Friday, July 20, 2007

I'll get your sushi - and footnotes, to boot!

Searching Snopes to see if Alton Brown's silly statement that sushi nori is not actually pressed seaweed but instead dried and pressed algae (yeah, right!), I found this, instead. Funny!

Don't forget to follow the links to the New York Times article!


2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Nitpick of sorts... seaweed is a form of algae.
So technically Alton is right, but needs to do more research or explain it better.

pc

July 21, 2007 6:56 AM  
Blogger butterflybutterfly said...

Per what was taught in school when I went, added to such as one can find in Dictionary.com (particularly the American Heritage Scientific and Cultural dictionaries refs), and even cross-referencing back and forth in Wikipedia. . .

Technically, nowadays, they don't know wtf they are calling/defining as algae, quite, except it's not the cyanobacteriae, the formerly-aka "blue-green algae."

There is a strong tendency to state that since kelp, aka seaweed, is a marine organism, that it cannot be a "plant" so must somehow be described and defined differently than that used to define "plants," aka, land organisms defined in way "A."

Much as Casey's nostrils, because he's a bird, not a mammal, "have" to be called ceres.

Silly, overall, since it does follow the maxim of "if it walks like a duck, it . . ." you know?

I rather follow the connections route, and nix the boxing and "cube-ing" traditionally found in academia.

Hence, Alton is still wrong.

And you are correct in that Alton needs to both do more research and explain it better.

Really, it's not hard to say that the current wave of scientists are trying to process new information they have, haven't yet done all the research necessary to better-classify the organisms in question, and that sometimes, things aren't quite what they seem at first glance. But then, perhaps he ought not to have dived into this one in the first place (by opening this can of worms, or his mouth, take your pick).

If we, his fans, love him because he's a techie, too, then he ought to respect that by being accurate - and expect us to rein him in when he's not. ;D

July 23, 2007 1:52 PM  

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