Also, central Washington looks exactly like West River South Dakota

“Eastern Washington, east of the Cascades, has a relatively dry climate with large areas of semiarid steppe and a few truly arid deserts lying in the rainshadow of the Cascades”

Still, the biggest news of yesterday was that Idaho has flipped to the ‘has visited’ column

For the first time in either of our lives, Lady of tdaxp and myself are going to visit Yellowstone today. We are stayingn with a friend in Bozeman, Montana. As we were careful to stop for food and gas along the say, this of course means…

… that Wyoming and Montana have fallen into the “has visited” column!

FiveThirtyEight has a really fascinating post of how Apartheid was an unpopular policy among the whites of South Africa. Some excerpts:

Compared to this, the National Party offered the promise of ending English dominance of the civil service and the economy as well ending the competition that African laborers moving to the urban areas posed to poor Afrikaner workers. When the votes were counted the United Party had won a large popular vote victory, 547,437 (50.9%) for the United Party to 443,278 (41.2%) for the National Party. But when the seats were declared, the National party and its allies had won 79, compared to 71 for the United Party and its allies.

…

Secondly, the National Party had the advantage of being an ethnic party in a country in which the ethnic balance favored them. Afrikaners, to whom they focused their appeal, made up 57% of the population, and were furthermore, better distributed for electoral purposes, making up the majority in 98 out of 150 seats. The redistricting that followed the Nationalist victory in 1948 only increased this discrepancy by adding six seats for Namibia, which was annexed in violation of UN resolutions calling for its independence.

Therefore, the results in the next two elections were even more disproportionate. In 1953, the opposition had united into the United Front, and had high hopes of victory, and with the unified support the South African business community and economic elite, they outspent the National party by nearly 4-1. Nevertheless, when the votes were counted the pattern of 1948 was repeated, only to an even greater extent than in 1948. In Cape Town the United Front won 73%; in Cape Elizabeth 65%. But in the rest of Cape Province, the National Party won 57% of the vote, and 29 out of 33 seats. The pattern was repeated nationwide. By 1958, the Opposition had all but given up serious hope of winning despite the fact that the results indicated that they still held the support of a majority of the electorate.

…

The greatest threat to the system was always naked demographics, and by giving no option to young whites for political change, it drove many of South Africa’s best and brightest towards emigration. By the 1970s it was not just English speakers who were leaving the country, but also young Afrikaners who wanted an opportunity to escape an Afrikaans-only educational system that the National party seemed determined to force them into.

By the end of the 1970s, the white population was actually falling by nearly 20,000 a year, a pace that would more than double by the beginnings of the 1980s. While the electoral system may have made it increasingly difficult for South Africans to oust the National government with their votes, it in many cases led them to vote against its system of Apartheid with their feet.

Like the Republic of South Africa, the United States of America also imposes unpopular, racially discriminatory laws which harm its competitiveness.

Like Purpleslog, I don’t have the artistic skill myself, but I like this painting. It  is Mohammed, as the medieval Europeans saw him.

Courtesy Mohammed Image Archive. I am a fan of the sketching of Abdul, as well.

Today I finished setting up a new laptop for my mom. As every time, I had voice mail trouble, because her rural telco does not use MP3 for forwarding voice mails — instead they use the Sipro Lab Telecom ACELP.net (130) audio codec, which requires a special driver.  How aggravating! Why don’t they just use MP3 like everyone else?

We, the Neanderthals

Of all the stories I missed while attending a research conference in Denver, the most amazing is the sudden wave of evidence that modern humans are an admixed population between ancient humans and Neanderthals. In other words, an us-versus-them (or them-versus-us, as in The Inheritors and “The Ugly Little Boy“) model of Ancient Humans and Neanderthals should be replaced by an “us and them” model. In the same way that the English are both Norman and Saxon, the Turks are Turkic and Greek, and American Blacks are African and European, we are both Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal.

Blog posts are all over the place, so instead of trying to synthesize them, I will simply link to a number of these, highlighting the most interesting lines of each

• I, for one, welcome my Neandertal ancestry.
• I assume by now that everyone has read A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome. It’s free to all, so you should
• Neandertals were of the same species as we moderns, at least using the biological species concept. There were fertile hybrids.
• Neanderthals were the first race to bury their dead, and had more advanced stone tools.
• Now, does this mean that it’s time to do the Neanderthal victory dance (to quote Hawks) and to begin re-imagining the caves of Late Pleistocene Europe throbbing to the sweet rhythms of Barry White and Marvin Gaye? Well yes and no
• Question: what other human evolution story is of the same order of magnitude in terms of significance? I think the last one of this magnitude was the Cann, et. al. “mitochondrial Eve” narrative of the mid-80s. Before that Lucy?
• So the NY Times admits to a significant genetic difference between blacks and whites/Asians. The latter races receive the benefit (whatever that may be) of 1 percent to 4 percent Neanderthal genes
• The fact that non-Africans as a whole, including Papuans, have Neandertal admixture, presumably from interactions in the Middle East, seem close to falsifying the “two-wave” model of expansion “Out of Africa” which came to prominence in the early aughts.
• The Neandertal sequences have a high number of cases with complete sequence identity with the human reference, considering only those human-chimpanzee SNPs. Indeed, in the low percentage categories, the Neandertals are closer to the human reference sequence than the San [African Bushman] individual.
• The Neanderthals were way stronger than us, and a Neanderthal female would kill a Homo sapien male who tried to rape her, and literally eat him for lunch.
• The power of data to overwhelm human prejudice is sometimes very awesome.
• There is evidence of a genocidal race war between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, which we won because our bodies were anatomically better suited for throwing projectile weapons.

Read these links. They are fascinating.

Thank you all.

Threats in the Age of Obama, including my chapter An Outbreak of Democracy, is now available in a Kindle Edition!

Thanks to Mike Tanji (our editor), Fred Zimmerman (our publisher), and everyone else who made this possible!