Ray Mears's Wild Food

Me and my daughter have just watched the second episode of "Ray Mears's Wild Food" on BBC2.  In it Ray Mears and Gordon Hillman (of University College London) travel around the coast of Britain investigating the sources of food that would have been available to our mesolithic hunter-gatherer ancestors. They dig up the roots of sea kale, pick rock samphire, skin eels, gather limpets, and coax razor shells out of their burrows.  And in the hour-long program they actually have enough time to go to some depth on how these foods would have been collected and prepared. All done in a non-sensational, non-dumbed-down manner.

In the first episode, last week, Mears and Hillman were in Australia finding out how the Australian Aborigines, among the last remaining hunter-gathers, went about collecting and preparing their food.  That was just as good as the latest program.  There are three more programs to go and I will be making sure I see each one of them.  They are being shown on Wednesday evenings and repeated on Sunday evenings.  Clips from the first two programs are available at the program's website.

This confirms my impression that, of all the sciences, archaeology is currently the best served by British television.

Bad Science of 2006

Over at Bad Science, Ben Goldacre has a summary of the 'best' Bad Science stories of the last year.  How many of these did you fall for?  I think this could be the basis of a rather nice end-of-the-year radio or television quiz program.

Hinchliffe's Rule

Via Ned Wright and Joe Polchinski, Hinchliffe's Rule for interpreting the titles of scientific papers:

If the title is a question, the answer is 'no'.

This reminds me of a 'principle' I myself formulated a few years ago:

The truth of a sentence is invariant under the substitution of 'not' for all occurrences of 'arguably'.

While it is fairly easy to construct sentences which violate this 'principle', these do not seem to occur in practice.

Hinchliffe's Rule currently has a fairly small profile on Google and hasn't yet made it to Wikipedia, but it deserves to be better known. It has even spawned a self-referential spoof paper!

Two for the Price of One

Yesterday I was out shopping with my daughter and we got to discussing a price tag that said "Two for the Price of One".  She asked "What would it cost if you wanted 3?" and I explained that you could work it out by splitting the 3 into 2 + 1.  The "Two for One" would only apply to the 2, and you would have to pay the full price for the 1.  I then summed it up as "Half Price for Even Quantities".  Thinking about this now, a better way to sum it up would be as (p div 2) + (p mod 2), where p is the original price in pennies.

After the Fall: the Drip

A week ago we had a run of days in which the temperature stayed between 10C and 12C both day and night.  Now we have just had three days when it has been between -1C and +2C.  With very little wind, it has been foggy and the trees have been covered with a sort of icy dew which continually drips from them.  Some of the drops splash when they hit the ground, others bounce and roll around, like hailstones.  Spiders webs are covered in ice and water droplets.