jenn and i hosted new years out in old jangsan this weekend. we packed many friends into our little apartments, fed them tasty things and made crafts. i snapped a few pictures before the red wine knocked me out.

here’s britt getting her make-up done by jenn.

and decorating cupcakes.

hannah, he totally loves the tie.

it was too tough to choose between this photo of rhylon and da-in

…and this one —

really, they’re just too photogenic.

the next morning was brunch in my blanket fort house. jost had a hangover until matt fixed him a “sleepy mary” — a bloody mary with nyquil. miracle cure!

tim snagged the camera for some close-ups.

it was quite the musical weekend.

since only tim made it to take part in the korean tradition of watching the sun rise on new year’s day, we went to watch it set.

and then to the pet cafe!

where jost made a new friend

with whom things got serious quickly.

the boys tamed the evil husky.

and matt helped the cat style her whiskers.

Arnold Kling, whom I generally liked before this rant, takes a swipe at libertarians and “leftists”, and Will Wilkinson takes it seriously.

It seems to me that some libertarians link arms with the far left as blame-America-firsters, with scathing attacks on America’s military and its foreign policy.

The first part of Wilkinson’s response I like.

To my mind, the first question is whether America’s military and foreign policy deserve withering criticism, and the answer is, Yes, it does. This isn’t a matter of “blaming America first”. It’s a matter of honestly evaluating American policy and laying the blame where the blame is due.What does this kind criticism accomplish? What does telling the truth about anything accomplish? Ideally, when we square ourselves to uncomfortable truths about policy, we change our minds.

That far – with some editing on my part – I can agree. And then, there’s a lot of verbiage about nationalism and tribalism. I don’t recognize that world. I thought the world included the great conveyor belt in the Pacific cycling unfinished goods around until finished products caused people in the American Midwest to complain about China. I also thought an American military presence – some call it “an empire of bases” – kept the cycle running smoothly. Commenter “Lorenzo” echoes my thoughts.

A major reason why I find Will’s criticism intemperate (to echo DeepEmBlues) is that he seems to have an almost complete lack of sense of there being a global system. Whatever criticisms one might make of US military and foreign policy, the period since 1945 has worked a lot better than, say 1914-1945, and American foreign and military policy has had a lot to do with that. Retreating to “the Atlantic and Pacific as our big moats” policy of 1919-1939 is an experiment the world can do without repeating.

The world we live in, one some would characterize as “free trade”, is a marked improvement on the early twentieth-century tribal world. So, I have to ask Wilkinson, where is the justifiable line between guaranteeing free trade and “Massive, lengthy, non-defensive military occupations”?

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Colum Lynch fears the nauseating truth about U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon: he’s old-school Korean, which means once he has a political job, he’ll never give it up without a bullet or a nudge from a superior.

The revelation was buried in an official U.N. readout of a New Year’s day exchange Ban had with South Korean president, Lee Myung-bak.

In it, Ban offers his best wishes to the South Korean president– the only leader to be so honored– underscoring the importance the U.N.’s South Korean secretary general continues to place in maintaining close ties with the government that helped promote his rise to the world’s top diplomatic job.

Ban’s readout–which was issued Saturday evening without fanfare and while most of the press corps was on holiday — seemed innocuous enough on first glance. Ban praised Seoul for its “active contribution to the work of the United Nations, including through an increase in overseas development assistance and greater participation in peace operations, as well as to global efforts to address climate change and promote green growth,” according to the readout. Ban also lauded Lee for his “successful” hosting of a G-20 summit and for South Korea’s continued “economic and social development” in 2o10.

For good measure, the readout notes that Ban and Lee discussed the crisis on the Korean peninsula. Ban — who has been seeking a mediation role there since his first months as secretary general– said he appreciated Lee’s recent decision to try to resolve the nuclear standoff through the resumption of six-nation political talks, a move that effectively sidelines the U.N. Still, Ban appeared hopeful, offering once again to “provide any assistance, as appropriate, in facilitating peace and stability in the region in close coordination with the concerned countries.”

But down in the final sentence of the readout, Ban’s office blandly notes that the “secretary general looks forward to the 2012 Nuclear Security Summit to be hosted by the ROK[Republic of Korea], an event which would significantly contribute to strengthening the global nuclear non-proliferation regime.” A careful reader will recall that Ban’s first five-year term expires at the end of 2011, meaning he would need to be reelected in order to attend the Korean summit as secretary general.

