science

Cookies Are Not Causation

October 22, 2010
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He Who Will Not Be Ignored will not eat M&M cookies; he believes that they make him sick. It’s not a decision he arrived at arbitrarily, it is, in his mind, supported by hard evidence. Four years ago, while driving him home from a doctor’s appointment, I offered to buy He Who a cookie as [...]

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I Didn’t Buy a Lottery Ticket Today

October 8, 2010
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Lest you think the title implies that I buy lottery tickets on other days, let me disabuse you of that notion: I don’t buy lottery tickets. Ever. I shouldn’t have to elaborate the usual statistical arguments, because this isn’t really about winning the lottery, it’s about a day full of coincidences. I had reconnected with [...]

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No Foam 101 for Me

September 2, 2010
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Back in March of this year, the food blogosphere picked up on this article in The Washington Post, which reported that Ferran Adrià of El Bulli and his friend José Andrés, prominent DC area chef, would be lecturing at Harvard University this fall. A bit of searching unearthed the official announcement from Harvard, which I [...]

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Bacon-Wrapped Skirt Steak

August 10, 2010
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With a head full of ideas from the classes taught by Ideas in Food, I realized it was time to turn theory into practice. I thought it would be prudent to try one of the simpler recipes, and the bacon-wraped skirt steak fit the bill, with a straightforward preparation and only four ingredients: steak, bacon, [...]

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Kitchen Chemistry

July 29, 2010
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During my summer internships at General Foods, I worked with many industrial processing techniques and chemicals that I later dismissed as having no practical value for a home cook working on a much smaller scale. I was proven wrong years later when the collection of techniques lumped together under the name “molecular gastronomy” became standard [...]

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Shocking!

July 20, 2010
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Because She Who Must Be Obeyed and I donate to the Boston Museum of Science, we frequently get invited to exhibit previews and special events. Last Saturday we took a behind the scenes tour of the Theater of Electricity, the wing of the museum that contains the giant Van de Graaf generator, pictured above. This [...]

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The Downfall of Vaccine Denial

March 30, 2010
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If you thought the vaccine denial movement was immune to the Downfall video meme, you’re in for a surprise. As you can see here, der Führer had a rough time of it after learning about a Danish study demonstrating no causal link between vaccines and autism. It’s worth it to hear him scream: It’s not [...]

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“Scientifically Unsupportable”

March 16, 2010
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Last Friday, special masters of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims released their findings on the second phase of the Omnibus Autism Proceedings, and found no evidence of a causal link between autism and thimerosal in vaccines. (The first phase, decided last year, addressed the claim that the MMR vaccine caused autism. ) Test cases [...]

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Feeding the Maws of Doom

March 9, 2010
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It’s been three months since I set up my iTerrarium. I must be doing something right, because the Nepenthes alata has developed two fully-formed pitchers (front and rear in the photo), with a third (to the right) on the way. I was advised by Paul Riddell, the iTerrarium’s creator and curator of the Texas Triffid [...]

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Try Reason, Not “Everything”

March 5, 2010
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Last week Time magazine published “The Autism Debate: Who’s Afraid of Jenny McCarthy?” As much as I’d like to rant about her, as I’ve done before, instead I’ll call your attention to this paragraph, buried halfway into the article: There are dark murmurings from scientists and doctors asking, Was her son ever really autistic? Evan’s [...]

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