Monthly Archives: November 2012

Most folks in Mwambo haven’t seen many white people before. This usually just means that the kids are at once excited and terrified when I show up. But that’s not the only amusing consequence of their lack of exposure to … Continue reading →

Admitting this never wins me too many friends, but I’m not a huge fan of democracy in and of itself. Don’t get me wrong, the empirics indicate that it leads to better results than other systems, much of the time. … Continue reading →

A recent study in Zambia and Malawi has found that growing Gliricidia trees on maize farms boosts yield by 50%. This happens because the Gliricidia trees fix nitrogen from the air and, as I understand it, some of it comes … Continue reading →

aidnography is critical of the way One Laptop Per Child has presented the results of an experiment where they dropped off Android tablets in a village in Ethiopia, and the kids quickly learned to use them. They reasonably point out … Continue reading →

Today’s xkcd is a work of subtle comic genius. The strip’s regular readers will all understand it as a reference to a debate about validity of FiveThirtyEight’s election-forecasting technique. For anyone else, read on. For stat-heads like me, the most … Continue reading →

The official Chinese Communist Party term for the catastrophic Great Leap Forward, which led to economic collapse and a famine that killed as many as 45 million people, is “the three years of economic difficulty.”

Most followers of this blog are probably aware of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, a law written by the British government of colonial India and then exported to their other colonies. It bans “sodomy”, which back in the … Continue reading →