Stonyfield Farm wants to be environmentally conscious -and they want to sell expensive organic yogurt but not saddle customers with a lot of liberal guilt about a container.They may have done it with Stonyfield Frozen Yogurt Pearls, which is being tested in a few Whole Foods stores. The organic vanilla or chocolate frozen yogurt is encased in an edible skin flavored like peach or banana or...
read moreRobin Thicke may have sung "Blurred Lines" and appeared in a teenage fantasy video with a lot of naked women, but when a photo was revealed of him in a suggestive situation with another woman, he found that the line was actually not all that blurry to his wife.(1) What changed? She had been fine with his canoodling before. He has no idea and men meeting women across the nation are just as...
read moreIn the mid-1800s an American plant lice made its way to Europe. It wasn't Native Americans returning the disease favor but the sap-sucking aphids still did a number on France, killing the rebounding post-French Revolution, post-Napoleon economy.The obnoxious little grape phylloxera were the result of mad science experiments - but since it was old-timey, random experimentation a lot of...
read moreScience is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality - Carl SaganI missed the big Carl Sagan thing when it happened. I was in high school when Cosmos came out, we lived in the country and if you wanted to watch a different television network, you had to go up into the attic and turn a giant antenna with a pipe wrench. Sports and girls and D&D were more of...
read moreStatisticians have a rule of thumb for calibrating claims made in humanities and science papers alike. Andrew Gelman, for example, talks about statistical significance filter - "If an estimate is statistically significant, it’s probably an overestimate." A good thing to remember when you read weak observational studies, psychology surveys and, in modern times, a shocking number of epidemiology...
read more