Scouts Out

No more Scouting:

Fraud Hunt

There will be fraud:

Egg Science

For those of you who can still afford them, this is how it's done:

The task was harder than it might seem, as many home cooks know. The yolk and the egg white, or albumen, have different chemical compositions, which call for different heating temperatures. Dr. Di Maio and his colleagues also welcomed the chance to one-up the Michelin-star chef Carlo Cracco, an egg evangelist who charges $52 for an egg yolk dish at his restaurant in Milan. The scientists devised a way of cooking an egg that requires no special culinary skill or fancy gadgets. It took about 300 eggs, though the researchers “didn’t eat all of them,” said Pellegrino Musto, a polymer expert at the National Research Council of Italy. The researchers said their method, published on Thursday, preserves the distinct textures of the egg as well as its nutritional value.

Cracking the egg code isn't easy...

Low Times

Drugs are actually bad for you:

On the West Coast, we didn’t just decriminalize hard drugs; we also ratified drug use as an acceptable lifestyle choice. One billboard, funded by the San Francisco city government, showed a group of healthy-looking young people partying and laughing. “Do it with friends,” the billboard advised. The aim is a worthy one, to destigmatize drug use in order to improve outreach and save lives, but the implication is that cool people have fun with drugs. Dwight Holton, executive director of Lines for Life, a Portland-based organization that aims to prevent addiction, draws an important distinction. “It’s not OK to stigmatize drug users,” he told me. “It is imperative to stigmatize drug use.”

Put the stigma where it belongs...

Blue Theatrics

It's all just for show:

Looking Good

Even they admit it:

Plastic Problems

Recycling hasn't helped with plastic:

The public’s falsely favorable perception of plastic recycling has been deliberately cultivated. Knowing consumers are increasingly concerned about the environmental impact of their purchase decisions, plastic manufacturers and product-packagers are quick to say a package is recyclable — failing to differentiate between plastics that are technically recyclable and those that are actually being recycled in practice. Three plastics — #1 PET, #2 HDPE and #5 PP —have been granted the designation of “widely recyclable” by How2Recycle, a consortium founded by Exxon Mobil and other plastics producers. However, only about 2.7% of #5 PP is being recycled today. Regardless, you may see “widely recyclable” printed on a yogurt tub that has a slim chance of being recycled. Environmentalists have cried foul, urging the EPA to take control of such designations to prevent consumers from being misled. However, governments get in on the deception too. Many cities, states and countries calculate their recycling rate based merely on what’s diverted from landfills — even if that plastic is incinerated or shipped off to another country where its fate is far from certain…more on that in a moment. Mythology surrounding plastic recycling is also reinforced by a decades-long stream of public service ads. While they ostensibly encourage recycling, critics say their real purpose is divert the public from challenging plastic’s domination of packaging, by cultivating a falsely rosy view of what recycling is accomplishing.

It's still plastics, Ben...