The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World is well written. Updating my knowledge base from when I was an elementary school kid.
I’m kind of tired of maintaining this site, so I have installed Jetpack, WP Rocket, and Cloudflare. Hopefully, this will keep the weblog from going down. If you have suggestions and tips, I’m game. On GTMatrix a major issue is
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js. But I don’t get why this is around as I removed the Twitter widget. Does anyone have an idea?
The second season of The Insight is done. Will be taking a short hiatus before season three. If you haven’t left a positive review on Apple or Stitcher, please do so.
Had a discussion with Aziz Poonawalla for my other podcast. Will probably go live after the 4th. We talked about the rise and fall of the blogosphere, and how not to make Twitter hell.
‘Mormon’ No More: Faithful Reflect on Church’s Move to Scrap a Moniker. Interesting that the post-Mormon is the person who seems to be the most upset with the name change!
SAGE: a comprehensive resource of genetic variants integrating South Asian whole genomes and exomes.
The recent trend of ethnic intermarriage in China: an analysis based on the census data. Look in the data, and see that Hui intermarriage rates with Han are far higher than with Uyghur. The implication being that religion is less important than ethnicity/language.
History Will Not Be Kind to Jony Ive. Basically, the move away from modularity increases aesthetic appeal but makes it more expensive and fragile.
Say Goodnight Kevin. This YouTube channel reviews Christian movies. The content creator is himself Christian and was homeschooled. But he’s also libertarian and a bit of a cynic. This is interesting anthropology.
Identification of type 2 diabetes loci in 433,540 East Asian individuals.
Classic and introgressed selective sweeps shape mimicry loci across a butterfly adaptive radiation.
The origin of the Gravettians: genomic evidence from a 36,000-year-old Eastern European.
How Western Europe Developed a Full Scientific Method. Beckwith rant alert.
By the way, if you haven’t read Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present, read it.
NIH probe of foreign ties has led to undisclosed firings—and refunds from institutions.
Nuclear DNA from two early Neandertals reveals 80,000 years of genetic continuity in Europe.
Dimensionality reduction by UMAP to visualize physical and genetic interactions.
The Iranian who pretended to be Messi in order to sleep with 23 women.
Move over, DNA: ancient proteins are starting to reveal humanity’s history. In case you don’t know, I interviewed an author on the recent Tibetan Denisovan protein finding.
“But I don’t get why this is around as I removed the Twitter widget. Does anyone have an idea?”
One of the WordPress scripts apparently inserts this widget.js. It’s in the cache/min/1 hierarchy, according to debugger tools, and it looks like it’s the Emoji plugin – probably to enable Twitter’s.
thanks. i turned off emojis in wp rocket. we’ll see if that has an impact.
I see that Hui have much higher intermarriage rates with Han than with Uyghurs.
I also see that Koreans have much higher intermarriage rates with Mongols and Manchus than with Hui. Particularly as to the Mongols, what that suggests to me is that geography matters. There are a lot of Han, there aren’t so many Uyghurs, and the Uyghurs mostly live in the northwest. How many of the Hui are in Xinjiang?
(I would of course agree that language matters a lot.)
I also see that Koreans have much higher intermarriage rates with Mongols and Manchus than with Hui. Particularly as to the Mongols, what that suggests to me is that geography matters.
mongols and koreans have a long history together and mongols are actually quite koreaphilic. most of the manchurians are really han now. manchurian language is dead. it’s just that being minority is a boon in some ways so ppl have been reidentifying.
How many of the Hui are in Xinjiang?
around 10% of xinjiang is hui. the hui have preferentially been instruments of chinese expansion into the muslim west. one of the reasons the uyghurs have negative attitudes to the hui….
I’m surprised that being a minority is a boon in contemporary China. We usually just hear about the Chinese government mistreating Uyghurs or Tibetans.
I will take the liberty of cross posting this from BP to here:
Progressives just love science:
“Indigenous arrival has no date, dons told” by Bernard Lane on
June 29, 2019
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/indigenous-arrival-has-no-date-dons-told/news-story/f3c3a28637afd33b1c090ba0ec74202b
“University science lecturers have been warned off making the familiar statement in class that ‘Aboriginal people have been in Australia for 40,000 years’.
“It ‘puts a limit on the occupation of Australia’ and many indigenous Australians see this as ‘inappropriate’, according to the University of NSW language advice for staff.
“The document suggests it is ‘more appropriate’ to say Aborigines have been here ‘since the beginning of the Dreaming/s’ because this ‘reflects the beliefs of many Indigenous Australians that they have always been in Australia, from the beginning of time, and came from the land’.
