Interesting Articles: June 20th-26th 2006

I've been trying (and so far succeeding) in spending less time on activities that don't really matter in the grand scheme of things, like reading the New York Times. Hence, these interesting articles postings will be much briefer in the future (as long as my resolve holds).

  • Found Magazine (KQED's Forum). I've always been interested in found objects and FOUND Magazine but never found the time to delve further into it. This one hour radio program provides an entertaining recitation of the best found items, an exploration of the meaning behind these objects, and a meta-level discussion about what makes this so fascinating (including terms such as "the cult of the ordinary").
  • As waters part, polygons appear (Science News). When you rotate a cylinder of water, polygons of various shapes can appear. How odd. If that link doesn't work, read the abstract of the source article: Polygons on a rotating fluid surface (Physical Review Letters). Or better yet, check out the pictures.
  • Springfield Theory: Mathematical references abound on The Simpsons (Science News). A cute article, but I'm severely disappointed that one of the rare times Science News decides to publish a mathematics article, it turns out to be a fluff piece.
  • Health products fail. Two articles induced me to make this bullet:
    Plain water was most effective, removing 96 percent of Norwalk virus. Antibacterial soap was close behind, reducing viral counts by 88 percent. The alcohol-based hand gels reduced the virus by only about half.
    -from Hand gels falter (Science News)
    Although one supplement degraded all the oxalate [a mineral most kidney stones are composed of], the others degraded negligible amounts.
    -from Can supplements nix kidney stones? (Science News)

    In short, some products with purported health benefits do effectively nothing.
  • Cooked garlic still kills bacteria (Science News). The title pretty much says it all, but you can always read the abstract of the source article: antibacterial activity of heat treated garlic extract against enteric bacteria (American Society for Microbiology meeting).
  • Fat Friends: Gut-microbe partners bring in more calories (Science News). Posted due to this fascinating possibility:
    The study suggests that the calories that people and other animals take from foods could be directly related to which microbes have colonized their guts.
    ...
    If the scientists' reasoning is correct, then manipulating intestinal flora might eventually be used to treat obesity, notes microbiologist Jeremy Nicholson of Imperial College London.

    More details on the study that inspired this claim are available in the Science News article or in the source article: A humanized gnotobiotic mouse model of host-archaeal-bacterial mutualism (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences).
  • Ashland Oregon Shakespeare Festival

    I spent Friday, June 16th 2006 to Sunday, June 18th 2006 in Ashland for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival as part of a trip I organized for some friends and I.

    The whole trip was great! I saw two plays and both were very well done. And I got to eat at a few decent places and two surprisingly good ones; these reviews are recorded elsewhere.

    The Merry Wives of Windsor, a fun play I saw on Friday night and one of Shakespeare's verbally witty and slapsticky comedies, had a very obvious theme: don't mess with women. My only disappointment with the performance was a very surreal ending scene. (I'm also a little disappointed by the bumpiness of the plot, but I'll take that up with Shakespeare.)

    On Saturday night I saw Cyrano de Bergerac, written in 1897 by Edmond Rostand. It was an excellent, emotionally exhausting romantic tragedy set in the seventeenth century. I was tired just watching it; I'm amazed at the energy had by the actor playing Cyrano. He was great and appropriately received a standing ovation. Superficially the theme dealt with the difference between inner and outer beauty. After deeper thought, one realizes it's more about the difference between visual beauty (i.e., physical beauty) and oral beauty (i.e., verbal eloquence).

    Sadly, I had to skip a third play to participate in an online puzzle competition I do every year, and I think I did as well as I usually do. Not great, not bad, but I'm happy with it. A few people on the trip asked about the puzzles I was so devoted to that I skipped on performance. I showed them and they went over really well -- some people got addicted and spent a couple of hours working on these.

    As for Ashland itself, it's a cute town that very much reminds me of Banff (Canada). Both towns are cozy and small, surrounded by verdant hills, and filled with neat little independent stores and boutiques (targeting the upper-class tourists that visit both places). Although expensive to purchase anything, they're fun for window shopping and have a wide variety of restaurants.

    Even the five to six hour ride to Ashland was pretty pleasant, with nice views of Mount Shasta and Black Butte for long portions of the drive.

    And the two people that I didn't know well before the trip I clicked with fairly well during the trip -a pleasant surprise-.

    All in all, good clean fun.

