Category: ideas

“But does food act like a historical text? What is food a record of exactly? …[F]ood is not a reliable historical source, for it is a truth universally acknowledged that most curries dished up in [British “balti”] restaurants are invented for the ‘white’ consumer. In Urdu, balti means ‘bucket’ and has more to do with Jack, Jill and the hill, than with cooking.”

“Boys do best with ‘as few girls as possible’ in English lessons at primary and secondary school, Steven Proud, a research student at Bristol University, will tell the Royal Economic Society’s conference. But when it comes to maths and science, both boys and girls at primary school achieve up to a tenth of a grade more when there is a high proportion of girls in the class, Proud found.”

“Liberals and conservatives, [University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt] insists, inhabit different moral universes. There is some overlap in belief systems, but huge differences in emphasis. In a creative attempt to move beyond red-state/blue-state clichés, Haidt has created a framework that codifies mankind’s multiplicity of moralities.”

“We have many automatic biases — we’re more averse to losses than we are interested in gains, for instance — and we make repeated errors in judgment based on our tendency to use shorthand rules to solve problems. We can also be extremely susceptible to how questions are posed.”

“Few people need convincing that the destruction of rain forests, the mass extinction of species and the melting of the ice sheets in Greenland would all be very bad things. Do we really need to list the reasons? We do. After all, in many regards our species has already kissed nature goodbye, and we are better off for it.”

“Bonobos yell out their food ratings using at least five distinct vocalizations, the study found. Since the calls are tonally similar to certain other primate sounds, such as the human exclamations ‘Yum!’ and ‘Ewww,’ the scientists think there might be a somewhat universal primate language when it comes to food.”

“If intelligence were deeply encoded in our genes, that would lead to the depressing conclusion that neither schooling nor antipoverty programs can accomplish much. Yet while this view of I.Q. as overwhelmingly inherited has been widely held, the evidence is growing that it is, at a practical level, profoundly wrong.”

“Refrigeration delivered a paradigm shift by removing the site of production from the sight of consumers. The idea of freshness emerged to fill the conceptual ellipsis that resulted … Self-sufficient agrarians did not define freshness, because they watched their chickens lay and slaughtered their own cows.”

“Banking developed in Florence because of the ingenious development of bills of exchange, first as a way of paying debts without having to transport cash, then as a means of evading the church’s usury laws, and finally as a means of extending credit.”

“Nuclear weapons aren’t only good for leveling cities, they’ve also been used throughout the last 50 years for a variety of civilian purposes like stimulating natural gas production – and all kinds of innovative proposals have been slapped on the table to harness the awesome power of the nuclear blast for economic benefit.”