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DNA USA: A Genetic Portrait of America – Bryan Sykes

by Myrna Posted on July 2, 2020

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DNA USA: A Genetic Portrait of America

Bryan Sykes

Genre: Life Sciences

Price: $2.99

Publish Date: May 14, 2012

Publisher: Liveright

Seller: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.


Crisscrossing the continent, a renowned geneticist provides a groundbreaking examination of America through its DNA. The best-selling author of The Seven Daughters of Eve now turns his sights on the United States, one of the most genetically variegated countries in the world. From the blue-blooded pockets of old-WASP New England to the vast tribal lands of the Navajo, Bryan Sykes takes us on a historical genetic tour, interviewing genealogists, geneticists, anthropologists, and everyday Americans with compelling ancestral stories. His findings suggest:      • Of Americans whose ancestors came as slaves, virtually all have some European DNA.      • Racial intermixing appears least common among descendants of early New England colonists.      • There is clear evidence of Jewish genes among descendants of southwestern Spanish Catholics.      • Among white Americans, evidence of African DNA is most common in the South.      • European genes appeared among Native Americans as early as ten thousand years ago. An unprecedented look into America's genetic mosaic and how we perceive race, DNA USA challenges the very notion of what we think it means to be American.

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DNA USA: A Genetic Portrait of America – Bryan Sykes

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Wild Horse Country: The History, Myth, and Future of the Mustang – David Philipps

by Myrna Posted on August 6, 2018

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Wild Horse Country: The History, Myth, and Future of the Mustang
David Philipps

Genre: Nature

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: October 10, 2017

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Seller: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.


A Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter’s history of wild horses in America—and an eye-opening story of their treatment in our own time. The wild horse is so ingrained in the American imagination that even those who have never seen one know what it stands for: fierce independence, unbridled freedom, the bedrock ideals of the nation. From car ads to high school mascots, the wild horse—popularly known as the mustang—is the enduring icon of America. But in modern times it has become entangled in controversy and bureaucracy, and now its future is in question. In Wild Horse Country, New York Times reporter David Philipps traces the rich history of wild horses in America and investigates the shocking dilemma they face in our own time. Here is the grand story of the horse: from its prehistoric debut in North America to its reintroduction by Spanish conquistadors and its spread through the epic battles between native tribes and settlers during the days of the Wild West. Philipps explores how wild horses became so central to America’s sense of itself, and he delves into the hold that wild horses have had on the American imagination from the early explorers to the best-selling novels of Zane Grey to Hollywood Westerns. Traveling through remote parts of the American West, Philipps also reveals the wild horse’s current crisis, with tens of thousands of horses being held in captivity by the federal government, and free horses caught between the clashing ideals of ranchers, animal rights activists, scientists, and government officials. Wild Horse Country is a powerful blend of history and contemporary reporting that vividly reveals the majesty and plight of an American icon, while pointing a way forward that will preserve this icon for future generations.

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Wild Horse Country: The History, Myth, and Future of the Mustang – David Philipps

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The Wandering Gene and the Indian Princess: Race, Religion, and DNA – Jeff Wheelwright

by Myrna Posted on September 21, 2017

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The Wandering Gene and the Indian Princess: Race, Religion, and DNA
Jeff Wheelwright

Genre: Life Sciences

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: January 16, 2012

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Seller: W. W. Norton


A brilliant and emotionally resonant exploration of science and family history. A vibrant young Hispano woman, Shonnie Medina, inherits a breast-cancer mutation known as BRCA1.185delAG. It is a genetic variant characteristic of Jews. The Medinas knew they were descended from Native Americans and Spanish Catholics, but they did not know that they had Jewish ancestry as well. The mutation most likely sprang from Sephardic Jews hounded by the Spanish Inquisition. The discovery of the gene leads to a fascinating investigation of cultural history and modern genetics by Dr. Harry Ostrer and other experts on the DNA of Jewish populations. Set in the isolated San Luis Valley of Colorado, this beautiful and harrowing book tells of the Medina family’s five-hundred-year passage from medieval Spain to the American Southwest and of their surprising conversion from Catholicism to the Jehovah’s Witnesses in the 1980s. Rejecting conventional therapies in her struggle against cancer, Shonnie Medina died in 1999. Her life embodies a story that could change the way we think about race and faith.

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The Wandering Gene and the Indian Princess: Race, Religion, and DNA – Jeff Wheelwright

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Machine Learning Has Transformed Google Translate

by LaunaGavin587 Posted on December 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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Alex Tabarrok draws my attention to an article in the New York Times Magazine this weekend. It’s about machine learning in general, but it starts out with this:

Late one Friday night in early November, Jun Rekimoto, a distinguished professor of human-computer interaction at the University of Tokyo, was online preparing for a lecture when he began to notice some peculiar posts rolling in on social media. Apparently Google Translate, the company’s popular machine-translation service, had suddenly and almost immeasurably improved. Rekimoto visited Translate himself and began to experiment with it. He was astonished. He had to go to sleep, but Translate refused to relax its grip on his imagination.