    Radio Show Plug: B-Side Radio

    B-Side Radio is a quality, thoughtful, and entertaining radio program produced by a local Berkeley radio station. In the style of This American Life (with Ira Glass), each episode (half an hour) covers different perspectives on a theme. While This America Life has deep themes, B-Side Radio has lighter ones that frequently lead toward a more unified program and also thus require less work from the listener.

    Give it a chance; click on the link, find a program with a tempting title, and listen!

    I've actually never heard it live, but I've listened on the web since I discovered it about two years ago. Shows are produced roughly monthly, or slightly less frequently.

    Interesting Articles: June 6th-19th 2006

  • Light Impacts: Hue and timing determine whether rays are beneficial or detrimental (Science News). The main message I take away from this article besides the effects of light use in general is to be conscious of the color of one's computer monitor (e.g., background image). And one can use these ideas to, say, perform better on an overnight scavenger hunt.
  • A Life Between Jobs (New York Times). hmmmm... Vacations are tempting.
  • In Search of a Pan That Lets Cooks Forget About Teflon (New York Times). I usually don't post food and cooking discussions here because I tend to think they only interest me, instead just bookmarking them for myself. But I felt like others might appreciate this article reviewing non-teflon pans.
  • The Way We Eat: Market Value (New York Times). A brief but entertaining history of supply and demand, as it applies to food ingredients.
  • Men Are Better Than Women at Ferreting Out That Angry Face in a Crowd (New York Times). Describes some interesting gender differences in speed of identifying emotions expressed on faces.
  • On the Art of the Travel Log

    Having finally caught up on my New York / New Jersey trip entries (look back in the April and May 2006 archives to read them), I thought this deserved posting:

    Admittedly, I'm not very good at writing travel logs. After all, my main audience for these diary entries is myself and what I publish here are really just slightly coherent first drafts of my notes and thoughts.

    All the same, I found the discussion with Author Frances Mayes on KQED's Forum on March 31 2006 quite interesting. (Listen if you want.) Mayes was talking about her new book and all the places she lived and described in the book. The theme -move somewhere and live there for a while- is exactly like what I did with Manhattan years ago.

    Eighteen minutes into the conversation Mayes talked about being offered bites off of other people's plates and remarked how this doesn't happen in America. In contrast, this happened to me (and similar events) in Manhattan; at the time I said this would never occur in my home of California. Interpret these observations as you will.

    Thirty minutes into the conversation I heard an exchange which really describes why I take notes of things I see and think:

    Caller: "... [My wife] would look at the notes she took during the day and she would try to write out her narrative. Very important to do that because you can write your own Under the Tuscan Sun when you get home."
    Mayes: "I'm so glad he brought that up because I think what he said is so crucial to enjoyment. I see people in cafes writing in their notebooks and I always think that is the most delicious moment in travel, when you're alone in a cafe with your notebook and you're writing down all you've seen. In a way it kind of doubles your pleasure and your perception; when you start writing down what you've done and seen, you see more and it makes bigger associations for you."

    Finally, although this quote twenty-five minutes into the discussion isn't really relevant to discussing travel logs, I hadn't heard it before but thought it was very incisive:
    "I loved Garcia Lorca's comment about racism in Harlem when he was there studying jazz. He said he could not understand racism because it was in fact a sign of God's creativity."
    (Sadly, I could not verify this quote and attribution on the web.)

    Italian Street Painting Festival (San Rafael)

    In mid-afternoon on Sunday, June 11th 2006, I headed out to my forth festival of the weekend, the Italian Street Painting Festival in San Rafael. The street painting was stunning! I arrived around four pm, and spent nearly two hours looking at the art and taking pictures. I took many photographs (please view them!) and I have little to add to the photographs and the accompanying commentary.

    After examining the street art and listening briefly to a decent enough latin rock band, I decided to grab something to eat. But before I got a chance, another band came on the stage, The House Jacks, and they were good! A capella done by five beatboxers, so it didn't sound like traditional a capella at all. While I didn't enjoy their standard repertoire much, they spent much of their show doing requests from the audience. They managed to remember enough of every song requested to be able to do an entertaining thirty second rendition. Not only were they pretty darn good at such impromptu performances, but it was clear they had fun doing so and that fun was contagious.

    While listening, I grabbed dinner. They had three food booths, all generally Italian-themed. I grabbed an Italian sausage. Sliced lengthwise in half, it was spicy and surprisingly good and worked well with onions and peppers in a chunk of large soft artisan bread. The other dinner choices included penne pasta, a salad, and a few types of pizza.

