There was a study done in 2009 or 2010 by, interestingly enough, a black and white scientist. They looked at the sprinting record in the last century and the swimming records too. They also did physiology studies on the average African and no African. What they came up with was that the position of the belly button was critical. Blacks generally have smaller torsos and a higher belly buttons indicating a higher center of gravity making them slightly more top heavy. Since running is essentially a state of constantly falling forward this gives them a physiological advantage against whites in sprinting. Asians and whites though have a clear advantage in swimming due to there proportionally larger torsos, since swimming is about constantly displacing water and larger torsos mean more displacement. Blacks aren't genetically more skilled than whites, that I believe is where cultural effects come into play. Black people are more into sports. My data is personal experience. Growing up around blacks and not being shy I converse all the time. Never have I met a black man that didn't like sports. Never. I've met a few that were pretty clumsy, but as far as not being interested. NEVER. I meet white men on a regular basis that don't like sports. Black dominance has driven many white kids from sports. Not all, not most, but a significant number. I only say that due to my extensive reading in American history. I have sat in conversations where I have actually heard white parents tell there kids to focus on school more than sports because there chances of going pro are slim. With the nba being over 80 % black and the nfl being almost 70 % black and blacks making up a much smaller part of the population it is obvious that if youre black you a MUCH higher shot at the pros. So I believe black kids hear that speech less than white kids. The Olympic USA hoops team. Definitely challenged more but still clearly the best is a good look at what whites in America could be if the weren't do lazy and discouraged. We're the fattest nation and whites in athletically competitive ages do tend to be fatter on average. No scientific study to back it up but I know enough blacks from living in a mixed town and being in the military to say that with confidence. Even still though the European game is more about team work and good shooting which are lost arts in America evidenced by the pre- Coach K teams that don't win gold. That's why they got him in the first place. Be aide SURPRISE ! he coaches at a school with a lot of white kids do he has to emphasize teamwork and recruit great shooters. Sorry man, whites ( except for the exceptionally few gifted athletes among us ) are going to stick to swimming and sports blacks don't care about like hockey, baseball, and soccer.

The numbers cited in that article are at odds with those cited on this site a little while back. Which kind of goes back to what myself and several others were saying then; pretty much every guy looks at porn but a bunch of them are too embarrassed or ashamed to admit it, throwing off surveys that rely on self reports. 
 
On the subject the article covers, he spends a lot of time splitting hairs and never really reaches the obvious conclusion - cheating ought to be defined as going behind your partner's back, doing something they'd disapprove of, and then lying about it. 
 
There's plenty of women who view looking at porn as infidelity - none who I'd ever choose to date, but that's beside the point. If their significant other chooses to view it anyway, then it's dishonesty and might rightly be labeled as cheating. On the far end of the other side of the spectrum, there are people in open relationships, swingers, the polyamory community, and others for whom outright having sex with other people is done with the full knowledge and approval of the other partner - I'd be hard pressed to call that "cheating" in any real sense. 
 
So cheating has nothing to do with individual acts and everything to do with the intent and assumptions about the boundaries of the relationship (which can conflict between the two partners if they're not communicated)

Google Docs is all kinds of awesome. 
 
Lots of people like 37Signals' Basecamp too, but I'm less enamored with it - if you don't want to use it exactly as they intended, you'll grow frustrated with it pretty quickly, IMO.

@Jack: "teenage boys don't pursue sex as vigorously as the boys in previous generations did." 
 
I think there's a major theme in our culture that says men are bad - men are responsible for all the world's ills - and women are good. example 1: Look at scholarly papers containing the phrase, "women are better at" and you'll find many telling you how wonderful the female brain is, how great they are at everything from communication and negotiation to management. Most papers containing the phrase "men are better at" actually contain the phrase, "it was once thought that men are better at" and those papers are "correcting past biases." 
 
example 2: look at popular culture, like the ads on television. Men are typically slobbering idiots. There's one where a guy tries to paint his house with a paint ball gun. haha! men are retarded! it's funny!! An ad has been running for over a year where a little girl asks her father why the sky is blue and he gives her a condescending answer, but mommy told her the truth. The ad closes with the message that "too many" women lose interest in math and science. Clearly, it's the fault of men like this retarded father. Women make up more than 60% of college students, but that's not enough. "too many" lose inerest in science. What sexism! 
 
So basically, I'm suggesting that one part of the problem is that boys are just brow-beaten into a sort of depressed lethargy. They are picking up these constant messages about how terrible they are and eventually they just quit trying.

"It looks like the distribution of "Soda" is in those areas more urbanized prior to, say, 1860 or maybe earlier where soda-fountains would have set the fashion (the NE, San Fran, St Louis) and before the widespread shipping of the pre-concoted, bottled product, which, when uncorked, put the "pop" in soda-pop." 
 
I'd say you have a point except that Chicago is firmly in the "pop" category.

