Daily Data Dump - Friday

Have a good weekend. DNA Dilemma, Day Five: Time to Decide. Mary Carmichael of Newsweek is going to get a personal genomics kit. I predict it will confirm that she is a female of European descent. Diabetes or Not, Dietary Habits of Aftrican-Americans Are Similar. Remember that there's variance in white ancestry among African Americans. People with the same environmental inputs may have different risks due to genetic variation. Recovery Summer. This time it's different. For real. A Grand Unified Theory of Palinisms. Jacob Weisberg, Yale grad and Rhodes Scholar, wonders why Sarah Palin says "stupid and ridiculous things." An easy answer is that she's stupid. But I think the truth is that Sarah Palin is closer to the norm in intelligence and polish than the typical American politician. In fact she's probably somewhat above average in intelligence. The fact that she's a social conservative means that it's easy for Left-leaning elites to mock her, but if you go to a liberal college town in the Berkshires I'm sure you could talk to plenty of people with the "right" ideology who are totally incoherent and obviously have no grasp of what they're trying to talk about. I've met plenty of liberals, as an example, who regurgitate Paul Krugman columns in a manner which makes it pretty clear they have no idea what he was trying to say (they make errors in transmission which would be obvious to them if they actually understood how the pieces of the argument cohere together, so it seems likely they're repeating verbatim without any real comprehension). The Collapse of Complex Societies. This is why productivity growth is so important. We can't go back, we can only go forward. Else we'll sink like the Great White Shark.