    They also had a wine/beer/italian soda/drink counter, at which I ordered a bellini. A bellini is a mixed drink of champagne, (peach) schnapps, peach "nectar" (i.e., juice), and a served with a slice of peach. Pretty refreshing and well-balanced.

    At the end of the festival I left San Rafael, happy because of the coolness of the festival but sad because I now remembered how neat and quaint and wonderful for wandering San Rafael was. (Well, sad because I didn't have time to wander around downtown.)

    Live Oak Park Fair (Berkeley)

    This Sunday morning, June 11th 2006, I walked to the Live Oak Park Fair with my apartmentmate and a friend. It's conveniently close, held in a secluded little-known park approximately halfway between my current place in Berkeley and my previous place in Berkeley. Live Oak Park is a beautiful forested space with two glades and a meandering stream; I took a few pictures that attempt to capture the feel of the place. Incidentally, live oak is a type of oak tree, not an adjective to oak (live versus dead).

    I wasn't expecting much in terms of booths or food. But regarding booths, I was pleasantly surprised with the quantity and quality. (I guess it's just that Berkeley is a town that can attract such talent.) Here are some neat things I thought were worth writing down:

    • A booth selling paper quilts. Each square from a different source. What a unique idea.
    • A photographer in an east asian country -I forget which one- that took great pictures of landscapes and amazing pictures of faces. I've rarely seen such a breadth of high quality portraits even in museums.
    • Hand-forged knives.
    • A set of artwork that's difficult to classify. They were vaguely impressionistic, but really unique, partially from the appearance given the materials used: pigment on rag paper.
    • Wind-vane metal sculptures shaped like fish.
    • Homemade wooden one-piece bowls. I'd like to be able to make these.
    • A set of surrealistic paintings, including one of a devil vacuuming a room. (The story goes that he is having an affair with the woman and wants to be invited back.) The artist also had some surrealistic photographs, a category of art I had forgotten existed. They were real but included such colors due to lighting and shadows that they looked extremely odd.
    • A booth of a very friendly couple selling jams, sauces, and condiments (Terra Verde Farms). They told me a neat story about how they used to grow the fruits themselves, then changed to buying organic produce to spend more of their time on the recipes for creating all their products. They have many more items than their web site lists and are very creative at pairing unusual flavors.
    • Asian-style framed mirrors, like millennium-old ones seen in museums.
    • Glass plates embedded with a medley of smaller pieces of colored glass.
    • Hollowed-out rocks used as pen-holders, soap dispensers, etc.
    • Soap shaped and colored to look like sushi. (I previously saw this at the Berkeley Spice of Life Festival but it's odd enough that I thought I'd mention it again.)
    • A booth selling slate plaques carved with pithy, thoughtful, or humorous sayings. Talking to the proprietor, I learned about slate and slate mining. Apparently slate is nearly everywhere in this part of California and one can get a slate mining permit for ten dollars. He, however, used Vermont slate because its hardness made for a better product.
    After seeing all the booths, I was hungry. My expectations were meet regarding the lack of good food booths so we went elsewhere (Gregoire) and had a good meal (as we expected). But since the day was overcast and chilly we didn't dilly-dally for long, and I headed home.

    Dia de Portugal Festival (San Jose)

    Dia de Portugal Festival is an event that occurs in many places throughout the world in honor of a Portuguese national holiday (June 10th 2006). The bay area festival occurred in Kelley Park in San Jose, a historical park I've been to a few times before because our company picnics have sometimes been held there. The location has a similar feel to that of the Celtic Festival in that both are settings from a bygone era, but Kelley Park is a town setting: main stream, small grove, old school ice cream parlor, old hotel, small church-like building, water tower, trolley, etc. Of course, none of these buildings (except for the ice cream parlor) are used for their original purpose anymore but the feeling of them is there.

