undead astronauts

http://www.youtube.com/html5

pretty cool, may be the beginning of the end for flash video.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/12/magicjack-femtocell-sure-to-face-legal-battle-royale/

Cool tech, kind of like a Skype that works on all existing phones. Either way, carriers are going to sue the heck out of them. Letting the customer save money would obviously be a terrible thing.

a study of SNPs has determined that the entire asian population came from a single migration from south asia.

Results showed that individuals coming from the same region, or speaking the same language had great genetic similarities, and Asia was populated through a single migration from the south.

“It seems likely from our data that they entered South East Asia first – making these populations older [and therefore more diverse],” a leading member of the consortium Edison Liu said.

that ppl from the same region or speaking the same language should tend to share great genetic similarities should surprise no one. this next part was interesting to me tho.

“So although the Chinese population is very large, it has less variation than the smaller number of individuals living in South East Asia, because the Chinese expansion occurred very recently, following the development of rice agriculture – within only the last 10,000 years.”

i’m not sure if i would have expected that. china has an array of different dialects and ethnicities, and i would have thought that would contribute to diversity. apparently, it doesn’t. at least not much genetically.

finally, one of the researchers says the findings were a “reassuring social message,” which “robbed racism of much biological support.” that’s a nice sentiment, but is it really that assuring? they’ve found that within a rather short amount of time (geologically), 10,000 years, a number of groups had diverged significantly enough that scientists could easily guess their region of origin or their spoken language. yes, we all came from one population, but now apparently we’re demonstrably different genetically. hmm. i’m not feeling especially reaassured.

UPDATE: here’s a graph from that study i saw on gnxp.

“The Bell curve is a fact of life. The blacks on average score 85 per cent on IQ and it is accurate, nothing to do with culture. The whites score on average 100. Asians score more … the Bell curve authors put it at least 10 points higher. These are realities that, if you do not accept, will lead to frustration because you will be spending money on wrong assumptions and the results cannot follow.” – Lee Kuan Yew, The Man & His Ideas, 1997

“I started off believing all men were equal. I now know that’s the most unlikely thing ever to have been, because millions of years have passed over evolution, people have scattered across the face of this earth, been isolated from each other, developed independently, had different intermixtures between races, peoples, climates, soils… I didn’t start off with that knowledge. But by observation, reading, watching, arguing, asking, that is the conclusion I’ve come to.” – Lee Kuan Yew, The Man & His Ideas, 1997

these quotes would pretty much get any existing american politician voted out of office, but being then leader of an east asian authoritarian city-state enables you to ignore most of your critics if they disagree. i mention lee b/c he is singled out in a new paper on the impact of smart fractions. it says he is the only world leader that has pursued public policy which, in effect, is pro-eugenic in it’s implications. lee actually went as far as favoring polygamy for ppl wealthy enough to afford it b/c of the biological implications (although the idea wasn’t implemented). (more…)

caught this on gnxp. a recent study shows that there’s a pretty strong positive correlation between cardiovascular health and iq. there have been plenty of studies that have shown smarter ppl are healthier, so we can’t really say how the arrow of causality points with much conviction. but if u needed motivation to go jogging or spinning, this might help.

(more…)

so the economist has an article up written by geoffrey miller, an evolutionary psychologist. he makes some rather stark observations.

Human geneticists have reached a private crisis of conscience, and it will become public knowledge in 2010. The crisis has depressing health implications and alarming political ones. In a nutshell: the new genetics will reveal much less than hoped about how to cure disease, and much more than feared about human evolution and inequality, including genetic differences between classes, ethnicities and races.

(more…)

i have recently became aware that liberals exist who have looked at the available data and have become convinced of the reality of hbd. one of these liberals is now struggling to reconcile hbd views and liberalism.

i appreciate this effort b/c i’ve stated previously that if liberals ignore this area of inquiry, they automatically cede the intellectual ground to conservatives and outright racists. i say this even though i’m not a liberal. i just happen to value divergent points of view as long as they are based on evidence and not ignorance, even if that evidence points to reality being pretty ugly. but what of asian-americans that might hold hbd views?

