Odd how some things make us reassess other things. A little notice on The Fresh Loaf informed me that Bernard Clayton Jr had died, and I realised I knew absolutely nothing about the person who wrote the book that first gave me a real idea of how interesting and varied bread and bread-making could...

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Occasionally I try to impart some elements of good science storytelling to people, and one of the points I make (based entirely on Garrett Hardin) is the big difference between literacy and numeracy. Literacy understands full well that the difference between a million and a billion is one letter. And that a billion is bigger than a million. But how much bigger? My example is simple enough. If a million seconds is 11 days (which it is, give or take), how long is a billion seconds?

It's especially worrying when the big numbers refer to big money. US Senator Everett Dirksen was clearly onto something when he said, "a billion here, a billion there ... pretty soon you're talking about real money". ¹

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I know there are readers who don’t care that what they see here is now being served by a delicious new all-singing, all-dancing, super-spiffy server -- but they might give silent thanks when they (or so I am promised) receive far fewer error messages in the future. For them, then, which is probably...

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I ask because there's a fascinating blog post -- Malaria, past and present -- over at Aidwatch. Laura Freschi takes a book review in Harper's because "it shows the historical roots of a struggle still raging in public health assistance today". That struggle is the unequal battle between simple, ea...

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This past couple of weeks I sipped from the well of erudition. Professor Leonard Barkan, of Princeton University, gave the 2011 Jerome Lectures at the American Academy in Rome, and his topic was Unswept floor: food culture and high culture, antiquity and renaissance.

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