    However, I didn't originally know the festival was in the historic section of Kelley Park. On the way to Kelley Park, I parked in the first labeled park entrance I saw, not knowing there was others. I saw two large barbecue parties with many latinos or iberians and signs about those areas being reserved for private parties. I wondered where the public part of the festival could be. Seeing some open gates, I wandered through and found myself at many booths being taken down, all labeled with ice cream names and puns of animal names. It turns out I'd stumbled upon the aftermath of an event for kids, the Ice Cream Zoofari. Wandering around more, I found myself in a zoo (who knew San Jose had one?). After walking by a number of animals, it occurred me these animals were more exotic than those at the Alderwood Historic Farm and I should take pictures of them. I took one, but before I could set up and take another I was gently encouraged to leave the zoo. It seemed the zoo closed at the end of the Zoofari, quite a while ago, and the only reason I found myself in it is because I wandered through a back entrance they hadn't yet locked.

    Driving around the parking lot, I didn't see anything that looked like the Dia de Portugal Festival. I parked and checked the internet, and Kelley Park is indeed where it was supposed to be. So I decided to drive the perimeter and attempt to find it. No further than two hundred yards down from this entrance, I started seeing signs for the festival and additional parking. Parking in a better and closer lot, I followed signs to where the festival actually was.

    Once at the festival, after glancing briefly at the half a dozen retail booths, all selling Portuguese books and themed t-shirts and the like, I discovered the museum. Although I'd been at this park multiple times before, I never knew the museum was there.

    The Portuguese Museum (photograph) was good. Filling up two sizable rooms, it covered Portuguese contributions to the world, from the exploration done by the Portuguese in the middle of the last millennium, to Portugal's later imperial expansion, to more recent and more local issues answering questions such as how did California end up with a Portuguese populace. Answer: many came in the nineteenth century when the Pacific whaling trade was large and California (particularly Monterey) served as an important base for it. I was impressed that the Portuguese had such expansive trade relations so early: by 1513, Portugal had trade relations with North and South America, Japan, and even India, all via ship.

    The museum also had good coverage of religion and how it influenced Portugal's development and the average Portuguese person's life. Overall I found the whole museum a short but quality introduction to six hundred years of Portuguese history and, to some extent, culture.

    There wasn't much to the festival besides the music stage, those retail booths, the food booths, and the co-located museum. But the food booths were cool! They had a wide variety of Portuguese food, with a wider selection of ethnic food than at any festivals I've previously attended (including all those Greek festivals I went to last year).

    They had a nice sign/menu listing all the food all the booths offered. To start, I tried the sopas, a stew of bread and cabbage with brisket and pork on the side, both may have been meant to be mixed in. The starch (bread) and cabbage reminded me a little of eastern European cuisine. The stew flavor wasn't bad, but sogginess of the bread gave it the (unpleasant to me) texture of fat. The brisket was fine though a little dry, and mixing it with the rest of the stew didn't help or hurt. The pork (with skin?!) was about 75% fat (!); the meat in the pork was pretty good and mixing it with the stew added some nice richness. I wonder what cut of pig had so much fat! Overall, a decent enough item to try but not particularly good.

    While eating it, I listened to a band warm up. In particular, a musician was practicing his electric guitar with very American sounds, and this seemed out of place to me. Soon after though they jumped into fairly energetic Portuguese pop/rock music and the dance floor (grass in front of the stage) rapidly filled up (with people doing, I believe, the two-step).

    Heading back to the food court, I ordered a container of lacassa ("Macanese style noodles"). These were flavorful fried vermicelli noodles mixed with ground beef, chiles, tiny drops of pork, and miniature chunks of tofu (or what might have been hard boiled eggs, it's hard to tell because they were so small). I saved some leftovers for later.

    Finally, I peaked at one of the dessert booths and the friendly person inside happily translated the names of the desserts into English for me. I chose a slice of the fig cake and took it home for later. Nice and moist and with a fruity though not particularly figgy flavor.

    Celtic Festival (Ardenwood Historic Farm, Fremont)

    Summertime is coming. While festivals appear intermittently in the winter, they've been appearing with increasing frequency these last two months and has built to a crescendo. There are eight festivals scattered around the bay area this weekend that I'm tempted to attend!

    The first festival I decided to attend on this Saturday, June 10th 2006, was the Celtic Festival, held at the Ardenwood Historic Farm in Fremont. The Ardenwood Historic Farm is an east bay park that used to be a farm, with all the usual accompaniments: barn, blacksmith, chicken coops, gazebo, large grassy fields, large tractored rows of dirt, old tractors, windmill, tiny local railroad for shipping grain around, and more. The day, beautiful, sunny, and warm, was perfect for wandering around outside.

    I took these pictures during my time at the festival.

