Life has been busy. Very busy. The company I’m working for is ramping up on releasing product…as in on the order of weeks, not months. We’ve already released results to a few early beta testers, and are taking reservations for orders (basically you are in the front of the line for notification when the orders are being taken, and I’m 99% sure that the turnaround is going to be faster than later on when the analysis pipeline will be crowded).
The details of the test are pretty straightforward, at least for a reader of this weblog. 224,000 markers on the SNP-chip, a reference panel of thousands, with 150 populations. Yes, we have wolves and coyotes, so we should be able to pick up admixture/introgression. It’s mostly a breed focused product at this point when it comes to ancestry, but we’ve got a large number of village dogs in there too. In terms of functional characteristics, the current focus is on diseases, but we’ll be expanding into traits soon. Really there are many directions we could go with this.
I’m making one public plea to Chris Chang of plink to allow us to be able to use his tool without always having to specify that we’re not using a human data set.
The New York Review of Books has a piece up, Who Was David Hume? It’s reviewing Hume: An Intellectual Biography. Of course I purchased it…I could do no other. God knows when I’ll get to read it.
Speaking of books, I also purchased Patricia Crone’s Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World. Crone is known more broadly in the public for her work in the revision of the history of early Islam, but as a scholar she was much more than that. Her Islamic revisionism didn’t make much of an impression on me, but God’s Rule – Government and Islam: Six Centuries of Medieval Islamic Political Thought, did. She’s a thinker who everyone should have paid more attention to in my opinion, as she was a humanistic scholar in the older tradition, genuinely striving toward the truth as opposed to fixating on the power relations of the present.
As some of you recall I’m following Game of Thrones now via the internet. The whole idea of a “fork” is somewhat liberating, and, the reality is that I’m not patient enough to wait until Martin completes the series when my daughter is in high school. Speaking of series, I left T Greer of Scholar’s Stage totally dispirited when I informed him that Brandon Sanderson’s The Stormlight Archive is projected to run to 10 books. At his current pace that means Sanderson will complete the series in 21 years assuming that he hits his mark…
Speaking of a long time, this August A Song of Ice & Fire will will be 20 years old! It seems highly implausible to me that George R. R. Martin can wind up all his plot threads in two final books, even if both are 1,500 page monsters. I think we’ll be lucky if he manages to accelerate publication rate again and tie things up in the middle-2020s, when he’s in his late 70s.
A note on comments. If you begin a comment by pointing out some presumed detail of my ethnicity you’re probably getting deleted immediately (I state presumed because 3/4 of the time people are wrong). I don’t prevent assholes from reading what I have to say, but I can make sure assholes don’t leave comments.
How Austin Residents Are Getting Around In A Post-Uber World. Keep Austin primitive?
Eske Willerslev Is Rewriting History With DNA.
Top scientists hold closed meeting to discuss building a human genome from scratch. My prior is to be against closed meetings. Makes scientists seem like they’re part of a cabal.
Interesting map.
Share of European children born out of wedlock. You can see that Finno-Ugric admixture line in Russia. pic.twitter.com/CTzCrqIgFX
— Anatoly Karlin (@akarlin88) May 16, 2016
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