Waiter, There’s a Physicist in My Soup, Part 2
Last week, in Part 1 of our “Waiter, There’s a Physicist in My Soup!” podcast, we looked at the movement to bring more science into the kitchen, embodied by the efforts of physicist/chef/inventor Nathan Myhrvold and his forthcoming cookbook Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking. We also heard from Alice Waters, the champion of organic and slow food, who thinks we need to get back to basics, with less technology in our food.
In Part 2, we get out of the kitchen and take a broader look at the past, present and future of food science. Read More »
How Do You Value Your Time?
Minneapolis allows single-occupancy cars to use its HOV expressway lanes for a price, which is typically between $1.50 and $2.50 on I-35W during morning rush-hour between the airport and downtown. The price seems to be higher when traffic in the other lanes is heavier — the city is sensibly applying peak-load pricing. Read More »
I've Made a Huge Mistake
I cannot believe we posted a photo puzzler the other day about the pricing strategies at a banana stand and failed to acknowledge the most delicious fact about the situation: There’s always money in the banana stand! Read More »
Mike Leigh Knows Incentives
There’s a great little scene in Mike Leigh’s new-ish film Another Year, which like most Mike Leigh films, is wonderful and also rather depressing (or at least sobering). In this exchange, there’s a wife and husband named Gerri and Tom; they are late middle age, mid-middle class, extremely compatible with each another and have their heads screwed on as right as can be. Their friend Mary works with Gerri and is a sad sack, a deluded and downward-spiraling woman who’s desperate for approval and love and, well anything she can get her hands on. The excerpt from the screenplay, below, can hardly do justice to the excellent acting and direction, but it gives you a sense of what makes Leigh’s films so quietly electric. According to his Wikipedia page, Leigh has been in theater and film his whole life, but when it comes to incentives, he sure thinks like an economist. Read More »
and 
. If you haven’t seen it yet, the movie features Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, and was made by a dream team of documentary directors. Paste Magazine named it one of the 