But, just think how much Ban can do for inter-Korean relations from now until Kim Jong-un is old enough to invade South Korea!

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Props to SGU for reminding me of this remarkable scientific discovery, which just might be MY “Science Story of 2010″. What I’m referring to is the discovery of a single finger bone from an ancient human not descended from either modern homo sapiens or homo neanderthalensis, but possibly living contemporaneously with both.

If further work does support the initial conclusions, the discovery would mark the first time that an extinct human relative had been identified by DNA analysis.

It would also suggest that ice-age humans were more diverse than had been thought. Since the late nineteenth century, researchers have known that two species of Homo — Neanderthals and modern humans — coexisted during the later part of the last ice age. In 2003, a third species, Homo floresiensis, was discovered on the island of Flores in Indonesia, but there has been no sign of this tiny ‘hobbit’ elsewhere. The relative identified in Siberia, however, raises the possibility that several Homo species ranged across Europe and Asia, overlapping with the direct ancestors of modern people.

The Siberian site in the Altai Mountains, called Denisova Cave, was already known as a rich source of Mousterian and Levallois artefacts, two styles of tool attributed to Neanderthals. For more than a decade, Russian scientists from the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology in Novosibirsk have been searching for the toolmakers’ bones. They discovered several bone specimens, handling each potentially important new find with gloves to prevent contamination with modern human DNA. The bones’ own DNA could then be extracted and analysed.

When the finger bone was discovered, “we didn’t pay special attention to it”, says archaeologist Michael Shunkov of the Novosibirsk institute. But Pääbo had established a relationship with the Russian team years before to gather material for genetic testing from ice-age humans. After obtaining the bone, the German team extracted the bone’s genetic material and sequenced its mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) — the most abundant kind of DNA and the best bet for getting an undegraded sequence from ancient tissue.

After re-reading the mtDNA sequences an average of 156 times each to ensure accuracy, the researchers compared them with the mtDNA genomes of 54 modern humans, a 30,000-year-old modern human found in Russia and six Neanderthals. The Denisova Cave DNA fell into a class of its own. Although a Neanderthal mtDNA genome differs from that of Homo sapiens at 202 nucleotide positions on average, the Denisova Cave sample differed at an average of 385 positions.

The differences imply that the Siberian ancestor branched off from the human family tree a million years ago, well before the split between modern humans and Neanderthals. If so, the proposed species must have left Africa in a previously unknown migration, between that of Homo erectus 1.9 million years ago and that of the Neanderthal ancestor Homo heidelbergensis, 300,000 to 500,000 years ago.

In addition, a tooth found in the Denisova cave raises the possibility of a connection between Denisovans and modern-day Melanesians.

Earlier this year the team showed that the mitochondrial DNA from the finger bone displayed an unusual sequence, suggesting that it came from an as yet unknown ancient hominin form. Using techniques that the researchers developed to sequence the Neandertal genome, they have now sequenced the nuclear genome from the bone. The researchers found that the individual was female and comes from a group of hominins that shared an ancient origin with Neandertals, but subsequently had a distinct history. They call this group of hominins Denisovans. Unlike Neandertals, Denisovans did not contribute genes to all present-day Eurasians. However, Denisovans share an elevated number of genetic variants with modern-day Papuan New Guinean populations, suggesting that there was interbreeding between Denisovans and the ancestors of Melanesians.

In addition, a Denisovan tooth found in the same cave shows a morphology that is distinct from Neandertals and modern humans and resembles much older hominin forms. Bence Viola, a scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology comments: “The tooth is just amazing. It allows us to connect the morphological and genetic information”.

And, this is consolation for research, that East Asia is probably not the site of canine domestication.

“Dogs seem to share more genetic similarity with Middle Eastern gray wolves than with any other wolf population worldwide,” said Robert Wayne, UCLA professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and senior author of the Nature paper. “Genome-wide analysis now directly suggests a Middle East origin for modern dogs. We have found that a dominant proportion of modern dogs’ ancestry derives from Middle Eastern wolves, and this finding is consistent with the hypothesis that dogs originated in the Middle East.

(…)

Previous genetic research had suggested an East Asian origin based on the higher diversity of mitochondrial sequences in East Asia and China than anywhere else in the world. (Mitochondria are tiny cellular structures outside the nucleus that produce energy and have their own small genome.) However, that research was based on only one sequence, a small part of the mitochondrial genome, Wayne noted.

Oh well, 50% is a decent score!

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