Category Archives: Uncategorized

Looking for free sites that would allow some experimentation with GPU programming, likely CUDA.  Also, thinking about buying something, what would you recommend? Something useful but not bleeding-edge? Advertisements

Let us suppose  that Elon Musk makes substantial progress in Mars colonization.  There’s a problem* – it’s not clear  that current Earth humans could thrive there. The gravity is a lot lower: we know that zero G is bad for … Continue reading →

Yellow fever is a viral disease that probably originated in Africa- it used to be a big problem in the Caribbean.  It occasionally showed up on the South, sometimes as far north as Philadelphia.  Nobody understood how it was transmitted … Continue reading →

I have said this before, but since fetal cells can linger in mothers for a long time, while maternal cells can be transmitted to offspring, there is a niche for a kind of cell that is transmitted indefinitely through the … Continue reading →

I’m going to review Carl Zimmer’s new book, She Has Her Mother’s Laugh. Well, you can see why he has a job at the New York Times.  And I do mean that in a bad way. “of making many books … Continue reading →

I have done a couple more podcasts with James Miller: one on the prehistory of Europe, and another on the prehistory of the Americas.

There’s a new paper out on Iceland’s demography. Originally, Iceland was roughly half Scandihoovian and half bog-trotters. But today, the islanders are about 70% Norse. The authors think that this was probably genetic drift. They are wrong.  Those Gaelic ancestors … Continue reading →