That explains it! About a week ago I happened to be clicking some links from somewhere and ended up on a Chinese site. Just for laughs I ran it through Google Translate, and I was surprised at the quality of the text I got. It was much more readable than usual and seemed to be a pretty accurate translation. I chalked it up to either coincidence or the fact that I hadn’t used Google Translate in a while, and went on my way.

But no. Google Translate really has taken a quantum leap:

The Google of the future, CEO Sundar Pichai had said on several occasions, was going to be “A.I. first.” What that meant in theory was complicated and had welcomed much speculation. What it meant in practice, with any luck, was that soon the company’s products would no longer represent the fruits of traditional computer programming, exactly, but “machine learning.”

A rarefied department within the company, Google Brain, was founded five years ago on this very principle: that artificial “neural networks” that acquaint themselves with the world via trial and error, as toddlers do, might in turn develop something like human flexibility…It was only with the refugee crisis, Pichai explained from the lectern, that the company came to reckon with Translate’s geopolitical importance…The team had been steadily adding new languages and features, but gains in quality over the last four years had slowed considerably.

Until today. As of the previous weekend, Translate had been converted to an A.I.-based system for much of its traffic, not just in the United States but in Europe and Asia as well: The rollout included translations between English and Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Turkish. The rest of Translate’s hundred-odd languages were to come, with the aim of eight per month, by the end of next year. The new incarnation, to the pleasant surprise of Google’s own engineers, had been completed in only nine months. The A.I. system had demonstrated overnight improvements roughly equal to the total gains the old one had accrued over its entire lifetime.

The robots are coming. Go ahead and scoff at the fact that some Uber cars ran red lights last week, but that doesn’t change anything. Every technology has hiccups at first, and AI is the biggest, toughest, and most important technology ever attempted. It will provide plenty of laughs over the next decade or two.

Until suddenly it doesn’t and the economy has permanently lost 20 million jobs—with many more to come. We’re not ready for that day, not by a long way. We should get started.

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Machine Learning Has Transformed Google Translate

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"Bad Hombres" and "Nasty Woman": Internet Unites to Slam Donald Trump’s Debate Remarks

by ReinaImlay Posted on October 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump stunned the political world during Wednesday’s third and final presidential debate when he refused to promise he would respect the upcoming general election results. But on social media, two phrases spoken by the GOP candidate managed to dominate the conversation: “bad hombres” and “nasty woman.”

The remarks sparked instant outrage online, quickly becoming a rallying point for voters opposed to Trump’s hard line on immigrants and women—two demographics widely predicted to vote against the Republican nominee. Here’s how the internet re-appropriated the phrases:

Trump dropped his “nasty woman” insult at Hillary Clinton, seemingly out of nowhere, when she was in the middle of criticizing his failure to pay income taxes. Moments later NastyWomenGetShitDone.com redirected to Clinton’s campaign site.

This is amazing! #imwithher

A photo posted by Travis Wall (@traviswall) on Oct 20, 2016 at 6:20am PDT

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"Bad Hombres" and "Nasty Woman": Internet Unites to Slam Donald Trump’s Debate Remarks

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Brave Testimony Helps Convict Costa Rican Slayers of a Turtle Conservationist

by Myrna Posted on April 1, 2016

A Spanish veterinarian who was attacked by thugs as they also murdered a turtle conservationist provided vital testimony at a Costa Rican trial. Continue at source:  Brave Testimony Helps Convict Costa Rican Slayers of a Turtle Conservationist ; ; ;

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Brave Testimony Helps Convict Costa Rican Slayers of a Turtle Conservationist

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A eulogy for Marco Rubio’s political career

by KyleKeegan0 Posted on March 16, 2016

A eulogy for Marco Rubio’s political career

By on 15 Mar 2016commentsShare

Little Marco! O, the waterfalls we shed for your departure!

Senator Rubio! How we weep for your consistency.

When the climate changed, Marco, you refused to do the same. We don’t remember you voting much at all in the Senate, but when you did, we remember you voting against an amendment that said human activity significantly contributes to our climate woes. “The climate is changing and one of the reasons why the climate is changing is the climate has always been changing,” you trumpeted. You were steadfast: a Florida coastline refusing to be swallowed by the rising seas of scientific consensus.

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“America is not a planet,” you once sighed. There was nothing we could do to change the climate, you explained. And there was nothing we could do to change you.

You pointed to China’s coal, to the fallacy of economic and environmental tradeoffs, to governmental overreach of the sordid left. You supported Keystone XL and lifting the crude export ban. You were the climate bad boy: the Daniel Desario we knew we shouldn’t hang out with — but you were just so dangerous. Like February 2016, you were just so hot.

Mere days before your dear departure from the race, you doubled down. The 21 Floridian mayors’ letter begging for reason on climate was met only by your trademark dismissal thereof. You always sounded so convincing! You teased and toyed with Jake Tapper: “I think the fundamental question for a policymaker is, is the climate changing because of something we are doing, and if so, is there a law you can pass to fix it?” There were plenty of laws that would do exactly that, but you preferred the rhetorical question. Denialism had such a palatable face with you on the stage. We wanted to believe.

And now you leave us bitter. Climate denial in the remaining Republican pool sports a different mask; a mask wearing a zanier expression than yours ever did.

¡Marcito! Your interventionism terrified us all, but your Spanish was so smooth. You disagreed with abortion, even in cases of rape — but you did have that one polished October jab against Jeb. “Donald is not going to make America great,” you said. “He is going to make America orange!” And now, sweet Marco, sad clown: You only make America blue.

Readers! Mourners! A man’s presidential hopes have faltered! He has traveled far and wide; he has sweat torrentially. But let us dispel with the notion that the wanderer is lost. Let us dispel once and for all with this fiction that Marco Rubio doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He is pulling himself up by his chic boot-zips and dusting the cobwebs from his Senate seat. Until, of course, he breaks our heart again, in 2017.

Marco Rubio is survived by the Zodiac Killer, the Frontrunner Who Shall Not Be Named, and his extraordinary, unforgettable glitch.

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A eulogy for Marco Rubio’s political career

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The Top 5 Moments From the Republican Debate

by Onopriyll7 Posted on February 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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A week before the crucial GOP primary in South Carolina, the Republican presidential candidates met for another debate Saturday night. Gone were Gov. Chris Christie and Carly Fiorina, who each dropped out following the New Hampshire contest. The debate, hosted by CBS, began with a moment of silence to mark the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Then the candidates, in a series of fiery exchanges, returned to the familiar conflicts that have dominated their previous encounters.

Here are the highlights:

Ted Cruz gets his facts wrong…and the crowd boos the moderator for correcting him.

At the start of the debate, moderator John Dickerson, the Face the Nation host, asked each candidate if he thought President Barack Obama should name a replacement for Justice Scalia during his final year in office. Predictably, several of the candidates pushed the new conservative meme: the GOP-controlled Senate should block Obama from appointing a successor to Scalia. “We have 80 years of precedent of not confirming Supreme Court justices in an election year,” Ted Cruz claimed. Not so, said Dickerson, pointing to Justice Anthony Kennedy, who was confirmed in February 1988. Cruz tried to argue that Kennedy got his seat in 1987—which was when he was nominated. But when Dickerson tried to make sure viewers were aware of the facts, the South Carolina crowd booed.

Donald Trump invokes Iraq War and 9/11 to attack Jeb Bush.

In 2008, Donald Trump said that George W. Bush should have been impeached over the Iraq War. When Dickerson asked Trump if he still holds this view, an inflamed Trump called the Iraq War “a big fat mistake” that cost the US trillions of dollars and thousands of lives.

A heated exchange followed: Jeb Bush fired back at Trump, calling out the business mogul for his continued attacks on the Bush family. “While Donald Trump was building a reality TV show, my brother was building a security apparatus to keep us safe,” Bush said. The back-and-forth grew hotter when Trump interrupted Bush and declared that the Twin Towers came down when George Bush was president.

Rubio disagreed, asserting that September 11 was Bill Clinton’s fault because Clinton failed to kill Osama Bin Laden in the 1990s. Rubio added, “I thank God that it was Bush in the White House on 9/11 and not Al Gore.” In response, Trump again invoked the 9/11 attack: “I lost hundreds of friends, the World Trade Center came down during the reign of George Bush.” He was met by a roar of boos from the audience.

Ted Cruz gets booed over immigration.

It wouldn’t be a GOP debate without a fight between Cruz and Rubio over immigration. But this tussle came with the added twist of a debate crowd that turned on Cruz, booing him when he attacked Rubio’s support for immigration reform. And when Cruz accused Rubio of once supporting amnesty during an appearance on Univision, Rubio fired back: “I don’t know how he knows what I said on Univision, because he doesn’t speak Spanish.” Cruz immediately shot back at Rubio in rapid, but grammatically incorrect, Spanish.

Donald Trump calls Ted Cruz the biggest liar.

When Trump said he considers himself “a common-sense conservative,” Cruz protested. Cruz contended that the billionaire has been “very, very liberal” throughout his career, though also “an amazing entertainer.” Trump then accused Cruz of putting out robocalls criticizing Trump. He said that Cruz was a “nasty guy” who “will say anything.” Trump continued, “You are the single biggest liar.”