    Upon arriving, the first thing I noticed was an open railroad car filled with people pulled by one tired horse. The car was used to transport people to the other end of the farm. I felt bad for the horse! And felt even worse when I soon walked by a carriage with only three people and pulled by two horses. Later I learned that there were many horses that alternated pulling the railroad car; that made me feel a little better. But it's still a tough job!

    Since I arrived around lunch time, I followed the signs to the food (in particular BBQ) area and was disappointed to find they only served three items: tri-tip sandwiches, hot dogs, and turkey legs. Well, it's been a while since I've had a turkey leg, so that was fine. Except they were out of turkey legs. Instead, I had a sad tri-tip sandwich of a few slices of meat on a hamburger bun.

    During my afternoon wandering, I later found a different food area. Too bad there weren't any signs for it nor was on the map. In consolation, it wasn't much better, having other greasy festival-type food that is slightly more appropriate to a Celtic festival. In addition to kebabs, chicken, and burgers, they had sausages (or, as the British call them, "bangers"), and fish and chips.

    This is called burying the main paragraph: The festival had many cute themed exhibits. One guy talked about how swords and armor were made and used and demonstrated how "live steel" resonates. Another area provided fencing lessons. A man dressed as a druid (I knew he wasn't a real druid since he wore a fancy modern watch) wove stories about colored stones and taught children about hardness of stones and the effects of weather on their shape. A medicine man with many tools lectured and took questions about medical techniques in the past. There were many private parties. Many festival attendees were costumed, a refreshing change from most other festivals. There were staged battles. And there were many musicians: pipers, bagpipers, and players of other Celtic and Scottish. I managed to get pictures of some of aforementioned activities; check them out!

    The only question I was left with was the relationship between the Celtic and the Scots over time. There were competing crafts booths of different ethnicities adjacent; the possible animosity between the businessmen made me wonder if a conflict went further back.

    On the way out I stopped by the farm's museum, located in a restored railroad car. It had a number of interesting signs describing the history of the farm and railroad, covering the obsolescence of the railroad during the narrow gauge-standard gauge wars, and the skirmishes between the farms and the railroad barons. The latter made me add "The Octopus" by Frank Norris (freely available online), a novel on that subject written at that time, to my list of books to read.

    Japantown Cherry Blossom Festival (San Francisco)

    On Sunday, April 23rd 2006, I was heading to the Kabuki Theater in San Francisco for yet another of many movies I've seen at the 2006 San Francisco International Film Festival. While attempting to park (which was harder than usual), I noticed some nearby streets were closed. I wondered what was going on. And after the movie, I had lots of free time and decided to find out.

    Finding out what was going on wasn't hard: when I left the theater I found the streets packed with people. I walked up the street and discovered japantown and a parade! I'd only driven by before (in the distant past) and had forgotten japantown was here. And it turned out to be the last day -the culmination if you will- of the Northern California Cherry Blossom Festival.

    I stood watching the parade for a while. It had some neat novelties such as a group that played taiko, moved their drums 100 feet, played more, and so on. (I like taiko.) Perhaps the more striking sight was that of dozens of men carrying a shrine -yes, a small building- down the street. It was a large shrine, probably over ten feet tall, and a few men in monk garb hung off the top of the tower. Apparently this type of portable shrine is called a mikoshi and it is intended to be carried down the street by on the order of a hundred people. Superstition, according to the brochure about the festival that I procured, dictates that the more the shrine weaves from side to side, the more blessings will be bestowed on the people.

    It was nearly three pm and, having not yet eaten lunch, I was hungry. Hence, during slow times in the parade, I wandered through the packed japantown mall, hunting for tempting looking and sounding food in a place that would serve me promptly and with a menu in English. Sadly, every place I found in the japantown mall failed on one of these criteria. Very many people were still eating. I would've been happy to eat at some food booth from the festival, but I didn't see any through the crowds, nor did my brochure tell where me they were.

    After watching a bit more of the parade, I wandered up the street, passed the end of the parade, and found some less crowded establishments that opened to the street (not part of the mall).

    I choose according to what I was in the mood for: New Korea Restaurant. There were a lot of Korean restaurants in japantown, so choosing Korean didn't seen too risky or odd. I had my standard test of a Korean restaurant: bim bim bap, which in this case had good quality meat. Sadly the dish was only okay because there was too much meat and other juices at the bottom of the bowl -- everything ended up soggy! As for the sides, I'm impressed they gave me (a solo diner) the full assortment of kim chi and was happy they did; the kim chi was quite good. I really like the kim chi that I think is made from fish cakes (at virtually every Korean place that serves it) and would love to make it for myself, but it's virtually impossible to find good pictures and descriptions -let alone recipes- for the hundreds of different kinds of kim chi that exist.

