Transmillennial

This is one of the most unnoticed and yet most interesting papers I've read in the last 10 years. Using a large amount of human genetic data, the authors calculated the recombination frequency as a function of position on all 22 somatic human chromosomes. Brief 'splainer: most of us have 22 pairs of somatic chromosomes. One member of each pair comes from our father, one from our mother. However, in the process of making sperm and eggs, our father and mother took each pair of chromosomes they had, and did something called recombination; they spliced the chromosomes together, in one or two places on each chromosome, typically, to produce two new chromosomes, each partly granddad, partly grandma. Then during meiosis they put one of the chromosomes in a single developing sperm or egg. So if grandad's orginal chromosome was blue, and grandma's was red, you inherit one of these two chromosomes from dad (and similarly from mom). X-chromosomes also recombine, but only i...

News item: Governor Pete Ricketts has just appointed Omaha attorney Jonathan Papik to the State Supreme Court. Backstory: Jon Papik (there may be another Jon Papik in Omaha, but I can't find him) apparently presides at various events at Harvest Community Church (PCA) in Omaha. PCA is a conservative denomination, and most of its pastors espouse young-earth creationism. They hold something called the Omaha Worship Conference ; the last two years, their lead speaker was Allen P. Ross, a young-earth creationist theologian from Godawful, Alabama . In the absence of other evidence, and based on his religious participation, it is reasonable therefore to conclude that Mr. Papik believes the world was created in 7 days about 4000 years ago. If so, he is the second creationist the Ricketts/Sasse tag-team have elevated to the judiciary (the first was Steve Grasz). Can anyone reasonably expect Mr. Papik will be able to evaluate scientific evidence if he believes the central paradigm of bi...

...or how figures lie, but liars sometimes don't figure too well. Someone yesterday tried to prove to me that gun bans don't reduce murder rates. They sent this link ... ...and something didn't look right. I've been looking at noisy data for nigh on 40 years, trying to see signal in the murk, and that spike in 2002 seemed really odd. Now I have family in the UK; I had more in 2002. I subscribe to the London Times. I go back and forward, though not as often as I'd like. And I was aware of nothing that might have caused a large number of homicides in 2002. So I did a little digging. And, remarkably, the spike in 2002 is the work of one man, a man you've probably never heard of, named Dr. Harold Shipman. Shipman was a general practitioner in the UK. He became a GP near Manchester (where I was born and lived the first eight years of my life). And then he started murdering people. He killed mostly older women, in order to steal their jewelry, or after having th...

Coby Mach, Lincoln's Sean Hannity wannabe, apparently found about UNL Nazi Dan Kleve the same way most of you did, by reading the Journal Star. And he has a sanctimonious little Facebook post up about it. Except, except...Mach has actively supported the campaign by Erdman, Halloran and Brewer against the UNL English department in general, and Gailey and Lawton in particular. That campaign, and particularly Erdman, has been a vehicle for threats of violence against Gailey and Lawton. In particular, Erdman's Facebook page has for months carried a comment suggesting... Someone visit these two on a dark night... It was still there this morning, more than 4 months after it was posted. Erdman has been told about it. He hasn't removed it, even though any Facebook account owner can remove any comment from their page. I posted a comment on Mach's Facebook page last night, pointing this out, in the context that even the establishment GOP has become quite tolerant o...

There was a National Review tweet in my Twitter feed this morning. Not sure why I looked at it (coffee hadn’t really cut in, probably) but it seemed at first glance to be a link to yet another extended whine about how a conservative speaker on a East-coast liberal arts campus hadn’t received the proper level of adulation from the assembled lumpen. Yawn! But First Amendment, I suppose, so I read on... Then the coffee started doing its magic, and I got curious. It was about a retired college professor named Paul Gottfried, who recently gave a lecture at Hamilton College, in upstate New York. A gauntlet of students accosted him before he had said a single word, tossing around epithets and accusations. OK crappy writing. Don't they know a gauntlet is a little glove? No, obvs. not. Buckley no longer edits. And epithets and accusations …oh, sweet merciful Cthulhu! (OK, I’m jaded. I’ve been binge-watching Supernatural, and am therefore unaroused anything less than stabby silver k...

John Kuehn (DVM) loves him some executions. He loves them so much he wants to protect them from the prying eyes of people who might foolishly believe having the state inject people with lethal substances to kill them might not be such a wonderful thing. Although he hilariously claims to be a steadfast advocate of transparency in government , this transparency does not extend to the suppliers of execution drugs to the state of Nebraska. So he's sponsoring a bill to conceal the identities of manufacturers and suppliers of the ingredients of death-penalty cocktails. He wrote just a couple of months ago , and on other occasions previous to that , that there are worldwide shortages of sodium thiopental, an important component of these cocktails but also a valuable drug for actually treating people instead of killing them. Activism and misrepresentation of sodium thiopental has virtually eliminated the drug from the global market, at the cost of untold lives. The technical ter...

The Nebraska political blog Leavenworth Street was once worth reading. It often published insider information that scooped the two major state newspapers, which was especially remarkable considering the blog owner, Street Sweeper/Jerry Kratochvil lives in Kansas. It was also often pungently funny. Heck, I even guest-posted once. But, as with everything else Republican/Conservative in the age of Trump, it's now pretty much a dumpster fire. Sweeper's replacement, Locke, is a joke; humorless, sanctimonious, hypocritical, and apparently with very little actual content to share. It reached rock-bottom today, though, with a sermon on civility . Trumpkins notoriously lack any introspection or self-awareness, but seriously, do they actually think they have standing to lecture anyone about civility? Which led me to ponder: what, actually, can Trumpkins still preach to us about, without conjuring up outright derision? Which of the seven deadly sins, for example, do they have stan...