* * *
“The indigenous language advice says putting a date on Aboriginal arrival “tends to lend support to migration theories and anthropological assumptions. … Many indigenous Australians see this sort of measurement and quantifying as inappropriate.”
I just reloaded this page and it popped up a box that said:
https://www.gnxp.com is requesting your username and password. The site says: “Members Area”
I had to click cancel 3 times before it went away.
Razib: I am posting this stuff so you can diagnose the page. Please delete when you wish.
When I posted the previous comment I got a page with the following:
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Over the years, I’ve filled some large gaps in my knowledge of history by following your reading tips. I don’t recall any about (sub-Sarahan)African history (as opposed to pre-history). Have you seen this review in the NYRB? I’ve read the easiest one (The Golden Rhinoceros) and have begun 2 of the others (which are heavier going, written, I think, for other historians). The article made me realize that “inadequate” doesn’t even begin to describe my knowledge of this area.
Vice on Jony Ive:
Sure, he sacrificed modularity and repairability for a variety of benefits. Since Koebler doesn’t know what the benefits are, he can’t judge the tradeoff. Everyone copied Apple, so the worst you can say about Ive is that he pandered to the market. Apple buyers aren’t unique sheep.
He’s made mistakes pushing this too far. The biggest was the laptop keyboards. “Move thin and break things.” But the big mistake was taking so many years to fix it, especially announcing every year that they’d fixed it, when they had failed. Probably this cascade was a refusal to add back thickness. (Similarly, taking so many years to replace the non-modular mac pro.) Are any of Koebler’s other examples even mistakes?
The smaller the computer, the more important miniaturization. He’s probably overdoing it with non-replaceable ram on desktops. But Koebler attacking airpods for being small?
Razib, what do you think of the recent David Reich study on the South Cushitic nomads from Southeast Africa who lived from 4100 – 1600 years ago, we now know Elmenteitan was not Nilotic and it’s culture bearers were undifferentiated genetically from the already South Cushitic Pastoral Neolithic/Stown Bowl nomads.
Paper: https://reich.hms.harvard.edu/sites/reich.hms.harvard.edu/files/inline-files/2019_PrendergastLipsonSawchuk_Science_PastoralNeolithic_1.pdf
The men of the Pastoral Neolithic/Elmentietan were dominated by ydna E-M293, despite it’s youngish age. So a very clear y-dna founder effect was occuring in this population. This fact only further cements the Afroasiatic affiliations of this population, not to mention their E-M293 has a legitimate Horn African origin – as the diversity of E-V1515 is almost wholly contained in the region. Also – the admixture between the early unmixed Cushitic population and the East African HG was extremely sex-biased – the lack of East African HG ydna, but proliferation of their mtdna in contemporary South Cushitic populations (and in this sample set) – and the reverse in the HG samples here, whose only Cushitic ancestry is seen solely in the ydna (the E-V22 HG sample). This is reflected in what is seen for the contemporary descendants.
The most unexpected thing in this paper were the Prettejohn’s Gully duo – a male and female pair of nomads – date to 4000+ years ago and lived deep into Kenya near Tanzania, and were 50% Eurasian in ancestry, 25%ish Ethiopian HG (Chabu-like) and 25% ancestral EA. The male car E-M78 lineages like E-V22 like a sample here, and another sample in the previous ried ydna E2 (idk if E2a or E2b) and mtdna K1a, and the female was L3f1b. The fact that they carry such a heavy amount of Eurasian ancestry in addition to Ethiopian HG ancestry, and the much lower ancestral EA ancestry needs further parsing. Their archeological and ethno-linguistic affiliation is also unknown as of now. No one expected people like this to come up in the aDNA record.
The Iron Age pastoral samples are similar to contemporary Southeast African Nilotes. The Iron Age earliest Bantu sample (1170 years) in the Great Lakes/northern Southeast Africa thus far (predating the more unmixed west African Pemba Bantu 600BP sample), yet it is very close to Cushitic-admixture levels of Kenyan Bantus like the Kikuyu, Kaamba, and other Thagiicu Bantu and broadly NE Bantu peoples.
TGGP: minorities get bonus points on the gaokao (the college entrance exam) and had the right to have two children under the one child policy. (The policy has been reformed in the last few years; I’m not sure where things stand currently.)
the hui have preferentially been instruments of chinese expansion into the muslim west. one of the reasons the uyghurs have negative attitudes to the hui….
The intermarriage table shows that 20 years ago, Uyghurs intermarried with Han at 7.2 times the rate they intermarried with Hui, whereas 10 years ago, they intermarried with Han at 3.7 times the rate with Hui. Viewed another way, over those 10 years intermarriage with Han dropped 64% while intermarriage with Hui dropped 29% (and intermarriage in general dropped 50%).
