Harold McGee: On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen

In December, 2010, the author was a guest on NPR program, Talk of the Nation. There, the author said this about corking champagne: Well, I was in another part of the experiment because Dick's French friends said that the best way to keep a semi-finished bottle of Champagne fresh was to put a silver spoon in the neck. And we thought that putting a cork in the neck would clearly do a much better job of keeping the carbon dioxide in the bottle. So we did a blind tasting. We got some friends together who were interested in this kind of science and did a blind tasting. Some bottles, we opened freshly. Some bottles, we left open overnight. Some bottles, we emptied partway and then put a cork in the neck and let that sit overnight. And we were surprised to find with American sparkling wines, anyway, that some of the bottles that were left open or with a spoon in the neck actually did taste better than bottles that had been recorked. The podcast of that Talk of the Nation episode is posted below.

David Eltis, David Richardson: Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-C)

In December, 2010, National Public Radio featured a story on the Transatlantic Slave Trade. This is the introduction to that feature story: In the mid-15th century, the ships of the trans-Atlantic trade system went from carrying cargoes of gold to carrying cargoes of human beings. Over the next 350 years, some 12.5 million people would be shipped as slaves from Africa. Historian David Eltis has summarized that piece of history in Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, an online database that uses thousands of documents to offer a clearer picture of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. He and fellow historian David Richardson have also published a book on the subject by the same name. Author, editor, and historian David Eltis is a Robert W. Woodruff Professor of History at Emory University. A few of his lectures are posted below. These are also interesting books and collections of maps: George Washington's America: A Biography Through His Maps, Atlas of Remote Islands.

Jonathon Keats: Virtual Words: Language on the Edge of Science and Technology

The Boston Globe recently wrote about the book: “Virtual Words,” by Jonathon Keats, who writes the Jargon Watch column in WIRED magazine. We might even be able to argue that his book is from at least a few minutes in the future — these are the jargon words that might become consumer-grade English. “Virtual Words” isn’t really a dictionary, but a collection of essays on new terms, and Keats makes no claim to be a lexicographer (although his author photo includes a very lexicographical bow tie). Instead, he refreshingly divides his book into six categories: Discovery, Innovation, Commentary, Promotion, Slang, and Neologism. Find that Boston Globe article here. From NPR's Talk of the Nation, Science Friday; "How Science and Technology Influence Language:" FLATOW: How do certain words catch on when other words don't? Mr. KEATS: It seems to me that the words that catch on are those that are probably least clever, that call least attention to themselves and that really kind of percolate from general usage, whereas the words that are particularly fun or funny, they may come into existence, and they may go viral, but they tend to die out almost as quickly as they came about. FLATOW: Do you have some favorite new words from this year? Mr. KEATS: Yes, I've been watching, as a result of my work in Wired, and one word that I really like right now is hygroelectricity, which is not hydroelectricity, it's spelled H-Y-G-R-O, and what it refers to is electricity that is taken from the humidity in the air, much as lightning is a lightening is a manifestation of this. And what I like about it is that it makes concrete in a word an idea that is very new and really right now is in the earliest prototyping stage in a laboratory. And it has, I think, great potential as an alternative energy source, and because there is a word, there is something that we can call it, we can start talking about it and promoting it, tweeting it, if you will, and I think that that can really be as important as the technology itself in terms of whether it catches on. Find that NPR webpage here.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

In December, 2010, the Financial Times had this to say about the book:

The book’s title is taken from the Greek myth in which Procrustes fitted his guests to a bed – cutting to size those too tall and stretching those too short. Taleb’s crystalline nuggets of thought stand alone like esoteric poems, but together produce a sort of picture in reverse – the surrounding space shaded in to reveal the central subject: human knowledge and its limitations.

Find that Financial Times piece here. New York Magazine had this to say about the book:

We are here in this French café in Morningside Heights to talk about Socrates, Seneca, Averroës, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Chamfort, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein. These are his forebears in the art of the aphorism, a form he took up for several months earlier this year, resulting in his new book, The Bed of Procrustes, a compendium of Talebian witticisms and skeptical philosophizing: “You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.” “Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.” “You are only secure if you can lose your fortune without the additional insult of having to become humble.” It is a work very different in format from The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness, best sellers that predicted that the mathematical models Wall Street relied on to measure risk would help bring down the world economy. When the crash of 2008 came, it secured Taleb’s fame as the oracle of the Great Recession and made him, for a time, a ubiquitous cable-news presence, inveighing against the financial-policy elite.

