Link Banana

Strange Maps highlights a study of the genetic commonality of Europeans. Finland’s a striking outlier. Other observations:

The extent of genetic variation is greater north to south than east to west. This may be a result of the way Europe was colonized by modern humans, i.e. from the south, in three successive waves of migration (45,000 years ago, where before there had only been Neanderthals; 17,000 years ago, after the last Ice Age; and 10,000 years ago, with the advent of farming techniques from the Middle East).

Yugoslav genetic variation is quite large (hence the big pink blob), and overlaps with the Greek, Romanian, Hungarian, Czech and even the Italian ones.

There is surprisingly little overlap between the northern and southern German populations, each of which has more in common with their other neighbours (Danish/Dutch/Swedish in the northern case, Austrian/Swiss/French in the other one).

The Swiss population is entirely subsumed by the French one, similarly, the Irish population almost doesn’t show any characteristics that would distinguish it from the British one.

I just read two profiles. Neither was interesting enough to merit it’s own post, but the combination seemed to just pass the bar. The two:

• Dr. Doom. Depending on who you ask Nouriel Roubini is either a lucky pessimist or prescient thinker. There is, however, no doubt that he predicted America’s current economic turmoil in 2006.
• Hit Man. Jerry Corsi, author of the bestselling “Obama’s a Muslim drug addict” book, gets a brief but interesting profile in the New Yorker.

If, like me, you’ve always wondered what technological wizardry allows for The Daily Show’s impressive ability to amass clips of political and media foibles, the answer is: very little. An explanation from a former researcher:

It’s literally 15 rack-mounted TiVos of various models, many from the pre-Series 2 era. Some Philips boxes, some Sonys. And because there’s a limited number of remote codes, when a staffer operates one, he has to hold the remote directly against that box’s IR receiver so that the beam doesn’t hit any of the other boxes (i.e., so he’s not inadvertently controlling multiple boxes at once). No joke!

(via Boing Boing)

Sam Javanrouh captured a few moments of a great one.

Making time to do things that I usually “don’t have time for” was a good idea. For example, Paul Tough’s (rather long) story for the New York Times Magazine about the challenge and hope for New Orleans schools is good. The most striking paragraph in a primarily optimistic article:

Pastorek’s optimism and determination can be inspiring, but he admits that for now, at least, there’s no proof that a portfolio model will do a significantly better job educating poor children than a command-and-control model. When I spoke last month to Diane Ravitch, a historian of education who has spent decades studying and writing about the often dispiriting process of school reform, she said that she was skeptical that a change in the governance model would solve the problems plaguing New Orleans’s schools. “The fundamental issue in American education — I say this after 40 years of having read and studied and written about the problems — is one that is demographic,” she told me. Poor children, Ravitch said, simply face too many problems outside the classroom. “If you don’t buttress whatever happens in school with social and economic changes that give kids a better chance in life and put their families on a more stable footing, then schools alone are not going to solve the problems of poor student performance. There has to be a range of social and economic strategies to support and enhance whatever happens in school.”

Specifically: Why does India have so few Olympic medals? Tyler Cowen and others speculate. I do believe that cricket remains my favorite explanation.

GOOD has a pretty interesting map of history’s greatest journeys. Worth a look.

(via Snarkmarket)

Not quite sure why — perhaps because the topics been on my mind recently — but I feel compelled to link to Gary Bass’s passable summary of the concept of humanitarian intervention.

This has been going around for some time, and I never found an hour with which to watch it. Today I finally did, and I’m glad for that. It’s well done, and brings new weight to Robin’s question: “How is YouTube not the greatest art project ever?”

Hidden in a rather good mental_floss post called “3 Controversial Maps” is an interesting idea:

If George Etzel Pearcy had his way, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s famous song would have been called “Sweet Home Talladego.” In 1973, the California State University geography professor suggested that the U.S. should redraw its antiquated state boundaries and narrow the overall number of states to a mere thirty-eight.

Pearcy’s proposed state lines were drawn in less-populated areas, isolating large cities and reducing their number within each state. He argued that if there were fewer cities vying for a state’s tax dollars, more money would be available for projects that would benefit all citizens.

Though there are a substantial number of reasons to immediately reject this proposal, I think I could get used to this new map.

New research is looking into the way magicians are able to trick us to discover what insights that can give us into the nature of cognition. Cool.

It’s worth considering the fact that Paul Krugman is wrong. But it’s also worth considering his point that the Georgia-Russia conflict may be the dawn of a new era:

But as I was reading the latest bad news, I found myself wondering whether this war is an omen — a sign that the second great age of globalization may share the fate of the first.

I’ve had mixed opinions about Ta-Nehisi Coates’s work in the past, but I really — really really — like this blog post.

Here is the thing — believing that you have fallen because of actions outside of your control, or the collective control of your tribe, rewards you with an unearned sense of the cosmic. It allows you to fashion yourself as heroic — a Hercules robbed by the smallness of Gods. It fills you with an anger which is, at its root, a sort of false power, a weak righteousness that turns your enemies into demons. It was thrilling to believe we’d been kidnapped by white interlopers, as opposed to knowing that, in the words of the great Robert Hayden, we’d been sold off for “tin crowns that shone with paste” for “red calico and German-silver trinkets.”

Some stories simply must be noted.

When considering the under-noticed anniversary of Burma’s 1988 uprising, The Economist’s Asia.view column hits a sensible point I’d never considered:

No, the reason the revolution failed was simple: the army was prepared to kill as many people as it took to thwart it.

So long as a state apparatus is strong and remains cohesive, it’s hard to imagine how any citizen uprising can end authoritarianism.

Andrew Chen used Google Insights to put together a pretty interesting comparison of what (web 2.0-y) internet sites are most popular in which US states.

(via Waxy)

Farhed Manjoo says that the future of gadgets is constant improvement. There’s certainly good basis for the argument.

But because music players, cell phones, cameras, GPS navigators, video game consoles, and nearly everything else now runs on Internet-updatable software, our gadgets’ functions are no longer static. It’s still true that a gizmo you buy today will eventually be superseded by something that comes along later. But just like Meryl Streep, your devices will now dazzle you as they age. They’ll gain new functions and become easier to use, giving you fewer reasons to jump to whatever hot new thing is just hitting the market.

I enjoyed Hilary De Vries brief story of her visit to her childhood home.

Apparently the heat of chili pepper is determined primarily by it’s risk of infestation. The pepper pods of plants in climates where seed-destroying fungi grow well will be hotter where such fungi are rare.

The National Weather Service think they may have found a driver going 130 miles per hour around Chicago. Using a weather doppler. Who knew? As Gizmodo explains, It works something like this:

Sometimes, when a warm layer of air rolls in up above the surface, the beam from the Doppler radar can be deflected towards the ground—picking up traffic and other objects much like a police radar gun. The weather service alluded to the fact that the “speeder” could have been nothing more than noise, but it still makes you wonder how long it will be before they figure out how to bust motorists from space.