Transmillennial

For a libertarian, this seems like a no-brainer. But it isn't, so read on. There have been several recent cases where genenalogical and DNA information, uploaded by its owners to gedmatch.com, a public database, has been downloaded by law-enforcement and used to solve murders and rapes. So far it's all good. Of course, we could solve far more murders and rapes by simply forcing everyone to provide a sample of their DNA to the police. As a society, we've chosen not to do that (rightfully, I believe) reasoning the vast invasion of privacy outweighs the social good. And police in the US can't go on a fishing expedition for DNA. To force you to provide it, they have to have probable cause to believe you committed that specific crime, and they can't use your refusal to provide DNA voluntarily as evidence. Fourth Amendment. Large databases have changed all that. If I compare a DNA sample with such a database, for any given DNA sample, I can almost certainly identif...

This is rich. Far-too-famous historian, columnist and professional douchebag Niall Ferguson conspired with conservative Stanford students , including College Republicans and a Turning Point USA organizer, to 'grind down' students they disliked on the 'Cardinal Conversations' steering committee, and even suggested to one of his student research assistants that he do 'opposition research' on one of the offending students. Because liberal faculty make conservative students feel unwelcome on campus. Oh, wait... Ferguson became infamous for suggesting John Maynard Keynes was not concerned about the long-term effects of his policies, because he was gay and therefore would have no offspring.

I emigrated to Boston from ireland in September 1977, and almost immediately developed a profound dislike for Irish Americans. People would ask me where I was from; I'd tell them Ireland, and they'd then say Oh, I'm Irish too , which usually meant their great-grandfather had gotten off the boat in New York 100 years ago. The disppointment was definitely mutual. I found them loud and usually bigoted; I deplored their taste in beer; their political views; and their ignorance about the rest of the world in general, and modern Ireland in particular. They didn't like my accent: they perceived upper-middle-class Dublin as 'English'; they didn't like my liberalism, or my irreligiosity, or my liking for soccer. I don't remember which annoyed me more; being told by Americans that they were Irish, or by being asked by Americans if I was English. It all culminated on St Patrick's Day in 1978, when I and a couple of compatriots headed to Fields Corner in Sout...

Toiling in the mid-morning sun, in a hot, muddy cotton field in Copiah County, in the south of Mississippi, three young African American men, brothers, aged 18, 20 and 22, hoed the rows. It was late June, 1860, and so the men were slaves. The ground was wet from yesterday’s rain, the air heavy, and the men were anxious to finish their work before the clouds gathering on the western horizon flooded the fields with another summer cloudburst. Inside the plantation house, unbeknownst to them, they were being enumerated . James R Fortenberry, the slave-holder, a man of about 35, was listing their important personal details to Elijah Peyton, Assistant Marshall. These details were three; age, gender, and race. The race was officially ‘mulatto’; at that time, and in that place, mulattos were usually the sons or daughters of a black woman raped by a white slave-holder. They had no names, as far as the United States Government was concerned. Instead they would be listed, in Peyton’s elegant,...

The Lincoln Journal Star comments page is infested with trolls, many of which are bots. The LJS requires you comment from a Facebook account; a pretty good sign you're dealing twith a bot, and not a real person, is if the Facebook page is blank. So a couple of days ago, I was congratulating the writer of a pretty decent letter to the LJS. And a bot presumed to try correct my punctuation, hilariously mis-spelling comma . So I had a little fun. The Helen Faust bot thought she could make me look stupid by editing her original comment. And another bot, a fake account, and a Nazi wench from Mitchell Nebraska tried to pile on. This gave me the opportunity I've waited for my whole life. Hello, Dirty Harry. As you can see, the Faustbot fell for it, hook, line and sinker. Now for the coup de grace. None of the four have since reappeared. Good clean fun.

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...