Non-Geo Sciences

Since today is National Pie Day, I thought I would list a few of my favorite cookbooks. In particular, the ones that have taught me to bake pie. The ones with science. My staple meringue pie recipe comes from The New Best Recipe. The Meyer lemon meringue pie I made from this recipe for Thanksgiving several years ago is what kicked off my love affair with meringue pies, and with meringue in general. But before I can tell you about this cookbook, I need to tell you about seismology. Seismologists set up simple computational models of the Earth in order to understand why seismograms look the…
It might be Labor Day, but summer isn't really over until the blackberries are gone. Since it's harvest season and I'm still on leave from the workforce, I've been spending my time figuring out clever things to do with the bountiful produce of my neighborhood's back alleys. (Tonight: lemon verbena drops and blackberry meringue pie.) Hoping to bring a little more order to the proceedings after a failed blackberry fish sauce, I cracked open Kitchen Mysteries: Revealing the Science of Cooking, written by one of the gurus of high tech haute cuisine, Hervé This. This explains with charming prose…