John Reader’s Africa: A Biography of the Continent is one of my favorite books. Cities is not as good, but if you are trying to avoid cookie-cutter surveys, it is pretty decent. Reader is an engaging writer.
I haven’t had time to work on the South Asian Genotype or Tutsi projects in a while. But I haven’t forgotten about them and will get to them in the near future.
Since I’ve stopped engaging much on Twitter much it has become so much more obvious to me how difficult it is to have good-faith engagements on the platform. Tweeting out a few links and announcements is fine. Having a discussion is ridiculous.
Debunking the meat/climate change myth.
Italy’s Biggest Economic Problem? It’s Still Italy.
China Said It Closed Muslim Detention Camps. There’s Reason to Doubt That. “Now I know the error of my ways,” he said, as his wife and daughter shuffled nervously around the living room.
Being a Law Firm Partner Was Once a Job for Life. That Culture Is All but Dead. Winner-take-all. I looked up the median vs. mean wage for lawyers, and the skew was way more extreme than for physicians.
Scalable probabilistic PCA for large-scale genetic variation data.
How San Francisco’s Wealthiest Families Launched Kamala Harris. Gavin Newsome is far more a creature of the Getty family, so Harris isn’t even that bad.
Negative frequency-dependent selection maintains coexisting genotypes during fluctuating selection.
Polygenic risk scores of several subtypes of epilepsies in a founder population.
‘Pepper X’ At Over 3 Million Scoville Is The New World’s Hottest Pepper.
I really enjoyed Tim Flannery’s books on Australia (The Future Eaters) and North America (The Eternal Frontier), and I hear he has a new book out on Europe.
I wonder what other biographies are worth reading for the continents – specifically, for South America and Antartica – that are similar to Reader and Flannery’s books.
“Being a Law Firm Partner Was Once a Job for Life. That Culture Is All but Dead. Winner-take-all. I looked up the median vs. mean wage for lawyers, and the skew was way more extreme than for physicians.”
It was not really news to me. I could see it starting 20 years ago when the last firm I was in blew up and ended my law firm career. No tears for me. I’m just fine and I didn’t have to pull any all nighters in the last two decades.
The interesting thing is how much the profits at the top end have grown, even when compared to what they were five or ten years ago. I have no good explanation for that.
In standard economic theory all super normal profits should be competed away. Why isn’t this happening in the law business?
In medicine, the government conspires with the hospitals and the medical schools to limit the number of new doctors to about 25,000/yr. The US has about 2.6 docs per 1,000 pop. Most of the countries in Europe run closer to 4. The US would have to double the number of new docs per year to reach that level in the medium term.
Law is a completely different game. There is a super abundance of lawyers. Law schools still graduate about 30% more lawyers than the ones who get hired*. Law firms still hire lots more lawyers than they retain after 5 or 10 years. Many of them wind up as in-house staff at the big corporations. They are under no illusions as to what is going on. And lots of boomers whose careers started in around 1980 are now reaching mandatory retirement**, and they are healthy and don’t necessarily want to retire.
*The status differences between law schools correlate with almost nothing. There are brilliant lawyers who went to fourth tier law schools and guys who do know whether to defecate or wind their watches who went to Harvard.
**Law firms structured as partnerships are not subject to the Age Discrimination Act.
I always thought that this ever growing reserve army of lawyers would crash lawyer pay and law firm profits. It hasn’t happened yet.
I read Africa: Biography of a Continent on your recommendation and was disappointed. Partly because it’s 20 years old now, and so much has changed and so much more is known.
Razib, do your Patreon contributions go strictly to supporting the Brown Pundits blog and podcast, or do you split the contributions with GNXP? While I discovered you through GNXP, I can say BP has been a very pleasant addition to my e-reading circuit, even though I’m not South Asian myself. Your podcasts in particular are great, definitely my favorite aspect of the site
mick, i was motivated by having to edit the bp podcast. but at this point i supports gnxp too, since the costs have gone up since the DoS attacks.
“Meat / climate change myth” article comes across as a bit of a weird strawman in 2019.
Perhaps it was relevant in 2009 when published, however in the articles on the topic I’ve read published in mainstream sources (and I’ve read a few), they’ve all included caveats that: animal raising on some land might be a better system, but that for practical purposes, switching would result in reduced meat output and consumption and that on an individual while switching out “factory meat” for “sustainably produced meat” (or whatever the term is) may be optimal, switching out meat for veg is simpler and more achievable.
https://www.vox.com/2019/8/8/20758813/secrets-ultra-elderly-supercentenarians-fraud-error –
Seems evidence is suggestive differences in frequency of supercentarians around the world mostly attributable to fraud and error.
May help explain why supercentarians seem sometimes more frequent in places that went through most rapid modernization (poor quality early record keeping?) or among subpopulations within countries with lower levels of primary education or higher rates of fraud.
“Was the World’s Oldest Person Ever Actually Her 99-Year-Old Daughter?: Jeanne Calment made history when she died at the age of 122 in 1997, but a new investigation claims her daughter actually assumed her identity in 1934” by Jason Daley on January 2, 2019
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/study-questions-age-worlds-oldest-woman-180971153/
“That’s the gist of the new paper published on ResearchGate and presented at a recent gerontology meeting by Nikolay Zak of the Moscow Center For Continuous Mathematical Education. The Russian researchers claim that Calment, in fact, died at the age of 59 in 1934, and her daughter, Yvonne, assumed her identity after the fact to avoid inheritance taxes, and was thus the one who died in 1997 at the impressive-but-not-record-breaking age of 99.
maybe your pinboard feed might get more action if you added its rss feed to the sidebar here? like a GNXP Classic had with Jason’s links over on the right;)
it’s there. just at the bottom. i guess i should move it up
oh nice, thanks. i scrolled down earlier and still missed it
> …but I wonder, are they too long for regular readers?
No, not at all! Please, by all means continue. I am a layman here, nevertheless, I’m very appreciative of the knowledge/insights you share.