sastyk | March 14, 2010First of all, may I ask which New York Times editor was responsible for permitting the coinage "femivore" to pass into language. Talk about illiterate (linguistically a "femivore" would be someone who ate women) and uneuphonious - yes, yes, I get that you want to get a Michael Pollan reference in there somehow, but come on... any writer worth her salt could do better than that.
Now to the meat of the thing - the essay, which profiles Shannon Hayes's book _Radical Homemakers_ attempts to argue that focusing on food has given women a new set of choices.
Hayes pointed out that the original "…
ejohnson | March 13, 2010As the deadline for the 2010 Pi Day Pie Bake-Off approaches, the entries are stacking up. In addition to the pies we've already posted here on Page 3.14, three of our own ScienceBloggers have thrown their hats in the ring. It's a good thing we don't actually have the pies here at ScienceBlogs headquarters to judge, because we'd be running out of counter space for them.
Wait a second, what are we saying? We can definitely find space for them if you want to send them to us...
In this next batch we have a One-Hundred-Digit berry pie from Claudette, a Banana Cream pie from Brendan Jinnohara, and…
ejohnson | March 13, 2010Either we set our oven temperature too high or the competition is heating up here in the 2010 Pi Day Pie Bake-Off.
Yesterday we posted Annie Wang's Archi-meaty pie, Leigh's Rabbiteye Blueberry Pie, and Stephanie's "Grown-Up" S'mores Pie with Guinness, and ScienceBloggers James Hrynyshyn and Pamela Ronald posted their own Strawbarb and Swiss chard-Gruyere pies, respectively.
Today we bring you three more: Mareena Wright's Cauchy's Coconut Cream Condensation Test Pie, Zinjanthropus's USO and Banana Pie with Anthropoid Bread Crust, and Nathan Lau's Chocolate Haupia Pie. We're starting to wish…
ejohnson | March 12, 2010The first entries in the ScienceBlogs/Serious Eats 2010 Pi Day Pie Bake-Off are starting to roll in, and it already looks like its going to be difficult to choose come voting day. We probably shouldn't be writing this post at lunchtime, but here we go anyway with the first three pies:
First, from Annie Wang at frites & fries, the ingeniously titled Archi-meaty pie. Because Archimedes was Greek, the pie itself had to be Greek too, made with lamb, feta, honey, apples and raisins.
Next up is Leigh's Rabbiteye Blueberry Pie, originally posted on her blog 5 Acres & A Dream. Freshly…
sastyk | March 12, 2010First of all, I present to you, the cover for my new book (not yet finished, but it will be really soon) forthcoming this fall. I didn't think it was possible that they could come up with something prettier than the cover for Independence Days (which you can see on the sidebar), but I think they did.
I admit, I'm pretty impressed by it! Plus it fulfills the maxim that all my covers must have food on them, whether the books are about food or not.
Second of all, if you want to see someone's impression of me headlocking a fellow science blogger in a free-for-all, I'm in panel three of this…
sastyk | March 12, 2010The Miami-Herald is reporting today that food stamp use has more than doubled among Floridians in the last three years:
More than 2.5 million Floridians are on food stamps, up from three years ago where 1.2 million residents received assistance.
That's according to records kept by the Department of Children and Families, which administers the program.
DCF Secretary George Sheldon told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel Tuesday that Florida's food stamp rolls grew the fastest in the nation since 2007.
Some of this is due to increased efforts on the part of states to expand access, but it is also,…
sastyk | March 12, 2010Note: It hasn't happened yet here, although we heard them down the hill in the valley yesterday. But we seem to be having an early spring, even though we've still got more than a foot of snow to melt off. I wrote this last year, and though the precise circumstances are different, the need for that sound is just the same. I know I owe y'all new content, but this one seemed appropo. Has spring sprung for you?
Spring doesn't come easily in upstate New York - she wrestles with Old Man Winter for a long, long time before he gives up. The first sign is the daffodils, up a small amount in…
sastyk | March 11, 2010In an American Chemical Society paper, "Forecasting World Crude Oil Production Using Multicyclic Hubbert Model" authors Ibrahim Sami Nashawi, Adel Malallah and Mohammed Al-Bisharah propose:
Even though forecasting should be handled with extreme caution, it is always desirable to look ahead as far as possible to make an intellectual judgment on the future supplies of crude oil. Over the years, accurate prediction of oil production was confronted by fluctuating ecological, economical, and political factors, which imposed many restrictions on its exploration, transportation, and supply and…
sastyk | March 11, 2010I'm back from my northeast travels - I had a great time at both NOFA and NESEA, and am slowly recovering from a glazed state of sleep deprivation to something sort of coherent enough to finish the book (3 weeks to go!). But I'm still sleepy and tired, so to remind you that Pi day is coming, I include my classic (ok, if I have any classics ;-)) essay on why the world can be saved with Pie. If you are inspired to follow up with a submission to the Pi-day contest, that would be awesome.
