I generally agree with everything you said with one caveat, but as an aside I would be interested in your citations on environment effects on population genotypes if you have them.

My caveat would be that I also know that basically anyone >2 cousins apart (I believe) have about the same DNA matching as a % of total DNA. However, the total % is not a very fair comparison between two closely related populations. The X% difference between your two African populations is probably substantially different between one of those African communities and a comparably sized European population as defined by X% per volume. The cross-correlation is the key.

However, out of my ignorance I would nominally agree that the location relative to the equator is a big factor in skin pigment levels in peoples and that's frankly irrelevant to me. Skin pigment doesn't define the races in my opinion.

I think you're agreeing with my premise. These data are arriving at a scientific delineation of how the Victorian (and we still consider) races formed. That they broadly align with the Victorian view of morphological differences is interesting in my opinion even if the Victorians weighted more the differences rather than the similarities. In all, this is what I find interesting from a temporal perspective because 100-30,000 years ago is not that much beyond recorded history in the global perspective...

Well, if I was the sort of person that would go to a creationist museum to see these graphics then yes, I would believe her body would shut it down if it was a legitimate rape. However, take a look at the smile on that bottom Tyranny's face? That's no "legitimate" rape!

If you read between the lines in these articles closely you'll see what I'm talking about. They're certainly skirting the subject like you for PC reasons but take a look for yourself. At some point, there were forks or bifurcations in the races and to ignore that is to promote ignorance. I am not suggesting a difference in mental/physical capacities between races or anything that was traditionally associated with this Racial Science. But I don't believe the Tower of Babel was the thing that created the different races of the world. Do you?!

Sorry to respond to myself, but I was more than a little imprecise in what I was referring to with 3 races. According to that Wikipedia article (the truthiest truth on the Internet), I was referring to what UNESCO "gives the examples of the Caucasian, Negroid and Mongoloid race". I suppose I was under the mistaken impression that this was already conventionally understood despite the fact that I acknowledged above, and UNESCO does as well, that they/we "maintain that there are no 'pure races' and that biological variability was as great within any race as between races. [Their statement] argued that there is no scientific basis for believing that there are any innate differences in intellectual, psychological or emotional potential among races." All this may be well and true, but again, there are phenotypic differences in morphology and, for me, I think this would be very satisfying to shove in creationists face over their reasoning for the Biblical Tower of Babel beyond the other arguments.

More precision in how people migrated and divided are wonderful pieces of science in my opinion, and it's amazing to me to see how evolution and diversification occurred on such a recent time-scale (less than 100,000 or even less than 30,000 years).

Wow!

I would almost go to a creationism museum to see the graphics for that. Can you imagine this shooped with a woman's body on the bottom?

This probably won't be popular because it's not especially PC, but it's starting to actually appear that the 3 classical types of human as defined by 19th century Racial Science are becoming more scientifically delineated. Or at least things are breaking down broadly in similar ways. After-all, at some point there was a gross separation between Asians, Africans, Europeans, and the rest (that are usually a mix of 1+ of the others).
One of the authors of this study or the others I read was talking about how he believed for a long time that Neandarthals are a sub-species of homo sapiens, while from this un-mixed homo sapiens are more closely related to the original and modern-day Africans, and then this Denisovans are related to more eastern groups including Pacific Islanders, Aboriginal Australian, and (maybe) what was classically related to Mongoloids?
Still homo sapiens from a breeding standpoint but noticeably distinct even if it's 0.1-0.5% of the DNA. Doesn't mean anyone is better than others but we're phenotypically different if only in body morphology.

Actually, you probably have a point because I know a couple bioengineering-related people that probably picked it up after a Ph.D. So, maybe the better distinction is that most 'biologists' won't learn it after a Ph.D. IMO. The people you describe are probably more likely to tinker with a new skill compared to the people I work around who already have the cookbook of experimental techniques they use everyday and don't need/want to devote a lot of time to something new.

Neurophysiologist here: patching isn't nearly as hard as it looks and is quite fun. Now-a-days investigators don't even need to build their own amplifiers like in the old days. However, that said, it does take practice and as I like to say, "I've never met anyone who learned how to patch-clamp after getting a Ph.D." Only undergraduates and graduate students have the time and dedication to learn it.

I should also point out there have been automatic patching machines that cater to high-throughput drug discovery on cultures (big pharmas like these). However, the novelty for this paper is that the patching is for live animals.

Another point I should make is that in the last 5 or so years the number of high-profile papers that just (or mostly) rely on patching are becoming exceedingly rare. It still has it's place, but we now know a great deal about the properties of ionic currents and their channel proteins and these properties are conserved across many subsystems. Now people are off working on complementary things...

You may also find this news piece interesting.

Professional gamer I take it? Makes me wonder how a new one handed keyboard would help his aim in Quake/Unreal/Rage, etc?

Fuck the ACLU, but these points you make don't make me happy but aren't deal-breakers. The treatment of Assange is nearly the breaking point as I mentioned. Killing Americans that have clearly called for the destruction of the US and have means to carry it out are fair-game -- Assange has done NOTHING remotely like that. All the rest of your points are the normal collateral from the American military-industrial complex. That doesn't mean it's right but it's entrenched, and don't try to tell me a Republican would be more sympathetic. As I admitted, this is the (FAR) lesser of two evils in my estimate.

As myself an American expat, we both know that at Guantanamo, you don't need a legitimate criminal charge to be extradited there or imprisoned indefinitely by us. Besides the way Obama's dealt with this Wikileaks issue I otherwise like him, but this situation had nearly turned me. But the lesser of two evils you know because a Republican president would have rattled a few more sabers as loudly as they could I think. Consequently, I really believe Congress would have enacted some new law (that retroactively is legal) where foreigners who smear the reputation of the US in some way can be tried for something analogous to treason in the US -- death penalty and all...

As someone that took CS 101 in '98, I should tell you that Java was the language taught Freshman year. I only stuck with CS for about 2-3 semesters (they were electives FYI :) -- but I'm still programming for work and leisure. Anyway, Java may have been "popular" but it was still 1.0-1.1 before Swing came out, and by that, and hindsight, I mean it was a total mess of shit that you couldn't get real work done in.

I still have nightmares about how I spent HOURS trying to figure out that a "deprecated" warning message during compilation wasn't an error and WOULD NOT prevent the code from working. Compile, warning, check code and change, compile, warning, check code, etc. with no actually test. Agghhhhh...

The good news from that experience was that my 1 on 1 exposure with that prof was also where I learned of vi, and I've never had to look for another code editing utility since...

Make sure to check out Nate's histogram under the "Electoral Vote Distribution" on the right about 4 or 5 panels down, which is kind of jaw-dropping IMO. His most probably outcome right now is Obama with about 335 electoral votes(!), which is a huge landslide.