Herman Cain gaining "libertarian Republican" support in Arizona

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From Eric Dondero:

A news poll out of Arizona shows Herman Cain now tied with Mitt Romney, 20 - 20. And Cain seems to be gaining among a key set of voters for AZ - libertarians.

From the Business Journal - Phoenix Bizjournals.com "Cain ties Romney in Arizona poll":

Cain has surged in the Republican presidential race with his 999 tax plan that includes flat taxes and a national sales tax and his more libertarian-conservative stances. He is the former CEO of Godfather's Pizza.

The Arizona poll solidifies Romney as one of the GOP front-runners but also shows his challenge of getting more than 20 to 25 percent in polls. Cain is making gains with tea party activists, libertarian Republicans and evangelicals.

Editor's comment - Should anyone be surprised that a libertarian-conservative is gaining support among libertarians?

Cain’s "libertarian" ad of the Year!

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Smoking issue a "dog-whistle" for libertarians

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution AJC.com "Cain ad catches fire -- or blows smoke":

the grainy 55-second video has been a raging success, generating more than 1 million hits on YouTube by tweaking liberal outrage at the taboo cigarette habit -- and libertarian delight in liberal outrage.

The use of the cigarette was a calculated ploy, said Marty Kaplan, a professor of entertainment, media and society at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California.

"Smoking is a dog-whistle to libertarians, Ron Paul supporters, people mad at the ‘nanny state,' " said Kaplan, who was deputy campaign manager for presidential candidate Walter Mondale in 1984.

"Plus, it vouches for Cain's ‘authenticity.'" Kaplan said in an email, "The subtext is that only a real guy, not a cautious and opportunistic pol -- [like Cain rival Mitt] Romney -- would do something like this."

Artificial Blood From Bone Marrow Stem Cells Still Makes Me Genuinely Queasy [Blood]

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I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm not the best person to call if you happen to be bleeding and need help. I tend to succumb to gravity pretty quickly, which has also prevented me from being a generous donor. But I know I'm not alone, and in a continuing effort to find a reliable source for blood that doesn't require sticking people with needles, researchers at Edinburgh University have developed a new type of faux blood that could be ready for human testing in as little as two years. More »


Unfrying the egg | Gene Expression

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Dienekes has a long post, the pith of which is expressed in the following:

If I had to guess, I would propose that most extant Europeans will be discovered to be a 2-way West Asian/Ancestral European mix, just as most South Asians are a simple West Asian/Ancestral South Indian mix. In both cases, the indigenous component is no longer in existence and the South Asian/Atlantic_Baltic components that emerge in ADMIXTURE analyses represent a composite of the aboriginal component with the introduced West Asian one. And, like in India, some populations will be discovered to be “off-cline” by admixture with different elements: in Europe these will be Paleo-Mediterraneans like the Iceman, an element maximally preserved in modern Sardinians, as well as the East Eurasian-influenced populations at the North-Eastern side of the continent.

This does not seem to be totally implausible on the face of it. But it seems likely that any “West Asian” component is going to be much closer genetically to an “Ancestral European” mix than they were to “Ancestral South Indians,” because the two former elements are probably part of a broader West Eurasian diversification which post-dates the separation of those groups from Southern and Eastern Eurasians. In other words, pulling out the distinct elements in Europeans is likely a more difficult task because the constituents of the mixture resemble each other quite a bit when compared to “Ancestral North Indians” vs. “Ancestral South Indians.”


The bigger issue which this highlights though is that the reality that many of these clustering methods are temporally sensitive. Given enough time a “hybrid” population is no longer a hybrid, but rather a new distinctive population which itself can be a “parent.” Recombination breaks apart the long range genetic physical associations which are the hallmarks of distinctive admixed ancestry on the genomic scale. That is why clustering methods easily generate a pure “South Asian” component. After at least ~3-4,000 years of continuous admixture the synthesis is now far less coarse, and the elements much more de facto miscible. And yet via other clustering techniques, such as principle components analysis, you get different results. The peculiar position of the “South Asian” individuals between Europeans and East Asians in direct proportion to their caste and regional origins becomes highly indicative of some sort of admixture event in different proportions as a function of geography and social context. The technique in Reconstructing Indian population history allowed for a resolution of this paradox by sifting through the variation and extracting out the ancestral components. The recent papers which came out on Australian Aboriginal genetics do something similar, in terms of making sense of somewhat puzzling results which are found when generating inferences from aggregate genomic variation.

