Chicagoboyz celebrate diversity.
Click photo for large version if you are interested. Cross posted at LITGM.
Month: September 2007
What?
Sykes — Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots …
Sykes, Bryan, Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland
Oxford University professor of human genetics, Bryan Sykes, follows up his best-selling popular books on recent European DNA studies with a book specifically about the “Isles” — England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Casting a wide but useful net, he provides a grounding not only in the geography, climate history and human prehistory of the two islands … but describes the mythology about, and early scientific investigations into, the origins of the people there. These are far from just academic preoccupations. In past centuries, English kings made their claims for sovereignty based on tales of Trojan settlers and Arthurian prowess. Every medieval commentary and discovery was followed with intense royal interest. Well into the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the rights of kings were linked to ancient origins. Not surprisingly, later Victorian efforts at phrenological and morphological interpretation of the island’s peoples (the shape of their skulls and features of their bodies) comes in for some hard knocks in this book. But Sykes gives those pioneer scientists full points for effort, thoroughness, and a methodical approach. Their efforts might now be dashed upon the rocks of genetic information, but their tables, charts, line drawings and descriptions of hair colour, skin tone, and body shape across the British Isles reflect the sincere interest of generations past, attempting to answer the question “who are we?”. In many ways, Professor Sykes continues their efforts.
Securities Analysis and the Housing Bubble
In the general field of securities analysis (predicting stock prices) there are two basic schools of thought, fundamental analysis and technical analysis. Fundamental analysis can be summarized as saying that stocks are worth a price based on their financial statements and that investors can profit by deeply understanding the details of said information. Benjamin Graham with his book “Securities Analysis” is an example of a fundamental approach to stock valuation.
On the other hand, a different school of thought belongs to the technical analysis camp, which states that stock prices have patterns and can be bought or sold for profit based on these patterns. Technical analysts frequently chart stocks and are responsible for the myriad types of charts available at any financial web site (such as Yahoo!) including “Bollinger Bands” and the like.
Without going into the relative validity of both theories (an endless topic in and of itself) I will glibly summarize the two models as “buy it because your detailed financial analysis says it will go up in value” vs. “buy it because it has been going up and other items similar to it are going up in price”.
September 1939
On September 1, 1939, Germany launched a massive assault on Poland, thereby igniting the Second World War.
Britain and France were both bound by treaty to come to Poland’s assistance. On September 2, Neville Chamberlain’s government sent a message to Germany proposing that hostilities should cease and that there should be an immediate conference among Britain, France, Poland, Germany, and Italy..and that the British government would be bound to take action unless German forces were withdrawn from Poland. “If the German Government should agree to withdraw their forces, then His Majesty’s Government would be willing to regard the position as being the same as it was before the German forces crossed the Polish frontier.”
According to General Edward Spears, who was then a member of Parliament, the assembly had been expecting a declaration of war. Few were happy with this temporizing by the Chamberlain government. Spears describes the scene:
Arthur Greenwood got up, tall, lanky, his dank, fair hair hanging to either side of his forehead. He swayed a little as he clutched at the box in front of him and gazed through his glasses at Chamberlain sitting opposite him, bolt-upright as usual. There was a moment’s silence, then something very astonishing happened.