't see any good questions in the WVS to capture that - the G008x series doesn't do it.

You are the _man_, agnostic.  
 
Fascinating -  
 
OK, since you have established beyond a reasonable doubt that you know far more than you have any reason to about STI incidence, and with reference to Figure 2, WTF with Belgium? Buncha infected soldiers and other colonial hangers-on coming back from the Congo and spreading their new strains around the country? 
 
Particularly in 1954 - did the whole country decide to spend a Lenten year or what? (I strongly suspect 1954 is some sort of recordkeeping glitch, since 1953 is a strong positive bump).

Agnostic - 
 
Oops, sorry, I thought you were referring to the NYT link Jason posted. I think I can be forgiven for that since you referenced your previous GNXP post about the explosion of gonorrhea in the US. If you are assuming a common demographic history vis a vis STI rates between the US and the UK you perhaps ought to make that a bit more explicit.  
 
But yes, if there was also a great increase in the UK gonorrhea rates at the same time as in the US, then the cohort in the science daily snippet would indeed probably be the culprits, pending data about the age distribution of gonorrhea cases in the UK in the mid late 1950s.

@agnostic, since oldest of them were just out of diapers in say 1955, yes, I agree it's quite a precocious achievement indeed. 
 
(for those who didn't read the NYT link, the age group is stated as 35-54, so born roughly 1951-1970, i.e., quite possibly more Xers than Boomers depending on a:finer age distribution stats from CDC; and b: your favored cutoff date for Boomerhood) 
 
Thanks for the NYT link, Jason. The author appears to be an interesting semi-crank (not that I disagree with the overall observation you guys have been that we appear to be in the midst of yet another round of "kids these days" hysteria; as the 50 year old father of 16 and 14 year old girls in SoCal suburban schools I hear about it a fair amount).  
 
Thanks also Razib for the original. Hard to infer much of anything from the almost dataless snippet (I'm not about to join the BMA to try to find the real data) - for one thing, I don't know that the demographic substructure of STIs in the West Midlands is at all comparable to that in the US (maybe it is - I really don't know).

Thanks, Razib. 
 
It was suprising to me (probably not to you) how incompletely dominant Quranic literalism is, only about 50%, with 14% of self-identified Muslims saying that the Quran is not the Word of God - I guess those Muslims are analogous to the atheists who believe in a personal god, but then I note (full report, p 31) that 3% of the atheists think that ["Holy Book", not clear which book but I assume Teh Bible] is the literal Word. I have no idea what those "atheists" think "atheist" means ... 
 
I went through Pew's 2007 survey of Muslim Americans, and while there was some interesting detail on the demographics, no crosstabs on literalism versus country of origin, etc. But pulling different pieces together I can see where the coalition of the non-literals might come together, e.g. about 4% of the US Muslim population are converts who converted for "family/marriage" (which presumably includes both marrying a Muslim and also going along when a dominant family member converts).