I've lived in the St. Louis area my whole life and I've always been surprised when people from as close as Kansas City or Chicago are puzzled or even offended by my use of the term "soda". I have no idea why St. Louis is an island of soda in the Midwest, but I have to assume it has to do with German heritage, catholic heritage, or the brewery. During prohibition Anheuser Busch produced soft drinks, maybe they marketed it as "soda"?

how did he get the drums to play along?

Could some one tell me what the coefficient of relatedness would be for a society where a group of unrelated people, many generations in the past suddenly always married their first cousins. In the limit, what is r?

Given that the "General Theory" of his brother loses weight every year, it is amusing to consider that while his brother John Maynard was considered so superior during his life, in fact, Geoffrey might have been more productive in terms of producing true stepping stones towards a more efficient future.

"Many think we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them." 
 
Alfred North Whitehead

Razib, you think Kosko's point on leptokurtosis is new or profound? "Fat tails" in economics and finance have been acknowledged from the beginning, but for most purposes a Gaussian distribution simplifies the exposition or parameter estimation. Option pricing acknowledges this by having a "volatility smile", so that tail events have higher probabilities than what is implied for, say, 1 standard deviation events.  
 
In any case, there's always someone raging against the tyranny of Gauss, but I think it's all naive: Gaussian distributions are used because they are simple and often capture the gist of what is being modeled. Anyone who considers them a "straightjacket" is usually ignoring the common ad hoc adjustments (eg, volatility smiles in option pricing) that practioners use.

Both my parents are part Icelandic. If you travel to Iceland, many Icelandic people tend to have a very 'Asian' look to them. For one, Iceland has the highest population of darker hair and complexions out of the Scandinavian people, ruling out Finland since Finns are not of Nordic descent.  
Many have slanted or wide-set eyes, dark hair, and such. If you all believe Icelanders are mostly blond and blue-eyed, you're terribly mistaken. My mother has redish-brown hair, with very tan skin. My father is more fair skinned and dirty blond. My oldest sister has blue eyes and black hair, while my grandfather has black hair and my grandmother has brown. All of my family members of Icelandic descent have a Asian look to us, especially in the eyes. You will see that this look is more common in the more isolated places and in more rural areas of Iceland.

A similar issue confounds economists who find the natural propensity of people to see "the state" as a person, with singular sets of information and intentions, as opposed to a collective that consists of individuals with varying goals and information sets. Over at Cafe Hayek: 
 
In the current issue of The Atlantic Monthly (paid subscription required), Yale University Professor of Psychology Paul Bloom reports on research that suggests that our minds are evolved to anthropomorphize events and institutions. 
... 
Evidence of this anthropomorphization is ample: count how many times you read or hear the phrase ?we as a nation choose? this, or ?we as a nation did? that ? as if 300 million of us are analogous to an individual who perceives, chooses, and acts. Likewise, note how many times you find people who believe that ?the market? ?seeks? or ?aims? to achieve this or that outcome. 
 
see http://cafehayek.typepad.com/hayek/2005/11/are_humans_gene.html

Jodie is clearly hetero. LHS-hottie. RHS-wingman material.

Audible.com has 10 years worth, $3.50 each for the mp3

very good, but $3.50 per episode!

Life is not a fractal, in that it is not scale independent. It is also not simple function like the ratio of the volume of a sphere to its surface area. Like at atom, at different levels of size, different laws are dominant (strong forces between quarks, electromagnetic between atoms, gravity between planets). There is no one force or law applicable to "life". Perhaps there's an organism that has galaxies or universes as its "atoms", and exists on a different time dimension? Or maybe I've had too many bong hits.

I'm shocked by the perpetual belief that appeasement is optimal. In a dynamic setting lessening the probability of arrest or severity of punishment seems to empirically be always a poor bargain.  
 
The problem is that those distant from the problem assume that violence begets violence, while those in the middle of it know that swift and drastic punishment is beneficial. It seems this was a problem in the 19th century, with Eastern Americans appalled an violence against American Indians, and currently as Europeans assume that appeasing Palestinians is a good thing. Those who live close by know best. Every time the police is handstrung, the murder rate goes up (eg, LA and the Ramparts scandal). Who pays? The poor bastards who live with these criminals.

As the communist (china) and socialist (aka "third way" in India) has shown, policy matters as much as human capital, perhaps more so. China is showing huge leaps, but from an abysmal base. They still don't have property rights, a system of GAAP accounting that would allow appropriate allocation of capital (who is really making money?), or a modern financial system. These are major impediments to taking either country to truly developed country status, and aren't being addressed.

Ah, celebrities. Their insights know few bounds. Such as  
Actress Drew Barrymore, who reportedly earns $15 million a film, told MTV viewers in one episode that after spending time in a primitive, electricity-free Chilean village, "I aspire to be like them more." 
 
Barrymore, apparently enthralled by the lack of a modern sanitary facilities, gleefully bragged, "I took a poo in the woods hunched over like an animal. It was awesome."

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