Some Politics May Be Etched in the Genes - New York Times

My thesis reader, Dr. John Hibbing, made the New York Times today. It's not often you see the word "dizygotic" in APSR.

Some Politics May Be Etched in the Genes - New York Times:

Political scientists have long held that people's upbringing and experience determine their political views. A child raised on peace protests and Bush-loathing generally tracks left as an adult, unless derailed by some powerful life experience. One reared on tax protests and a hatred of Kennedys usually lists to the right.

But on the basis of a new study, a team of political scientists is arguing that people's gut-level reaction to issues like the death penalty, taxes and abortion is strongly influenced by genetic inheritance. The new research builds on a series of studies that indicate that people's general approach to social issues - more conservative or more progressive - is influenced by genes.

...

In the study, three political scientists - Dr. John Hibbing of the University of Nebraska, Dr. John R. Alford of Rice University and Dr. Carolyn L. Funk of Virginia Commonwealth - combed survey data from two large continuing studies including more than 8,000 sets of twins.

Polaroid-o-nize johnfulwider dot com?

Here's what my front-page photographs would look like if I used the free Polaroid-o-nize service to, you guessed it, make the photographs look like old school instant photos.

The service lets you select the angle of tilt and the caption, among other things. I could alternate the tilt for variety so today's tilts to the left, tomorrow's (or, at my blogging pace, next month's) tilts to the right.

The pictures seem pretty blurry and pixellated, which I can completely understand. The server load to accept image uploads of varying sizes and then send a modified image back must be astonishing.

Valued five readers, consider your feedback solicited.

Blue Mounds Blue Skies

The summer Minnesotaclimbing.com gathering drew more than 70 people this year, including an impressive Nebraska contingent: Doug, Jake, Tim, Jami, Javal, Shannon, Mark and ... and ... that guy whose name I can't remember right now! Anyone who was there knows the title of this entry is ... well ... optimistic. But that's water under the bridge. Next time we face climb on dry sandstone, we'll look back to the wet and mossy Sioux quartzite and think everything else is just a piece of cake.

Here's a slideshow.

Firewire Network Transfers

Found on Lifehacker:

After stringing a firewire cable between my two machines, adding internal IPs, and mapping the mac drive on my PC desktop, my transfers are 20-50x faster over firewire than they ever were over the network. What used to take hours now takes seconds.

Transfering files between two computers on your network FAST!: