Interesting Articles: March 28th-April 3rd 2006

Food and Health:
* Cloning May Lead to Healthy Pork (New York Times). Pork with omega-3. Or, taking genetic engineering further than it occurred it me was possible.
* Eat Smart: Foods may affect the brain as well as the body (Science News). In short, eat fish, tumeric, and in general balanced diets with minimal calories and your brain will be happy and healthy for years to come.
* Report raises flag on fluoride (USA Today). I always thought flouride in water was good (for preventing cavities), but it seems like there is now too much in water in many places.

Medicine:
* Long-Awaited Medical Study Questions the Power of Prayer (New York Times). I'm glad the authors of the study intended it as a legitimate test, not as a way of mocking religion. But I can definitely see where the sentiments in the following quote come from.

"The problem with studying religion scientifically is that you do violence to the phenomenon by reducing it to basic elements that can be quantified, and that makes for bad science and bad religion," said Dr. Richard Sloan.

Law:
* O.K., Knockoffs, This Is War (New York Times). On the movement for copyright protections for clothing designs. I'm not sure where I stand on it, but I found the last half the article -the part about the existing legal framework- most interesting.

Education:
* Time to Think (New York Times). An op-ed piece suggesting easing time pressure on the SAT. (I'm generally in favor of eliminating time pressure on exams, but this obviously depends on what the exam is trying to measure.)

Puzzles:
* Puzzles, Origami and Other Mind-Twisters (New York Times). A cute short article about puzzles, the Gathering for Gardner, magic, and mathematics. Mentions two people I know. :)

Misc:
* Keeping It Secret as the Family Car Becomes a Home (New York Times). A touching story about how people that become homeless and decide to live in their car hide and try to keep the appearance of a normal life. (The audio interviews with some of the people is also revealing about why and how people do this.)
* The Modern Hunter-Gatherer (New York Times). A detailed description of the author's experience hunting, and its social and cultural implications. You can tell he's struggling with finding the right words to describe his experience, but he does a good job and includes many striking turns of phrase like:

In general, experiences that banish irony are much better for living than for writing.
...
And I had long felt that, as a meat eater, I should, at least once, take responsibility for the killing that eating meat entails. I wanted, for once in my life, to pay the full karmic price of a meal.
...
Later, when I reread Ortega y Gasset's description of the experience, I decided maybe he wasn't so crazy after all, not even when he asserted that hunting offers us our last best chance to leave behind history and return to the state of nature, if only for a time — for what he called a "vacation from the human condition."
...
All the various techniques humans have devised for transforming the raw into the cooked — nature into culture — do a lot more for us than make food tastier and easier to digest; they interpose a welcome distance too. It might be enough for other species that their food be good to eat, but for us, as Claude Lévi-Strauss famously put it, food has to be "good to think" as well; the alchemies of the kitchen help get us there, by giving new, more human forms and flavors to the plants and fungi and animals we bring out of nature.

It's worth reading to the end; the story does build and actually comes to some conclusions.