Imagine how much more difficult the task would have been if the ancestral components were much closer! I suspect that’s what’s going on in Europe. I’m not privy to any big secrets, but I have heard of whispers of research groups using Sardinians as a “pure” outgroup to model the changing demographics of Europe since the arrival of agriculture. What David Reich stated at the conference was not particularly surprising to me in light of that possibility. Sardinia regularly pops out as a weird outlier in many analyses. One simple possibility here is that that’s simply a function of the fact that it’s an island, and therefore has diverged from mainland populations due to isolation from conventional village-to-village mate exchange. Another possibility, mooted by Dienekes, is that it may be a repository of European genetic variation from earlier periods, relatively unaffected by later perturbations due to demographic changes. The main reason that I can give some credit to Dienekes’ thesis has less to do with Sardinians than Basques. The French Basques in the HGDP are less atypical than the Sardinians, but in some runs they do lack a component which is most obviously classed as “West Asian,” and which other French have. In Dienekes’ own runs with a diverse array of Iberian populations this same distinction emerges.

All of this reminds us that clustering methods give us great insights into how populations are related to each other, but they don’t tell us about the details of how that relatedness came to be. It makes a great difference if an element is the outcome of relatively recent (>10,000 years) hybridization events, as opposed to having deeper roots. For example, admixture between Polynesians and Melanesians brings together two components, whatever their own prior origins, diverged on the order of 50,000 years before the present. And yet if the two groups mentioned earlier are correct than the Melanesian component itself must be decomposed into two fractions, one of which is much closer to the Polynesians than the other, our understanding of the past changes.

As I implied earlier today I think the era of wild hypothesis generation in the area of the settling of Europe over the last 10,000 years is coming to the end. The combination of more powerful analytic techniques and the emergence of ancient DNA samples with which to calibrate, peg, and check, inferences from those techniques, will probably clarify our understanding of the past to a great extent.

Image credit: yomi955

FAA Enlists the Web For Reporting Laser Shenanigans [Lasers]

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Every year laser pointers get brighter and cheaper, and every year the number of incidents involving some bozo shining one at an aircraft increases. In 2005 there were just 283 reports, but that number has increased every year, hitting an astonishing 2,836 in 2010. So the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has set up a website to make it easier for pilots, and those on the ground, to report when it happens. More »


Extending a 24 Conductor Camera Module Ribbon

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I was going to get one of those 808 keychain cameras. I wanted to extend the ribbon cable so that I could create a button camera. What is the best type of wire to use for this and what is the maximum length that this would work at? I have lots of very thin enamel coated magnet wire which is about tw

Grounding of Encoder Cable

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hello,

I would like to ask about grounding of encoder cable.I use JAMAK cable for my encoders.But one of encoder signal which is belong to 1650 KW 690 V 1500 A AC motor, is time to time getting to sour.That is why motor is not working properly.The distance of motor cubicle and motor about 70-80 met

In it for the long run | Gene Expression

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Over the past six months we’ve seen the “Libyan revolution” stall and then succeed. There’s no doubt that the late Libyan dictator was a marginally sane megalomaniac. That being said, he’d been on better behavior over the past 10 years, dismantling his nuclear program for example. I can see the logic in wanting to overthrow him though, there’s a lot of built up historical memory in relation to the various terrorist groups he’s funded in Europe, as well as actions like bombing of Pan Am 103. But is anyone really surprised when things like this occur:

It was just a passing reference to marriage in a leader’s soberly delivered speech, but all week it has unsettled women here as well as allies abroad.

In announcing the success of the Libyan revolution and calling for a new, more pious nation, the head of the interim government, Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, also seemed to clear the way for unrestricted polygamy in a Muslim country where it has been limited and rare for decades.

It looked like a sizable step backward for women at a moment when much here — institutions, laws, social relations — is still in play after the end of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s 42 years of authoritarian rule.

