The Consequence of Matters

  There's a new trend in cookbooks -- books that instruct you on how to cook without a recipe. First of all, there is a category error going on here. Instructions ARE recipes. So this is not so much cooking without a recipe as it is cooking with a vague, incomplete, annoying recipe. I learned during my time as a cognitive scientist that almost all human reasoning is what Darwin called "descent with modification." We reason by analogy with prior knowledge and experience, taking something from the past that sort of fits and adjusting it. And it isn't necessarily always personal experience. It just has to be relevant to the context of your current situation. The person I worked for at the time had even, as a graduate student, created an AI cooking program called JULIA that could create new recipes subject to current constraints. She taught computers to cook. So recipes are the starting point for learning. They are codified prior experience, waiting to be modified. They a...

  The term "vaccination" comes from variolae vaccinae, an old medical term for smallpox of the cow, or cowpox. It was coined by Edward Jenner in his paper Inquiry Into the Variolae Vaccinae Known as the Cow Pox. On this day in 1796, Jenner committed what would today be regarded as a crime against humanity -- he injected pus from a cowpox blister into James Phipps, the eight year old son of Jenner's gardener. Phipps caught a fever and some uneasiness but no full blown infection. Later, he injected the boy with smallpox pus. He showed no signs of infection. Jenner went on to test his technique on 23 other people. Contrary to myth, Jenner did not invent vaccination. He was just the first person to study it scientifically, and is therefore regarded as the founder of immunology. Jenner himself had been variolated, an early form of vaccination that had been imported into Britain by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in 1721. The idea was to insert or rub the skin with actual smallpox ma...