    Re-energized, I emerged to explore more of the festival and japantown as a whole.

    The best exhibit at the festival was the bonsai display. This exhibit truly made me regret not having my camera. (This was serious regret! It wasn't simply, oh, I wish I had my camera.) The bonsai were like tiny manifestations of nature. Each was amazingly evocative of some pure aspect of the beauty of nature, whether a single tree that captured the feeling of a whole forest, or growths that suggested glades, millennium old trees, windswept shores, barren mountaintops, autumn, etc. I found one that clearly said to me "sunny lazy spring day spent fishing by a pond." Another reminded me perfectly of the violence and need for urgent movement that occurred in the orc chase scene in the lord of the rings movie. A third, of two intertwined junipers of two different colors, spoke about race and the need for others that are different than oneself.

    It's stunning these bonsai growths take generations of care and tuning to achieve the majesty they do. Most were labeled as being transferred to their containers between twenty and seventy years ago! Such patience the care-givers must have.

    Incidentally, suiseki is an analogous term for bonsai that applies to stones that suggest aspect of nature, like mountains and lakes.

    I discovered there is a bonsai garden nearby in Oakland that I would like to visit.

    The festival also had a number of other exhibits, only some of which were on display this day. I saw:
    * Japanese swords and helmets.
    * Origami. Lots of dragons. And even a few starships.
    * Paper dolls. Paper can look amazingly like fabric. Some, like one of a jumping samurai, do an impressive job of capturing the feeling of motion. Another was a cute old man. All demonstrated that paper, in contrast to origami, can be used to make constructions that flow, that omit all the regularity of edges and folds one expects of paper.

    After all the exhibits, I wandered down the japantown mall, briefly contemplated the japantown tower, watched some of the anime costume competition, and then tried to see the art booths, but gave up because they were so crowded walking in that area was frustratingly slow and difficult.

    I then spotted some other booth; these turned out to be the food booths. They were closing up -it was almost five pm- and I was full so I didn't have anything, but it looked like they had a nice selection of Japanese street food I've never seen before, including yakisoba (a Japanese-inspired version of chow mein), imagawa yaki (pancake with sweet bean filling paste inside), and takoyaki (octopus doughnut holes). They also had less exotic Japanese-type food, like teriyaki burgers, lumpia (Filipino fried egg rolls), soba noodles, Japanese beer, and sake. It's too bad I missed eating there, but even if I knew where those booths were I wouldn't have been able to cross the parade to get to them when I was hungry.

    To end the day and kill some time before seeing yet another festival movie in the Kabuki, I explored more of the japantown mall. I spent a lot of time watching the performance food preparation occurring in Benihana. Each three-sided table surrounded a large flat grilling/frying area. A chef prepares the food for the table in front of the diners. With amazing dexterity and speed, he de-shells shrimp, chops fish while it's cooking, chops, tosses, and distributes steak and mushrooms, and cooks onions and makes onion volcanoes. (Directions: chop them, remove some of the insides, and make a little tower of each half. When one pours a little oil in the top, it starts steaming and sputtering.) Some chefs even toss their knife in the air and catch it. It's all part of the show, and brought me and a large crowd staring in from outside the window.

    After seeing a few performances, I wandered away and found another performance cooking place: Sophie's Crepes. There one can watch crepes being cooked, filled, folded, wrapped, and served. Also quite neat.

    These cooking demonstrations were a nice way to end a food-heavy weekend. After all, the previous day I'd taken a French cooking class, and the day before I'd seen an excellent movie called Eden (also at the film festival) about a love triangle that involves a chef, and showing how food can open up the heart.

    Interesting Articles: May 30th-June 5th 2006

    * Legal Debate: Assumptions on medical malpractice called into question (Science News). Politicians talk at times about putting limits on medical malpractice claims. It seems these limitations are likely inappropriate and actually unnecessary.
    * Sharing the Health: Cells from unusual mice make others cancerfree (Science News). A better title for this article might be: Scientists Discover Mighty Mouse! And Mighty Mouse's cancer-fighting abilities are hereditary.