NY Times on Watson’s African DNA

A bit meta perhaps, but there is a choice moment right at the top of today’s NYT Lede blogpiece on the “Lucky” Jim Watson’s DNA. It seems that 16 % of the former chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor’s genetic make-up comes from Africa. (UPDATE: Whatever that means — which is most likely [...]

Gauss files

No real reason for this post beyond that I have to help my second grader with his math homework this weekend. His class is doing a lot of stuff with simple equations, and looking at the different ways different sets of numbers can add up to the same total.
That reminds me of one of [...]

Friday (Isaac) Newton Blogging

This week’s bit of Newtoniana:
There is one story told by every Newton chronicler (including me) that is supposed to capture the great man’s puritanism in action.
Newton was famously a man of few friends, especially in his Cambridge years (1661-1696). One of those few was the immigrant chemist Giovanni Vigani (whose chemical chest — complete [...]

Andrew Sullivan and the IQ follies (short version)

The IQ and race mess is a gift that keeps on giving – but I wish Andrew Sullivan would stop teaching the controversy. Links like these to a fanzine level interview (in a self described “engaging lifestyle magazine,” forsooth!) on IQ and heritability don’t help much. (And yes, James Flynn, the [...]

Brain and mind–PTSD and Lt. Whiteside

Philip Carter, writing in his exemplary blog, Intel-Dump, argues that the Army’s attempt to criminalize the behavior of Lt. Elizabeth Whiteside in the wake of her suicide attempt in Iraq represents a “hard case.” Carter sees a conflict between the Army’s need to discipline its troops and its imperative to take care of its own. [...]

Hello World

This is, or will be, a blog that focuses on writing about science, the history of science, the interaction (often to the unhappiness of both) between science and what passes for our politics today — and whatever else suits my fancy. Honi soit qui mal y pense.The blog’s title refers back to Isaac Newton’s [...]