I fell down the stairs so many times as a small child that my mother almost got used to the sound of my body bouncing its way down the stairs and the crying that followed. In her touching, personal memory of the late Stephen Jay Gould, photographer Jill Krementz recalls the time she was on the phone with Gould when she heard her baby daughter fall down the stairs. He waited patiently for her to return to the phone and comforted her with the information from the chapter in his book “Ever Since Darwin” that was about this very subject:

“If a child half your height falls down, its head will hit with not half but 1/32 the energy of yours in a similar fall. A child is protected more by its size than by a ‘soft’ head. In return, we are protected from the physical force of its tantrums, for the child can strike with, not half, but only 1/32 of the energy we can muster.”

This is likely something my mother realized as I picked myself up, time and time again, unhurt, save for the residual damage of tears drying my face, which she fixed with Pond’s Dry Skin Cream, and a lifelong fear of down escalators, which I haven’t yet found a fix for.

David Bowie is releasing a new album, titled Heathen, on June 11. The first single, Slow Burn, with Pete Townshend on guitar, is available for listening in Real Audio format. Bowie is headlining Moby’s Area2 Festival this summer along with a happy surprise: Blue Man Group.

The Natural Point trackIR follows a silver dot on your forehead so you can control your mouse cursor with your head. There’s a special version for gaming and software packages to provide assistive technology for people who can’t use a mouse or would like an ergonomic alternative.

Production of this year’s state quarters is down from previous years. 648 million Tennessee quarters were minted; compare that to others on the mintage chart. The 2002-P Ohio quarter has the lowest mintage for one mint, 217.2 million. There has not been as much demand for coinage with the economy downturn. Also, the Pennsylvania mint was closed for six weeks, while they should have been producing Ohio quarters, to fix some OSHA concerns. Louisiana is out, so I’m losing ground fast in my hunt.

Gilroy, California will probably hold the Garlic Capital of the World title for as long as it wants to claim it, but China is exporting garlic into the U.S. which sells at much lower prices than the local crop. Even with a 376% tariff, Chinese garlic is coming in cheaper and the produce is of equal quality; even the owner of Christopher Ranch says the cloves are “beautiful.” Some Chinese garlic makes it way past the tariff by being sent through another country such as Thailand. It is easy to claim a different country of origin and the higher the tariff, the more reason to get around it. “Trace mineral profiling” can be used to verify where the garlic was grown, but Customs can’t check all of it. I still have to get myself to the Garlic Festival one of these years. If local farmers are to be believed, I probably should not put it off too long.

Amazon has started a catalog and menu search which I’ve found to be very similar to Google’s catalog search. Actual printed catalogs and menus are scanned in and the text is searchable. I’m not finding the menu search very practical yet, since it is currently full of ritzy places, but I suppose that could change as more are added. It would be most useful to me if it had local takeout and pizza places, not expensive restaurants who already have their own websites. A friend mentioned that a personal scan and search mechanism would be very helpful to him. Then he could have all the pieces of paper that he has accumulated digitized and catalogued for search. He was willing to pay good bucks for this too. Perhaps a service could be created where customers used their own scanners and then sent or uploaded the results to an online service for character recognition and indexing for search. The customer could log in and search their own set of documents as needed. Anyone done this already? I’m writing up the patent right now.

This yummy Observer article about Britain’s new wave of upscale Indian restaurants has some interesting details on the evolution of Indian food in Britain. “More than 90 per cent of Indian restaurants in Britain are owned and run by Bangladeshis.” This, they claim, accounts for the homogeneity of Indian restaurant food. There are also details on the substitutions made for original ingredients. The new upscale places are trying to import the right raw materials, such as rock moss from Hyderabad, an essential ingredient for steaming up a true biryani. But the mainstream curry shops make do with jarred curry pastes and powdered food colorings. This formula is true for restaurants of all cuisines, though. High-class places use authentic ingredients. At the end of the article is a list of facts, the most disheartening for me being that chicken tikka masala, one of my favorites, was invented in the oh so Asian land of Glasgow. Ah well, bring on the chop suey and fortune cookies. Evolution is OK (and often more affordable). (via randomWalks)

While Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center (with acoustics designed by Artec Consultants) is designed with customizable acoustic panels and walls, the two concert halls in the Rome Auditorium were created for classical music. There is a third theater that can transform in size, but the acoustic engineers at Muller-BBM maintain that a more versatile space will sacrifice reverberation. So they made the compromise of designing the larger halls for symphony orchestras. However, “the largest hall exceeds the theoretical limit of a naturally acoustic hall.” They built a scale model to determine how sound would track inside it and are hoping that the curved ceiling will funnel the sound appropriately.

Jamie Oliver (aka “The Naked Chef”) has a regular column in The Times and the archives of his chatty writing are available. Use the dropdown menu to access recipe listings. Alton Brown is out on his book tour. Check the listings carefully; some of the city headings don’t match where the actual booksigning is (e.g. when did San Francisco move across the bay to Oakland?).

Mexico used to be a leading vanilla supplier, but the Mexican Revolution in 1910 and discovery of oil near where the crops grew put a halt to much of the industry. Then synthetic vanilla and Madagascar’s hefty vanilla crop created a price drop, prompting Mexican farmers to raise cattle or citrus and bananas instead. But prices have recently gone up after the cyclones of 2000 and political problems in Madagascar, so Mexico is aiming to ramp up production again, with the help of their already established orange trees which, fortuitously, provide excellent support for vanilla plants. They also hope to retain some of the workers who prefer to go to the U.S. for jobs. Caring for and harvesting the crop is labor intensive. Some clever marketing to the gourmet food crowd would help them gain an edge over Madagascar, Indonesia, and, also ramping up, Uganda.