A few minutes later, while Cruz was trying to respond to another attack from Trump (regarding Cruz’s support for the confirmation of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts), Trump began shouting over Cruz: “Why do you lie? Why do you lie?”

“Donald, adults learn not to interrupt each other,” Cruz responded. “Yeah, yeah, I know, you’re an adult,” Trump replied.

Trump says Planned Parenthood does “wonderful things” for women’s health, other than abortion.

Cruz accused Trump of supporting taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood, hitting Trump for having said, “Planned Parenthood does wonderful things and we should not defund it.” Trump responded by saying that he does believe the organization does “wonderful things” having to do with women’s health “but not when it comes to abortion.” Cruz used Trump’s answer to again accuse the tycoon of being a liberal and claimed that Trump would appoint progressive judges to the Supreme Court.

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The Top 5 Moments From the Republican Debate

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The Pope Wants America to Learn From Its Horrific Treatment of Native Americans

by NateSqynziclpt Posted on September 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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As expected, Pope Francis implored Congress to protect refugees and other migrants in an address at the Capitol on Thursday. But before he did, he took a step to acknowledge the nation’s (and the church’s) often horrific treatment of American Indians. America, he argued, should demonstrate a sense of compassion it so rarely showed during the colonization of the continent:

In recent centuries, millions of people came to this land to pursue their dream of building a future in freedom. We, the people of this continent, are not fearful of foreigners, because most of us were once foreigners. I say this to you as the son of immigrants, knowing that so many of you are also descended from immigrants. Tragically, the rights of those who were here long before us were not always respected. For those peoples and their nations, from the heart of American democracy, I wish to reaffirm my highest esteem and appreciation. Those first contacts were often turbulent and violent, but it is difficult to judge the past by the criteria of the present. Nonetheless, when the stranger in our midst appeals to us, we must not repeat the sins and the errors of the past. We must resolve now to live as nobly and as justly as possible, as we educate new generations not to turn their back on our “neighbors” and everything around us. Building a nation calls us to recognize that we must constantly relate to others, rejecting a mindset of hostility in order to adopt one of reciprocal subsidiarity, in a constant effort to do our best. I am confident that we can do this.

This language is particularly significant because of what the Pope was up to yesterday—at a service at Catholic University, he formally canonized Junipero Serra, an 18th-century Spanish missionary who played an important role in the conversion of American Indians to Catholicism in California. Serra wasn’t by any stretch the worst European to visit the New World (the bar is very high), but the missions of California were deadly places for American Indians, cursed with high mortality rates (from disease and abuse) and forced labor. The core purpose of Serra’s work was to purge the region of its native culture and install the church in its place. For this reason, some American Indian activists were fiercely opposed to the canonization; Francis didn’t meet with any of them until yesterday afternoon—after he’d made it official. Consider Thursday’s allusion to past transgressions something of an olive branch.

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The Pope Wants America to Learn From Its Horrific Treatment of Native Americans

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Ohio Republicans Are Freaking Out About the Denali Name Change

by MakaylaAsher Posted on August 31, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Sunday, President Barack Obama announced that the official name for the highest peak in North America, Alaska’s Mount McKinley, would formally be changed to its Athabascan name: Denali. This makes a lot of sense. The mountain was known as Denali long before a gold prospector dubbed it McKinley after reading a newspaper headline in 1896, and it has officially been known as “Denali” in Alaska for about a century, according to the state’s board for geographic names. The state and its Republican legislature have been asking Washington to call the mountain Denali for decades. And for decades, the major obstacle to getting this done has been Ohio, McKinley’s home state.

We need not spend much time discussing Ohio in this space, but suffice it to say that Ohioans are a very proud, if sometimes misinformed, people, and the birthplace of mediocre presidents won’t just take the marginalization of those mediocre presidents lying down. It will fight! To wit, the state’s congressional delegation has decided to show off that old Ohio fighting spirit by condemning the decision in sternly worded press releases and tweets. Here’s GOP Sen. Rob Portman:

No it wasn’t! McKinley was assassinated in 1901. The mountain was named McKinley in 1896, by a random gold prospector who had just returned from the Alaskan Range to find that the governor of Ohio had won the Republican presidential nomination. This is like naming the highest point in the continent after Mitt Romney. Is Portman suggesting that the fix was in as early as 1896? Did Czolgosz really act alone? Was Teddy Roosevelt in on it? My God! Congress did pass a law in 1917 formally recognizing McKinley as the mountain’s name, but that was really just paperwork.

Let’s see what else they’ve got:

The Spanish-American War hadn’t happened yet in 1896—William Randolph Hearst wouldn’t start that for another two years! Okay. Here’s GOP Rep. Bob Gibbs, all but engraving his sternly worded response on obsidian:

Job-killing name change!

I haven’t seen this much loathing directed at Denali since the last time I went on Yelp.

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Ohio Republicans Are Freaking Out About the Denali Name Change

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