Find that New Yorker Magazine article, here.

WNYC Radio's The Takeaway also had the author on their show, recently; listen to that podcast, just below.

Sam Kean: The Disappearing Spoon

In "A spoonful of science trickery," from the Thursday, December 02, 2010 issue of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, Rebecca Sodergren writes:

If I only knew where to get me some gallium, I could hoodwink my tea-drinking mother. See, as Sam Kean writes in his recent book, "The Disappearing Spoon and Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements" (Little Brown, 2010, $24), gallium is solid at typical room temperature. But leave it out on a moderate summer day (84 degrees) and it'll melt. "It's one of the few liquid metals you can touch without boiling your finger to the bone," he writes. "As a result, gallium has been a staple of practical jokes among the chemistry cognoscenti . . . One popular trick, since gallium molds easily and looks like aluminum, is to fashion gallium spoons, serve them with tea, and watch as your guests recoil when their Earl Grey 'eats' their utensils."

Read that article, in full, here.

Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food

For most cooks, food is a question of how. How many teaspoons? How many pounds? How many degrees? For geeks, food is fundamentally a question of why. Instead of "How do I brine a turkey?" it's "Why does osmosis push moisture back into the bird?" Instead of "How should I brown these potatoes?" it's "Why does a Maillard reaction make food tasty?" Food geek Jeff Porter delves into these questions and more in his book "Cooking for Geeks" (O'Reilly, $34.99), an excellent walk through the science of food and the basic techniques to turn that knowledge into flavor. Now, to be sure, Harold McGee (who appears in an interview in the book) traveled down the science portion of this path already in his seminal "On Food and Cooking." But Porter taps into the trend of food experimentation and gadgetry that has invaded our kitchens. "Overly intellectual. Obsessed with details. Going beyond the point where a mainstream user would stop," Porter writes. "A geek is anyone who dwells with some obsession on why something works and how to make that something better. And it's become a badge of honor to be a geek."

That's out of The Herald, in Monterey, California. You can find the rest of that article here.

Mapping Out the Transatlantic Slave Trade and Its 21st Century Legacy from The Takeaway: Early Edition by feedback@thetakeaway.org (Public Radio International and WNYC Radio)

The historic slave trade from Africa to the Americas was so widespread and so horrific as to remain difficult to entirely grasp. A new book, “Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade," aims to turn historic data from the period into a more coherent view, through maps and data. The book uncovers information that may soon have us all reconsidering not only America's history, but many of our own, personal stories. David Eltis, Professor of History at Emory University and co-author of the book, says that the data put forth in the atlas reveals a modern reintegration of peoples from around the world. The transatlantic slave trade marked the very beginning of that shift, which is still happening today.

View The Takeaway webpage on this story here. [Podcast will be made available after the show airs.] See also: George Washington's America: A Biography Through His Maps, Atlas of Remote Islands

How Language is Changing from KERA's Think Podcast

Syndicated description:

[2010-12-20 13:00:00] From the archives: How is language changing and what do we lose when a language disappears forever? In July we talked with linguist and author David Crystal. His latest work is "A Little Book of Language" (Yale, 2010).

Download the podcast here. Other books by David Crystal: How Language Works, Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language, Words Words Words, Txtng: The Gr8 Db8, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language

"Please Explain: Wool" from The Leonard Lopate Show

This cold weather has caused many of us to pull out our wool sweaters for extra warmth, and for this week’s Please Explain we’re talking about wool—and the process of gathering and using wool, from the sheep to the sweater! Clara Parkes, author of The Knitters Book of Wool: The Ultimate Guide to Understanding, Using, and Loving this Most Fabulous Fiber and The Knitter's Book of Yarn: The Ultimate Guide to Choosing, Using, and Enjoying Yarn, and Dr. Christopher Lupton, Professor, The Bill Sims Wool and Mohair Research Laboratory, Texas AgriLife Research and Extension Center, join us to discuss the subject.

