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Since people keep asking, I will post here (it will post to my total feed). Gene Expression the website kept maxing the shared hosting plan’s CPU a few weeks ago. I took it down because I didn’t want our host to blacklist it. When I have some time to spare that’s continuous I will get it back up, along with archives. The issue has been time (I used Cloudflare for what’s it worth). The host looked at the logs and suggested it might have been targeted by DoS attack.
The downside of me hosting the blog is that I have to do all the tech stuff. On the other hand, I have total control of the platform. In this day and age I am not going to give up the control, so just be patient. Honestly, I obviously don’t have as much spare time as I did when I started the blog as a 20something 17 years ago. But I’m not ditching it either.
I’m going to start moderating the incessant Indo-Pak Flame Wars on the threads since we have much better things to talk about. Continue reading Keep your biases in check
I’ve given myself the thankless task of “tagging” all my past posts. I noticed that we don’t have a tag on “Kashmir” (the only sub-region we do have is NWFP). It sparked a thought that for a Desi blog we really don’t discuss Kashmir all that much (even though it was going to drag the region into war earlier this year).
This mirrors the larger discourse on Kashmir where Indians & Pakistanis don’t seem as animated or defined by it as before. Two reason comes to mind: Continue reading Our most popular categories
Further to Anan’s post below I thought I would share a few thoughts of my own below.
I enjoyed doing the video cast with Kushal and Omar (Razib was unfortunately not able to join in).
I let myself “go” in this podcast since I had to get up at 4.30 in the morning to get it done so I thought I earnt a bit of a respite.
Ordinarily I’m rather reticent on the podcasts since they aren’t my guests and I also don’t want to venture too many opinions; surprisingly I’m becoming more circumspect in my old age.
At any rate it was a great discussion lots of fun and my penchant for dramatically diverging the conversation was rather welcome (Omar was very on point and it was refreshing to see that Kushal was opinionated as opposed to simply querying).
We did a fair amount of India-Pakistan but I don’t think they were the conventional perspectives. I also have to acknowledge my own biases stem from my background and life experiences.
I wrote a longer post but I decided to private blog it since I didn’t feel it was entirely relevant and I meandered (as I do).
All in I enjoyed the conversation and I found Google Hangouts a surprisingly easy interface. It’s a nice feeling to be “Live”; it was so dark that I didn’t want to switch on video but perhaps I should have and treated the audience to the dawn of a new day..
I just was rifling through our readership numbers.
We are average 8x our average daily readership; 5x the views of our highest ever readership count.
I have no idea what’s causing the traffic specifically (it could just be general events) but to be honest it’s a tense day.
I’ve been exceptionally busy these days since I’m trying to take Bubble Tap to franchise and it’s a lot of work setting it up.
I don’t want to detract from Omar (Episode 8) and Razib’s excellent podcasts (Episode 7). Of course it would nice to see more of our stakeholders support Razib’s patreon, Episode 9 is on Sanskrit.
However as an aside I found this comment by our resident Morisco to be incredible tactless:
Apologies for pinning this blog’s low standards on you Razib. I found it through your work originally and have gotten progressively more irritated that virtually none of the posts are above grade-level quality (your excellent posts excepted obviously).
Episode 9 has generated some interesting comments and I found these two comments to be the most interesting:
Okay, some feedback on the Podcast (s). Firstly, I like it. The range of topics is wide enough and conversations informative enough as well. Secondly, you guys need to invest in better Audio recording systems. Early podcasts had an issue where Omar could barely be heard and this one has an issue with massive and unacceptable lag which leads to long moments of silence. This leads to listeners fatigue and also increases the podcast needlessly. It is irritating. Though Omar voice issue has improved in recent podcasts the volume intensity of different speakers is still not consistent, some are louder and some less so. This needs to be dealt with. Thirdly, regarding this particular Ep9. content was good listen so no qualms there but man the long “Aaaa” pauses in speech are just too irritating after a while. Razib is a more fluid speaker. Fourth. Zack also needs to go on less redundant windings. He says the same thing multiple times worded differently. It is unnecessary, esp on a platform of Podcasts. Stick to the point and be concise, respect the listening audience to have a certain level of contextual grasp. I hardly doubt you guys are making this podcast to be some sort of educational material for 10-14 year olds. Listeners already have a certain level of grasp, stick to a standard and move on rather than spending minutes on redundant things. You guys seem new to this Podcast game and hence seem to be having above issues. Podcasts is a platform which is very mature now hence the sort of feedback I listed above, these are basic stuff on this medium but I think you can improve overtime, it is just about rounding off the edges because the core(content) is solid so majority of the battle is done anyway. Best of luck. Looking forward for more from you guys.
