The Hobbit, part 1

I went and saw The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey yesterday with some friends. It’s been 20 years since I last read The Hobbit, and even longer since I watched the television film from the late 1970s. So I really didn’t notice all the differences between the three hour film and the original novel. Two quick comments:

1) I didn’t pick up on all the big technological changes. I suspect this is something movie reviewers are going to focus on, because they have such a good grasp of the technical element. But for the average person it’s not as obvious. Some of the 3D was well done, but much of it was a little excessive for me.

2) I wasn’t too bored, but a two hour film would have been more than sufficient. Someone behind me literally fell asleep, judging by the persistent snoring.

I’d give the film a B-. This wasn’t in Jar Jar Binks territory.

Merry Christmas, hold the Hanukkah?

It’s that time of the year, and I quite like “the Holidays.” I am, of course, looking forward to my daughter’s first Christmas. Though no one in our family believes in the religious justification for the holiday, it is still an important time of the year, for reasons I have outlined before. But for the first time in 16 years I am going to a “Hanukkah party,” and my feelings about this are a little mixed. The reasons is that the more I heave learned about Hanukkah, the more I’ve become irritated by the fact that this minor Jewish holiday just happens to align well chronologically with Christmas. Most people are aware that as a religious matter for Jews Hanukkah bears no equivalence to what Christmas does for some Christians. But most non-Jews, and even many Jews, know little about the festival aside from the miracle of olive oil.

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The G.O.P. as the white Christian party

A few weeks ago I reiterated that the most parsimonious explanation for why Asian Americans have been shifting to the Democratic party over the past generation (George H. W. Bush won Asian Americans according to the 1992 exit polls) is a matter of identity politics (reiterated, because I noticed this years ago in the survey data). In short, since the 1950s a normative expectation that America was defined by its historic white Protestant majority has receded. The proportion of “Others,” non-whites, non-Christians, etc., has grown to the point that for all practical purposes these groups have found a secure home in the Democratic party, and the Democratic party has been able to benefit electorally from this support (this would not be the case in 1950, because not enough Americans were non-white or non-Christian). Naturally then the Republican party has become the locus of organization for white Christians, and more specifically white Protestants.

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The spread of 'white people problems'

Life Expectancy Rises Around the World, Study Finds:

A sharp decline in deaths from malnutrition and diseases like measles and tuberculosis has caused a shift in global mortality patterns over the past 20 years, according to a new report, with far more of the world’s population now living into old age and dying from diseases more associated with rich countries, like cancer and heart disease.

In the West declinism has set in, for legitimate reasons. But that doesn’t mean that things aren’t getting better in the rest of the world. They are. What irritates me is that some of my acquaintances who fancy themselves cosmopolitan internationalists nevertheless engage in declinism, despite their avowed concern for the well-being of humans as a whole. Yet their fixation on the decline in the relative status of their own societies, and their own status, reveals the transparent false signalling nature of their cosmopolitan internationalism.

Mind you, I think it is legitimate to worry about your own, and your society’s, position the relative order of things. But to constructively address this issue you need to not confuse your own station with that of the aggregate whole.

Population projections 50 years into the future are fantasy

There’s another Census Projection out. Yes, I understand that the character of the children born today is going to have obvious impacts on the nature of the population 50 years from now, but we really need to heed the stupidity of past projections. Here’s a piece from 1930, A Nation of Elders in the Making:

To explain convincingly why we believe that we shall certainly not have more than 185,000,000 people here in 2000 A.D. and why we further believe that our population may cease to grow before that time, it is only necessary to make a rapid survey of our national trend of births and deaths….

For what it’s worth, the population of the USA in 2000 A.D. was ~280 million. The Baby Boom + massive immigration = revisions to projections.

We are Nature

There’s an interesting piece in Slate, The Great Schism in the Environmental Movement, which seems to be a distillation of trends which have been bubbling within the modern environmentalist movement for a generation now (I’ve read earlier manifestos in a similar vein). I can’t assess the magnitude of the shift, but here’s the top-line:

But that is a false construct that scientists and scholars have been demolishing the past few decades. Besides, there’s a growing scientific consensus that the contemporary human footprint—our cities, suburban sprawl, dams, agriculture, greenhouse gases, etc.—has so massively transformed the planet as to usher in a new geological epoch. It’s called the Anthropocene.

Modernist greens don’t dispute the ecological tumult associated with the Anthropocene. But this is the world as it is, they say, so we might as well reconcile the needs of people with the needs of nature. To this end, Kareiva advises conservationists to craft “a new vision of a planet in which nature—forests, wetlands, diverse species, and other ancient ecosystems—exists amid a wide variety of modern, human landscapes.”

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A lighter shade of brown: Dan MacArthur, look east or south!

South Indian Udupi cuisine

In the post below I offered up my supposition that Dan MacArthur’s ancestry is unlikely to be Northwest Indian, which precludes a Romani origin for his South Asian ancestry. Indeed this is almost certainly so, Dienekes Pontikos followed up my crude analyses with IBD-sharing calculations (IBD = ‘identity by descent,’ which is basically what you would think it is). The South Asian population which MacArthur has the closest affinity to is from Karnataka, which is one of the Dravidian speaking states of the South. This does not necessarily refute my earlier contention, as aside from Brahmins most Bengalis seem to have broad South Indian affinities, except for the fact that they often have more East Asian ancestry.

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A lighter shade of brown: the Dan MacArthur chronicles, not a Romani

Pakistani honor guard

A few days ago I suggested that Dr. Daniel MacArthur might have South Asian ancestry. Now, when confronted with surprise the best option is to stick with your prior assumption, unless that surprise is powerful enough for you to “update” your model. After a few days of further analysis I will update: I do think Dan MacArthur has South Asian ancestry. Dienekes dug further, and noticed that there are hallmarks of “Ancestral South Indian” ancestry along the first 2/3 or so of chromosome 10. Now, you do have to remember that this genomic region is only half South Asian. The other half is European.

But in any case, one question that some people brought up: perhaps MacArthur has Romani heritage? I’m skeptical of this partly because:

1) there weren’t that many Romani in Britain in the 19th century

2) The British Romani are already very highly admixed

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Don't wait to have children!

The New Republic has a piece up, How Older Parenthood Will Upend American Society, which won’t have surprising data for readers of this weblog. But it’s nice to see this sort of thing go “mainstream.” My daughter was born when her parents were in their mid-30s, so I know all the statistics. They aren’t good bed-time reading (she’s healthy and robust so far!). If I had to do it over again I definitely wouldn’t have waited this long. After becoming a father it brought home to me that waiting was one of the worst decisions of my life. Why postpone something this incredible for the more far more prosaic pleasures of an extended adolescence? Granted, I’m not sure that I would have been the best father at 25, but I don’t think there’s much I can say in reply to the argument that I should have become a father by 30.

More concretely, we would have had sperm and egg “banked” if we had been smart delaying parenthood. The article notes that storage of sperm costs $850 up front, and $300 to $500 per year after that, and that many balk at the cost. And how much do you spend on your cell phone every year? The issue here seems to be time preference.

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We don't know why Ethiopians breathe easy

Most people are aware that altitude imposes constraints on individual performance and function. Much of this is flexible; athletes who train at high altitudes may gain a performance edge. But over the long term there are costs, just as there are with computers which are ‘overclocked.’ This is the point where you make the transition from physiology to evolution. Residence at high altitude entails strong selective pressures on populations. Over the past few years there has been a great deal of exploration of the genetics of long resident high altitude groups, the Tibetans, Peruvians, and Ethiopians.

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