"Another note, I wonder how many of the 24% of people who raised Protestant but later converted to Islam are like these people." 
 
Do they count groups like Nation of Islam as Muslim ? 
 
That would probably explain a huge chunk of the figure.

Oakley makes asian fit sunglasses.  
 
http://oakley.com/asian_fit

The myostatin gene mutation is also found in Belgian blue cattle. 
 
I don't think there are any negative effects to this other than extra caloric intake required to maintain all that muscle.

Tufte is cool. His ideas are starting to become main stream. Here's to hoping the days of countless pointless excel charts in Powerpoint persentations are over.

Judging only her face + makeup, she is a six sigma if I ever saw one.

I think I used to go swimming with Miss Canada when we were in middle school. She is a ditz who wanted to go to Hollywood her whole life. Can't believe she made it so far.

Bulletin Boards need a certain critical mass of traffic. Maybe GNXP is more popular now...

"Gordian worm live inside crickets for long periods, feeding on the cricket's diet. Once fully grown, they inject chemicals into the cricket's brain brainwashing it and forcing it to kill itself by jumping into the water. Once in water, the worm wriggles out of the writhing body and swims off in search of a mate. " 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JutstmBivsc 
 
The Guiness Book of World Records recognizes the Mexican DeJesus family as the hairiest family on Earth. Born with the rare condition hypertrichosis or Werewolf Syndrome,19 members have the genetic disease. This clip is taken from the American television show Guinness World Records: Primetime and aired February 9 1999. 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtPG1OokzGo 
 
Family with multiple cases of progeria (premature aging). 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85jNxBofuD8 
 
not youtube but amusing 'Homo sapiens whedonum', via pz myers' blog 
http://www.rifters.com/blindsight/vampires.htm

"60% of Indian men have penises which are between three and five centimetres shorter than international standards used in condom manufacture." 
 
What are the international standards used in condom manufacture ?

"The Democrats are really three parties: Minorities who are disproportionately poor, the urban white elites to include wannabe elites such as most college students, college professors, and artisians; and the unions. " 
 
Wealthy minorities also tend to vote democrat. Maybe as an attempt at emulating urban white elite cultural sensibilities.

"I'm not certain what the expected correlation would be between IQ and skin color among Blacks for a given measure of "between-group heritability" (BGH) as described by Jensen (1998). " 
 
Light skin vs dark skin IQ gap is probably more a result of successful high IQ black men taking light skin women as wives rather than due to white admixture (the actual effect of which is reduced as a result of assortive mating).

"How did a microcephalic grow to adulthood in hunter-gatherer times? And doesn't it seem like it's pushing the odds to think that this happened and that's the skull we happened to find?" 
 
The odds might not be that bad. Flores is an isolated island, so maybe it had a culture allowing inbreeding, which results in more genetic defects.  
 
Interbreeding also means greater interelatedness of the tribe which then leads to a greater alturism and increased chance of survival for a microcephalic person. 
 
All just speculation, but I think an explanation like this is more in line with Occam's razor than proposing an isolated dwarf homonid species that survived being wiped out or assimilated by homo sapiens for such a long time.

This is the first time I've heard of Lebanese Christian suicide bombers. 
 
The Salafi link was dubious from the start. It's a result of political commentators who were too eager to seperate the 'good islam' from the bad. 
 
I think the author needs to be more careful about 'Communist/ Socialist groups'. In highly religious thrid world countries, they usually have a religious tinge to them (like Fatah in the West Bank). 
 
As far as terrorists go the Tamil Tigers are in a class of their own, they even have their own airforce.

The mutazilites sound interesting, maybe modern day liberal sunnis can start calling themselves an extension of the mutazilite tradition to gain some street cred amongst the plebs rather than being seen westernized heretics. 
 
------------------ 
 
Also on the I just realized that the article linked refers to Kashmir. I remember reading something about the Kashmiri hindu priestly class being targeted in the Kashmir conflict. 
 
I guess that may have caused a shortage of hindus in Kashmir to man the temples. The article alludes to this - 
 
"When everyone left the valley, I was the only person who took care of this temple" 
 
"performed twice a day for devotees, mostly the tourists."

Spike, 
Sufi doesn't necessarily mean progressive. The former Taliban government in Afganistan followed a brand of Sufi (Deobandi) Islam. Salafi doesn't always mean regressive either. 
 
I think the main problem is mainly the very high level of literal belief in religious texts / teachings among the general population in many majority muslim countries. If Christians took the Bible that seriously, Europe would still be in the Dark Ages.

Look at Miss Sri Lanaka.  
 
I know South Asians can have varying looks, but she doesn't even sound south asian, also her name is 'Jacqualine Fernandez'. Did the Portugese colonize Sri Lanka or something ?

Arcane: The Armenian Genocide was conducted by muslims against non-muslims. It's debatable wether it was really a genocide. 
 
KJS: While Hindu Kush literally means Hindu Killer, it is probably a reference to hindu slaves taken as spoils of war dying from the harsh climate of the mountains.  
 
If you want a comparison the early Central Asian tribal raids of India were more like the Viking raids of Europe rather than various European emprires' conquest of North America. 
 
I guess atleast Islam, Xtianity et al gave people a choice of conversion, and with some cultural changes the individual could usually go about their business. Secular ideologies often did not give individuals that choice. 
 
On the other hand the insistance on the part of strict religion that people conform to certain preset norms tends to greatly hamper technological progress.

"After an exhaustive study of the match video, and with the help of an Italian translator, Rees claimed that Materazzi called Zidane ?the son of a terrorist whore? before adding ?so just f*** off? for good measure...." 
 
Zidane speaks Italian ?

"for all of mahathir mohammed's talk about southeast asia taking the lead there is an implicit arab-ass-licking on the part of non-arab muslims. vox arabi vox dei :)" 
 
Maybe if the zionists had picked an island in Malaysia as the jewish homeland they would have had less trouble. 
 
On the flip side though, I live close to a muslim (Iranian) area, and have personally witnessed the opposite with Iranians (who get all worked up and angry when someone makes the mistake of thinking that Iranians are Arabs). Then again I don't know how religious they are, this world cup they were all flying the old nationalist flags (with the idolatrous lion symbol) rather than the new islamic ones. 
 
Anyways I did some googling and came up with this interesting paper about rich Indian muslims born in South Africa who insist that they are Arabs in order to dissassociate themselves from the other Indian groups. 
 
Maybe its an Asian thing.

The vast majority of British Muslims are Asians, where as a lot of European continental muslims are Arabs. So it's interesting that more British muslims than continental muslims deny Arab involvement in 9/11.