al-mofhariz

Let's make it a good one.

Loyal AmericanScience reader Anna Zeide wonders about Thanksgiving in a post-can world over at the Food Studies section of Grist. Check it out . For those of you who teach some environmental history or history of technology alongside history of science, I can vouch for "The Miracle of the Can" as a great tool to generate discussion right around Thanksgiving. Seasons be damned! For more Thanksgiving scholarly fun, see Neil Prendergast's recent Environmental History article on " Raising the Thanksgiving Turkey ." Talking Turkey the Somewhat-Old-Fashioned Way... And a final tid-bit, from the department of applied science: Butterball University !

It has little to do with America directly, but I am fascinated by the New York Times ' coverage of India's new nation-wise statistical and biometric registry: "Aadhaar"---which translates, in an Asimovian twist, to "foundation." The project aims to assign a 12-digit ID to every Indian---that's 1.2 billion IDs---and link those IDs to names, fingerprints, and iris-scans. As Lydia Polgreen, the Times reporter, notes: "It is a project of epic proportions." It also promises to make the Indian government into the world's most important aggregator of biometric data, surpassing the US-Visit program by an order of magnitude. Nandan M. Nilekani, the former chairman of Infosys and Aadhaar's head, explained the necessity of the system in terms that made it sound like a natural governmental activity: "What we are creating is as important as a road." It is, in other words, a kind of infrastructure: statistical infrastructure. That's a...