The other day I got embroiled in one of those endless discussions/debates/headbangings about what the best…
sastyk | March 8, 2010I'm not going to be beating PZ Myers any time soon on readership, Dr. Isis in hot shoes or Comrade Physioprof in elegantly phrased obscenity, but I think I've found something that this blog can kick fellow-science blogger patootie at - the baking of awesome pies. After all, how many of those other blogistes actually have a food and cooking book to their credit? How many famously brought our nation together in the pursuit of pie (I'll be re-running the famous "We Need More Pie" essay tomorrow, since it is pure, ennobling, and well, because I'm off doing other stuff and need some gently used…
sastyk | March 7, 2010Real Climate has an analysis of the methane release paper up, which is at least partly reassuring - partly.
CO2 is plenty to be frightened of, while methane is frosting on the cake. Imagine you are in a Toyota on the highway at 60 miles per hour approaching stopped traffic, and you find that the brake pedal is broken. This is CO2. Then you figure out that the accelerator has also jammed, so that by the time you hit the truck in front of you, you will be going 90 miles per hour instead of 60. This is methane. Is now the time to get worried? No, you should already have been worried by the…
sastyk | March 4, 2010I haven't had a chance to read the original paper - I'm getting ready to head out of town and probably won't get to it until next week, but I just got a press release from U Alaska Fairbanks about a recent paper in this month's issue of Science that suggests that we've got bigger methane problems than we knew about.
From the UAK press release:
The research results, published in the March 5 edition of the journal Science, show that the permafrost under the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, long thought to be an impermeable barrier sealing in methane, is perforated and is leaking large amounts of…
sastyk | March 4, 2010Well, I'm headed off for my weekend away - I'll be at NOFA NH on Saturday giving the keynote and at the NESEA Building Energy Public Forum Panel on Tuesday night. Posting will be intermittent while I'm gone, but I figure I'd leave you all with a laugh at my expense.
Eric had a horrible moment the other day in class. Students were coming in and he was calling up a youtube video on space exploration for his students to see. But somehow while answering a student question, he committed a typo, which brought up, on a huge screen a hard-core porn site with very explicit visuals. After a second…
sastyk | March 4, 2010Note: This is another lightly revised version a piece I wrote some years ago at the oldest incarnation of this blog. It answers a question I get a lot - if people have been saying that the oil is going to run out for years, and if 30 years ago people thought we were going to have an ice age, why should I believe you that peak oil and climate change are real problems.
A lot of what I write works from the assumption that we all agree that peak oil and climate change are happening and going to be life-changing events. And yet, some people who read this blog don't necessarily agree on this…
sastyk | March 3, 2010Over at Dot.Earth, Andy Revkin points out that basic preparedness is important - and that he'd have benefitted from some.
If I'd followed my colleague Tom Zeller's advice and invested in a wood-stove-style insert for my fireplace -- as I've muttered about for years -- my family wouldn't have had to sleep in a 45-degree house for four days in the wake of the epic snowstorm in the Northeast last week. (Although we still would have had to melt snow on our propane stove to flush the toilets; watch the video below for more survival tips from the snow zone.)
Everyone lives where potential…
sastyk | March 3, 2010
It has been an exciting morning - and it isn't even 10 o clock. Today was the day to pick up our new buck goat, Ring Bearer (again, not responsible for his name). For those of you who have never had the pleasure of having a buck goat, or do have buck goats, but own pickup trucks or other more sensible farm vehicles than our ancient Ford Taurus, you may not be famliar with the way a buck goat smells in close quarters.
This time of year, it isn't that bad, but there is a definite musk. This muskiness makes said goat sexually irresistable to all ladies of the goat persuasion, but let's…
sastyk | March 2, 2010One of the pleasures of blogging here has been the focus that this community has on issues of public health. Doing everything we can to maintain the health and well-being of populations through a shift into a different model of life is an issue that is deeply important to me - I don't always agree with everyone who writes here on these issues (and, of course, they don't always agree with each other ;-)), but I am struck with admiration of the degree of concern for the public welfare expressed by my Science Blog Colleagues.
Which is why I'm being so presumptuous (since I am a science writer,…
sastyk | March 2, 2010I have an enormous amount of respect for Stuart Staniford, who I think is one of the best minds working on our collective ecological crisis. That said, we've had some serious debates, because I've tended to think that our situation, particularly our longer term food situation, is more serious than Staniford has - but those debates on my end have always included just a profound gratitude for the kind of analytic work he does.
(Days over 100 degrees in projected high emissions scenarios)
Staniford has done a fabulous review (Note: apologies for linkage problems, they should now be fixed!)…
sastyk | March 1, 2010
Note: Most of the Independence Days material will run at ye olde blogge , but I wanted to post the year three start up over here too, since my readership isn't entirely overlapping. If you want to post status updates, the weekly thread for that will be at my other blog, but you can sign up here too! I hope you'll join us!
Many of us need nothing in the world so much as more time. Adding new projects is exhausting - and stressful. And yet, we know that there are things we want to change - for example, most of us would like to grow a garden with our kids, or make sure that we know where…
sastyk | March 1, 2010On Saturday evening as my family went out to synagogue for purim, I was astonished - driving through Schenectady there were only a few inches of snow on the ground. Now we often get more snow than lower elevations, but this time the difference was astounding - we have nearly four feet of snow on the ground.
I like snow, but I admit, I've never dealt with this much, accumulated so quickly - it snowed non-stop from Tuesday morning until Saturday night. Sometimes we had gentle flakes, other white-out, but snow it did, and looking out this sunny morning, my four and a half foot goat fences are…