In his speech, Mr. Abdel-Jalil declared that a Qaddafi-era law that placed restrictions on multiple marriages, which is a tenet of Islamic law, or Shariah, would be done away with. The law, which stated that a first wife had to give permission before others were added, for instance, had kept polygamy rare here.

“This law is contrary to Shariah and must be stopped,” Mr. Abdel-Jalil told the crowd, vowing that the new government would adhere more faithfully to Shariah. The next day he reiterated the point to reporters at a news conference: “Shariah allows polygamy,” he said. Mr. Abdel-Jalil is known for his piety.


The Libyan nation is a pretty religious one. Even the women who oppose polygamy out of straightforward self-interest admit its religious validity: ‘Rehab Zehany, 20, who said Mr. Abdel-Jalil was merely following the dictates of the Koran, added, when asked if she would accept her husband taking a second wife: “Of course not! I would kill him!”’ As I’ve asserted many times: attitudes considered extreme or benighted in the West are relatively widespread in much of the Islamic world. When you democratically empower people who have these attitudes, you’re going to get some sloppy regress back to positions that in the West might be considered backward. Some Americans do garnish their arguments about public policy with references to the Bible, but they’re in a minority. Not so in many of these Middle Eastern Muslim nations.

Consider Tunisia, where relatively milquetoast Islamists just came to power. Tunisia Liberals See a Vote for Change, Not Religion:

The message to Islamists, he added, was: “ ‘We are for Islam to be the religion of the state, but you must be very cautious. We are not going to give up our fight for civil freedoms.’ I am profoundly convinced that we can promote human rights and women’s rights, etc., without fighting against Islamists.”

Observe that self-described liberals in Tunisia want Islam to be the religion of the state! Having a state religion isn’t necessarily incompatible with democratic liberalism (e.g., Norway). But in general in most societies which are democratically liberal the secularists are not proponents of an established state religion. I am moderately optimistic that Tunisia can make a transition toward a pluralistic democracy, because it doesn’t seem that the religious conservatives are the overwhelming majority, and so could not impose their vision without major backlash and possible revolt from the more liberal segment of society. This may not be the case in far less developed nations, such as Egypt.

As far as Libya goes, it might be best to avert our eyes. Liberal internationalists and neoconservatives don’t seem to have learned anything from the past 10 years of American foreign policy intervention in their hearts. They see only the immediate justice that they can mete out before their face, and don’t think about medium to long term consequences. They saw the revolution in Libya as a clean abstraction. But the past 6 months have seen something of a ‘race war’, as anti-Qaddafi forces turn against black Libyans and Sub-Saharan Africans who were favored by the old regime. The future may see the rise of a conservative illiberal democracy. That’s not the end of the world by any means, but people should have had their eyes open to the range of possibilities beforehand.

Planning Low Fuel Consumption DC Diesel Generator

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Dear users, I am a beginner, I need some advice at my prototype.

I have finished my prototype at dc diesel generator

diesel engine : kubota Z-482, 2 cylinders, 6.9KW at 3000 Rpm, water cooled.

alternator : custom spec 3 phase brushless alternator, 4 pole, 1500 Rpm, 8KVA,

DC load : telecommunicat

Ancient DNA in the near future | Gene Expression

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I recently inquired if anyone was sequencing Cheddar Man. In case you don’t know, this individual died ~9,000 years ago in Britain, but the remains were well preserved enough that mtDNA was retrieved from him. He was of haplogroup U5, which is still present in the local region. Cheddar Man is also particularly interesting because he is definitely a Paleolithic hunter-gatherer, predating the Neolithic in Britain by thousands of years.

It turns out that no one is looking at Cheddar Man now. But that’s probably because money and time are finite. I was told that there are plenty of other specimens which would also probably be good candidates for sequencing in the Museum’s collection (this doesn’t seem to be a case where curators are being stingy and overprotecting of their specimens). That’s not too surprising. We’ll probably answer a lot of questions about the roles of demographic diffusion vs. cultural diffusion when it comes to agriculture soon enough (as in, over the next 10 years as techniques for getting signal out of old degraded and contaminated samples get better).