Monthly Archives: June 2018

Tyler Cowen asks. No.        

I’m looking for examples of chemical reactions, industrial processes, gadgets, that almost work. The laws of physics suggest that the thing is possible, but we haven’t found a way to do it, or maybe we can, but it’s uneconomical or … Continue reading →

For many years, anthropologists [ many of them] have doubted traditional accounts of human  sacrifice, cannibalism, torture, and  general irritability among MesoAmerican Indians – mainly the Aztecs and Maya. Progress in archaeology and the translation of the Mayan script have … Continue reading →

According to wiki, Fst between Europeans (CEU) and sub-Saharan Africans (YRI) is 0.153. According to this study, Fst between North American wolves and coyotes is … wait for it..  0.153.      

My review of Carl Zimmer’s new book, She Has Her Mother’s Laugh, will come out in Quillette, probably next week.

Looking for free sites that would allow some experimentation with GPU programming, likely CUDA.  Also, thinking about buying something, what would you recommend? Something useful but not bleeding-edge?

Let us suppose  that Elon Musk makes substantial progress in Mars colonization.  There’s a problem* – it’s not clear  that current Earth humans could thrive there. The gravity is a lot lower: we know that zero G is bad for … Continue reading →

Yellow fever is a viral disease that probably originated in Africa- it used to be a big problem in the Caribbean.  It occasionally showed up on the South, sometimes as far north as Philadelphia.  Nobody understood how it was transmitted … Continue reading →

I have said this before, but since fetal cells can linger in mothers for a long time, while maternal cells can be transmitted to offspring, there is a niche for a kind of cell that is transmitted indefinitely through the … Continue reading →

I’m going to review Carl Zimmer’s new book, She Has Her Mother’s Laugh. Well, you can see why he has a job at the New York Times.  And I do mean that in a bad way. “of making many books … Continue reading →