That’s compatible with some negative feeling toward the Hui in absolute terms, but Hui intermarriage dropping just 30% while all intermarriage drops 50% looks more like preference towards the Hui.
most of the manchurians are really han now. manchurian language is dead. it’s just that being minority is a boon in some ways so ppl have been reidentifying.
The Manchu rate of non-intermarriage is 55/53%. That’s very low! But it’s high enough to make real differences seem plausible on the surface. Mongols are only at 63/62% and they are quite different from the Han. This paper rates the Mongol language as thriving and in current use “with complete modern school systems”, although Language Log tends to suggest that that’s overstating the case.
Also Razib – I posted under another name here (Luke Wallace), your free to delete that post. I thought that comment hadn’t gone through as I received a error message.
Vice on Jony Ive:
Some years ago when I mucked around with computers a lot more than I do these days, I grew to admire the IBM computers. They were built by the anti-Jony Ive. The chassis were all metal. The covers came off by push one or two buttons. Things like disk drives that were mounted on a second level pivoted out of the way. I could, and did, ram upgrades in a matter of minutes. Their ThinkPad laptops could take a licking and keep on ticking. I once had one knocked off a high table on to a concrete floor. One little ding.
IBM sold the business to Lenovo 15 years ago. The ThinkPad and ThinkCentre branded machines are still well built. I still buy them and I plan to continue.
Airpods? My brother uses airpods. A couple of months ago he was out walking his dog in the snow. He stopped to talk to a neighbor about a canine issue. He used a gloved hand to take one of his airpods out so he could hold a conversation, and fumbled it into a snow bank. $159 for a new pair. Yes, there is such a thing as too small.
I just got the error message described in my 7:19am post. But my post got put up. At least I can see it.
I read an entertaining rant about Airpods recently — wish I could remember where. The take-home was the method used in their construction inherently sets a finite working life of something like 18 months, after which the Airpods become “e-waste” (too many hazardous materials to put in the regular garbage stream, but not repairable without destroying the housing). They are thus best seen as a status-symbol disposable good.
Airpods were not even the first to market. You can dislike this product category, but you can’t blame it on Ive. Are any of the competitors more serviceable or have a longer battery lifetime? I’m pretty sure that everyone made their products as small as possible, it’s just that Apple is better at it, because Ive pushed them to develop these capabilities.
There is the possibility that smallness makes them easier to lose, but I’m skeptical.
Razib, I just recently saw your Twitter exchange with Huw Groucutt/Alwyn Scally from the other day, you left an interesting comment regarding the Eurasian bottleneck “the polytomy tendency you see 40k BP > earlier looks like it is more diversification from common ancestral.” This means that all Eurasians descend from a single bottlenecked population that started expanding at some point around 60,000 years ago, as opposed to multiple separate (but also bottlenecked) populations mixing into one another at that time and then expanding outwards?
I personally think Huw Groucutt’s speculation will eventually be vindicated – there was no Out of Africa migration 60,000 years ago, the colonization of Eurasia by humans happened from within Eurasia around that time, and hyper-arid MIS 4 is the ultimate cause of the apparent population collapse in the ancestral Eurasian population. The true “Out of Africa” event occurred closer to 90,000-100,000 years right in the middle of MIS 5, when Southwest Asia started getting colonized by humans from Nubian Complex Egypt. This correlates with the divergence of y-DNA CT and mtDNA L3 from ostensibly African BT and L3’4, and also corresponds MSMC divergence dating of 100,000 years between Africans and non-Africans that I’ve mentioned here in the past.
mick, a lot is up in the air….
Hi Razib,
Regarding your problem with your website ( I am a software engineer). I analysed your site and found this conclusion.
1) Your are hosted on dreamhost.
2) You have chosen to host wordress on dreamhost.
3) Between them and your needs, configuration problems are too difficult to handle the problem, unless your are a software engineer or hire one (I am not available for hire, so just giving advice).
The best bet for you is to move this to medium or blogger.
I suggest
I actually got error messages, after posting the above comment. So I sent you an email also.
Then I get two messages asking me to confirm subscription to gnxp, which I did. Honestly, this is really fucked up. You need to bail out.
the comment problems should be fixe. turned off wp debug.
also, does anyone thing the ‘notify’ of new comments option is worth it? i turned it on for jetpack. literally never do that sort of thing myself
On the Mormon thing–
It does not really surprise me. The person in question mostly identifies with Mormonism culturally instead of in the “this is what I live every day by following the commandments” sense. For the normal active member, things *done* are much bigger signs of identity and place than things *named.*