This chap hasn’t donated to the Patron account (or if he has, hasn’t mentioned that) and spews opinions on the whole podcast. It’s discourteous because we haven’t actually asked for feedback and what gets my goat is unqualified opinions; either invest or shut up.
The amusing thing with Xir Var is that he presumes that we really care as to whether he liked the podcast or not.
This isn’t me being defensive; I dislike the lack of respect by anonymous commentators and I always will. My persona is somewhat public (though it’s rapidly paring back as I grow tired of the phone and online word) and I think it’s unfair to parry with opponents in the dark.
FWIW I had wanted to step out of the podcast with Slapstick because I thought that Razib and SS would have had a much more fruitful conversation but I stayed on simply to make the logistics work.
This was the first comment that I read that pricked my ears and I thought was out of line:
This was my first podcast, as the topic interested me. By the first 3 minutes upon hearing assertions of Vedic originating in BMAC and etymology of Atharvaveda is based on the root Athar = fire in Iranian I was extremely amused. That amusement pulled me through a few more minutes and it ended, when I heard Pashto and Persian are dervied seperately and directly from a proto language. At that point i decided to stop the cast at about 18 minutes in. To be fair to real scholars who have or may come on the podcast in future, you guys might want to seperate the streams into something like BrownPunditWannabe for amateur hobbyists and BrownPunditReal for guys who actually can back up their assertions with something concrete. Also this is nothing personal against slapstick, everyone has their personal views. Just my thoughts.
I looked at traffic from Jan 1 of 2018. Here are the top 30 cities, standardized by the # of users from the 30th, Indore:
| City | User # |
| Bengaluru | 6.6 |
| London | 5.7 |
| Mumbai | 5.7 |
| New Delhi | 4.3 |
| San Jose | 4.3 |
| New York | 4.1 |
| Lahore | 3.9 |
| Pune | 2.9 |
| Karachi | 2.8 |
| Chennai | 2.7 |
| Mountain View | 2.4 |
| Islamabad | 2.3 |
| Kolkata | 2.0 |
| Hyderabad | 2.0 |
| San Francisco | 1.9 |
| Toronto | 1.9 |
| Chandigarh | 1.6 |
| Chicago | 1.6 |
| Washington | 1.5 |
| Los Angeles | 1.4 |
| Cambridge | 1.4 |
| Spartanburg | 1.3 |
| Lucknow | 1.3 |
| Ahmedabad | 1.3 |
| Austin | 1.2 |
| Rawalpindi | 1.2 |
| Noida | 1.0 |
| Sydney | 1.0 |
| Melbourne | 1.0 |
| Indore | 1.0 |
The average session form San Jose lasts more than 10 minutes and people look at 4+ pages. This is in contrast to all readers who are closer to 5 minutes. Also, I find it funny that we have more readers from Mountain View than San Francisco. I don’t think it’s just Google crawlers, the sessions average nearly 7 minutes.
If readers want to they can use this as an “unlurk” post too. Basically, you can say who you are if you are so inclined.
As per the request of Kabir I’ve closed comments on the post below. I’ll delete it soon. His new blog is here: https://kabiraltaf.wordpress.com/.
A few quick notes to be clear:
Finally, some of you know I’ve been at the forefront of communication about South Asian genetics. Like many things, this kind of fell into my lap because I know genetics, and I don’t live in South Asia and so am not part of any major social-political groupings (I’m not left-wing and some Hindutva types attack me as a Muslim). But honestly, I’ve been impressed by how clear-eyed and honest many Indian journalists and thinkers have been about the new research. And this has made me more optimistic and engaged in Brown Pundits’ future direction.
Also, BP has a twitter account. Most it pushes content right now from this blog.