"Please Explain" is a great segment of The Leonard Lopate Show; you should check this webpage out, on wool. See also: Magic Wool: Creative Activities With Natural Sheep's Wool, Wool Toys and Friends: Step-by-Step Instructions for Needle-Felting Fun, Spinning Wool: Beyond the Basics

"'Pushing Up Daisies' And Our Passion For Euphemisms" from NPR's talk of the Nation

From "passed away" to "Chilean sea bass," euphemisms are a way to avoid unpleasant terms or phrases. But in Euphemania, Ralph Keyes argues that using them isn't necessarily lazy or evasive; it can actually be harder to not say what we mean and still get our point across. "Euphemisms can be incredibly playful and a lot of fun — very creative," Keyes tells NPR's Neal Conan. Take, for example, the euphemisms we use for death. Keyes notes that the French talk about "eating dandelions by the root," their version of "pushing up daisies." He also recalls an old high school classmate who once told him how the life insurance industry avoids the word: "When one of their policy holders became eligible for his benefits to go to his heirs, they said he was 'post-retirement.'" And one of the author's favorite modern expressions is "going offline."

Read that full NPR feature story here. Download the podcast here. Read a few pages of the book here. See also: The Courage to Write: How Writers Transcend Fear In "To Put It Another Way: True, we often try to avoid plain words, but we should be careful about what we call a euphemism," Eric Felten out of the Wall Street Journal writes that the author:

[...] assures us that his book "is not meant to be a compilation of euphemisms." And yet that is mostly what it is. Alas, while piling up examples, Mr. Keyes seems to exhibit a glib indifference to whether the euphemisms he cites were ever in real circulation. Consider one of the first examples he offers of military circumlocution: "Bombadiers no longer 'drop bombs,' " he writes; "they unleash vertically deployed antipersonnel devices." Really? Goodness knows the military is rife with jargon, some of it euphemistic. But just try to find an instance of "vertically deployed antipersonnel device" actually being used by the military. The source for this claim appears to be one of several books on euphemisms published over the past couple of decades. And those books seem to have based the claim on a brief item 20 years ago in the Quarterly Review of Doublespeak, a newsletter once compiled by William Lutz, a Rutgers University professor.

Read that WSJ piece here.

Predictor of Financial Crisis Dispenses Bite-Sized Wisdom from The Takeaway: Early Edition by feedback@thetakeaway.org (Public Radio International and WNYC Radio)

Nassim Taleb is the philosopher and former trader who correctly predicted that the mathematical models Wall Street used to measure risk would lead to a massive financial crisis. His new book, ‘The Bed of Procrustes,’ scrutinizes the economy, as well as human knowledge and values. The book features "practical and philosophical aphorisms," and includes fortune-cookie sized sentences that attempt to "expose self-delusions you have been living with but have never recognized." Taleb is the current Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University. He is the author of 'Fooled by Randomness' and 'The Black Swan.'

Download the podcast here. See also: The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: With a new section: "On Robustness and Fragility", Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets, Dynamic Hedging: Managing Vanilla and Exotic Options (Wiley Finance), Lecturing Birds on Flying: Can Mathematical Theories Destroy the Financial Markets?, The Volatility Surface: A Practitioner's Guide (Wiley Finance), by Nassim Nicholas Taleb The Black Swan, The Impact of the Highly Improbable 1 edition, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Hardcover)

"Higher Learning" from Newsweek by Joel Schectman

For more than two decades, as the cost of college has climbed at twice the rate of inflation, critics have argued that bloated bureaucracies, overpaid faculty, and unnecessary amenities are inflating tuition. Yet in a new book—Why Does College Cost So Much?—economists Robert Archibald and David Feldman argue that college isn’t actually overpriced. The reason: although the total cost of attending an in-state, four-year public university has nearly doubled to $16,140 since 2000, the benefits that come with it have increased considerably, too. Indeed, over the same time period, the difference in wages between those who attend college and those who don’t has climbed by 20 percent. Yet in the aftermath of the recession, a more important question is who’s losing out in the process? Even though aid packages have risen by more than 50 percent since 2000, one recent study found that college enrollment could fall by 3.6 percent due to the housing bust, which has made it harder for families to finance their children’s education.

Read the full Newsweek article here. See also: Tuition Rising: Why College Costs So Much, With a new preface, Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs Too Much, Why Does College Cost So Much? [Hardcover]

Mark Twain And Science: It's Complicated from NPR Podcast Science Friday

Did you know Mark Twain tried his hand at science fiction? In the book The Disappearing Spoon, author Sam Kean writes about Twain's prescient story "Sold to Satan." In the story, Satan’s problems stem, in part, from the fact that he is made entirely of the newly discovered radioactive element radium.

Listen to the podcast here, or download the file here.