I was offline most of the past day or so with festivities, so I missed that New Horizons went offline yesterday (though they’re back in touch). Very excited about the Pluto mission. It’s not often that new science is immediately so viscerally accessible, but that’s the case with planetary science (obviously the public takes something different from this than the scientists, but same difference).
Does anyone know a good history of the revolutionary movements for independence in Latin America against the Spaniards? I realize I don’t know much about this beyond what I learned in high school. It’s easy to find books specifically about Spain, or portions of South America. But I’m talking about a broader survey.
The Nature paper on the costs of inbreeding is interesting. I’ve read it, and it makes sense. Basically everyone has a load of alleles which have deleterious fitness consequences when they are phenotypically expressed. Most of these are probably recessive in expression, as that way they can “hide” in the population’s gene pool in heterozygotes. When more closely related individuals have offspring, they’re more likely to have alleles which are identical, resulting in a homozygous state in offspring. Ergo, more expression of recessive traits, many of which are going to be bad.
Greece. And Steve Waldman on the culpability of European elites in the Greek situation.
A Planet Money episode, Why People Do Bad Things, reviews research that we are all susceptible to becoming party to fraud in the right context. That being said, I do think it is important to note that the main figure in the story, who was convinced by fraud, had a much older brother who was also convicted of fraud. Personalities are correlated, so it strikes me that there’s no surprise that fraud runs in families (Bernie Madoff’s father was involved in some shady dealings as well).
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