(more…)

i’m surprised i haven’t come across this guy before, as his story is fascinating and he has ties to huntsville’s most famous inhabitant. qian xuesan was a chinese born rocket scientist that passed away this halloween.

he was born near shanghai and later went to MIT and caltech. after reaching caltech, he got interested in rocketry and helped found the jet propulsion lab in pasedena as a response to germany’s V-2 rocket. he was part of the manhattan project and after WW2, the US sent him to interview werner von braun and other german scientists.

“No one then knew that the father of the future U.S. space program was being quizzed by the father of the future Chinese space program.”

his US work would be an inspiration for the space shuttle. he then married a famous opera singer jiang ying, who was the daughter of one of chiang kai shek’s military strategists.

i’m not sure if i’ve ever heard of a modern equivalent of a match like this. who has ever heard of a famous singing babe marrying an uber rocket nerd? anyways, qian’s luck would run out in 1950. (more…)

some of u may have already seen augmented reality on the iphone in the form of yelp!, which overlays data on top of a camera picture. however the limitations of that are obvious as the program does no analysis of the data within the videostream.

well, get ready for a change. some enterprising ppl have figured out the API concerning iphone video and promise to release it to the public.

for a taste of what augmented reality really offers, check out the video here:

Too tired to much analysis, but i did want to mention it. social scientists have long puzzled over the fact that winter babies have done worse in life, but they haven’t been able to figure out why. now, there appears to be an explanation.

Study after study has shown that they test poorly, don’t get as far in school, earn less, are less healthy, and don’t live as long as children born at other times of year. Researchers have spent years documenting the effect and trying to understand it.

for whatever reasons, babies born in the winter are disproportionately born to lower income parents. the reason this wasn’t picked out earlier is b/c researchers didn’t even contemplate the idea that family background might have something to do w/ it.

He and Ms. Buckles estimate that family background accounts for up to 50% of the differences in education and earnings.

another environmental only theory fails. one hypothesis as to why this happens is that spring break and prom play a part in the baby creation. i’m not completely sold on the idea however. one reason this phenomenon was discovered was that the researchers noticed that couples tended to have their kids in the same season. since spring break and prom should only occur a few times in one’s life, it seems unlikely it would affect multiple kids.

so the nytimes has a story describing some studies done on the effects of parenting. the researchers studied the effects on the happiness of kids who were raised either to believe they needed to submit their will to a higher authority like their parents, or raised so that they could figure things out for themselves.

the researchers found that kids raised to submit their will were not as happy as kids who were taught to find their own direction and think for themselves. this study took a novel (to me anyways) view that praise “might be just another method of control, analogous to punishment,” and that “the primary message of all types of conditional parenting is that children must earn a parent’s love.”

this is what the study found:

It turned out that children who received conditional approval were indeed somewhat more likely to act as the parent wanted. But compliance came at a steep price. First, these children tended to resent and dislike their parents. Second, they were apt to say that the way they acted was often due more to a “strong internal pressure” than to “a real sense of choice.” Moreover, their happiness after succeeding at something was usually short-lived, and they often felt guilty or ashamed. (more…)

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ic0352250

yeah.  I’m immature.

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=353

after i just said no single gene or polymorphism has been found that increases IQ by more than 1-2 points, we get this news. a study has found that ppl that carry 2 copies of a gene that causes myopia have an average 7 pts iq gain. i don’t know why this result hasn’t turned up before b/c studies have long shown a correlation between myopia and higher IQ. and just for reference, wiki says: “The prevalence of myopia has been reported as high as 70-90% in some Asian countries, 30-40% in Europe and the United States, and 10-20% in Africa.”

apparently u can also carry the gene heterozygously, have normal vision, and still receive an intelligence gain, although it’s a smaller gain than homozygous carriers.

watch now to see if parents start screening their babies in utero for this gene, and to see if sperm donors will get paid more for being myopic.

this is a huge finding if it holds up and has major implications for politics/econ/society. but we need to keep in mind that previous major finds have not held up. no need to make further big pronouncements until it’s confirmed. i say again, that it’s odd that such a major IQ related gene tied to myopia hasn’t been looked at before.

hat tip to inductivist.

Well, I thought it was pretty awesome.  Skip to 1:50.