Month: August 2010

Rachel Laudan:

Eating fresh, natural food was regarded with suspicion verging on horror; only the uncivilized, the poor, and the starving resorted to it.

To make food tasty, safe, digestible, and healthy, our forebears bred, ground, soaked, leached, curdled, fermented, and cooked naturally occurring plants and animals until they were literally beaten into submission. They created sweet oranges and juicy apples and non-bitter legumes, happily abandoning their more natural but less tasty ancestors. They built granaries, dried their meat and their fruit, salted and smoked their fish, curdled and fermented their dairy products, and cheerfully used additives and preservatives—sugar, salt, oil, vinegar, lye—to make edible foodstuffs.

David Gentilcore:

In Italy, up until the 1950s, there was a large part of the country, even where they produce tomatoes, where they wouldn’t eat the stuff.

Most Italian dishes, such as pasta al pomodoro, are fairly recent — from the 1870s or ’80s. Italian immigrants arriving in New York City or Boston were the first generation to eat these dishes as daily things. Making a rich meat sauce with maybe the addition of tomato paste, that Sunday gravy style, is something that happens only in the 20th century.

Dan Jurafsky:

The story starts in the mid-6th century in Persia.

French fries, the “chips” of “fish and chips”, are Belgian, and came to England only in the mid-19th century. And the “fish”, deep-fried battered fish, turns out to be a cousin to ceviche; both of them, as well as some other well-known foods that’ll we’ll get to, are the direct descendents of the favorite dish of the Shahs of Persia more than 1500 years ago.

Name the person that has caused the most harm in the name of religion.

Wha?! Only one?

God’s Lunatics !

Lost Souls,
False Prophets,
Martyred Saints,
Murderous Cults,
Demonic Nuns,
and Other Victims of Man’s Eternal Search for the Divine.

“I was getting kind of crazy at the end of the book. With all the different gods, it got hard to sleep.” – Michael Largo

Gary Jones:

I tend to pretty much disagree with everyone and everything.

Feynman’s assertion that science is the belief in the ignorance of experts seems like simple good sense that generalizes to all aspects of human endeavor. Humans are fallible: this is a feature not a bug. Fail forward faster etc.

Everything that I know is wrong, though I don’t know what is wrong with what I know, or what is right, and assume that the same is true for you since I’ve seldom if ever seen contrary evidence that upon close examination proved to be sound.

I’m comfortable with the fact that we are all lack-wits and bumblers, and comfortable with continuing none the less to pursue immediate objectives that seem to be worthwhile given current circustances and understandings. Our current errors will be revealed shortly, though our general condition will be unchanged by those revealations.

Good cheer and a sense of humor are useful as salve for our embarrassment and wounds.

Not  all brooders and ruminators are created equal.

American brooders show extremely high levels of depressive symptoms. Russian brooders are less likely to be depressed. Rumination is an emotional buffer for Russians, but makes Americans depressed.

Yes, it’s true. Deepest thoughts and feelings are not the same in Moscow or Michigan.

Let’s look at the facts: The emperor Augustus found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble.

Similarly, I can say that found Randy’s Diner a cheap greasy spoon with threadbare gingham tablecloths and tomato sauce dispensers shaped liked huge tomatoes.

I made it a gleaming Carlo’s Panini Pavilion franchise featuring Carlotta’s Gelato Annex. Some local residents bemoaned the bulldozing of Randy’s, calling Carlo’s “the Starbucks of Italian-style toasted sandwiches.” Apparently they thought that paying fifteen bucks for a Tuscan Turkey Melt with romaine lettuce, sun-dried tomato, honey mustard and your choice of three cheese toppings on ciabatta was an insanely outrageous expense. Well, an old-fashioned, four buck club sandwich from Randy’s might fill people’s stomachs, but could it fill a full-color center-spread in Happenin’ Around Town with a starred review and arty lomo photographs? No, because a trendy magazine like Happenin’ Around Town wouldn’t bother going to a dreary dump like Randy’s in the first place.