Bird’s Eye: Never having been able to taste faint hints of grapefruit, lavender, and tobacco in wines, it’s a pleasure to find out that the experts are faking it. A delightful New Yorker article starts off the debunking, followed by evidence that economists don’t know what’s going on, and that back surgeons are confusing coincidence and causation. And on a lighter note, the Nook folks kindle a fire under themselves.

* Does Wine from New Jersey Taste the Same as Wine from France?   The New Yorker

now, in an even more surprising turn of events, another American wine region has performed far better than expected in a blind tasting against the finest French châteaus. Ready for the punch line? The wines were from New Jersey.

The tasting was closely modelled on the 1976 event, featuring the same fancy Bordeaux vineyards, such as Château Mouton Rothschild and Château Haut-Brion. The Jersey entries included bottles from the Heritage Vineyards in Mullica Hill and Unionville Vineyards in Ringoes. The nine judges were French and American wine experts.

The Judgment of Princeton didn’t quite end with a Jersey victory—a French wine was on top in both the red and white categories—but, in terms of the reassurance for those with valuable wine collections, it might as well have. Clos des Mouches only narrowly beat out Unionville Single Vineyard and two other Jersey whites, while Château Mouton Rothschild and Haut-Brion topped Heritage’s BDX. The wines from New Jersey cost, on average, about five per cent as much as their French counterparts. And then there’s the inconsistency of the judges: the scores for that Mouton Rothschild, for instance, ranged from 11 to 19.5. On the excellent blog Marginal Revolution, the economist Tyler Cowen highlights the analysis of the Princeton professor Richard Quand, who found that almost of all the wines were “statistically undistinguishable” from each other. This suggests that, if the blind tasting were held again, a Jersey wine might very well win.

* Why Do We Take Economists So Seriously?  Suzanne Moore The Guardian

It’s the economists, stupid! While we were not waving but drowning in soggy flags, economic stuff was happening. Big stuff, though it could not break through the gooey queen-fest. In the news blackout that was the jubilee, other countries were reporting the meltdown of the Spanish banks, and thus, eventually, the euro. Obama was on the phone to Cameron telling him to do something about Merkel. It’s all pretty dire. It must be for me to understand it, for though I am not an economist, I know what I like. Some sort of stimulus, please. Fiscal will do nicely.

…Why all this panic, though? Aren’t economists in charge of it all? Yes. And this is the problem. These highly skilled people carry on, though they exhibit not only a lack of foresight but an astonishing lack of hindsight. Why on earth are they taken seriously when they keep getting things wrong? We are silenced by some jargon and bogus maths (sorry, probabilities) because we are mostly innumerate and because economic orthodoxy presents itself as a higher faith. 

* Why Science Is Failing Us  Wired Magazine

This hands-off approach to back pain … changed, however, with the introduction of magnetic resonance imaging in the late 1970s. These diagnostic machines use powerful magnets to generate stunningly detailed images of the body’s interior. Within a few years, the MRI machine became a crucial diagnostic tool.

The view afforded by MRI led to a new causal story: Back pain was the result of abnormalities in the spinal discs, those supple buffers between the vertebrae. The MRIs certainly supplied bleak evidence: Back pain was strongly correlated with seriously degenerated discs, which were in turn thought to cause inflammation of the local nerves. Consequently, doctors began administering epidurals to quiet the pain, and if it persisted they would surgically remove the damaged disc tissue.

But the vivid images were misleading. It turns out that disc abnormalities are typically not the cause of chronic back pain. The presence of such abnormalities is just as likely to be correlated with the absence of back problems, as a 1994 study published in The New England Journal of Medicine showed. The researchers imaged the spinal regions of 98 people with no back pain. The results were shocking: Two-thirds of normal patients exhibited “serious problems” like bulging or protruding tissue. In 38 percent of these patients, the MRI revealed multiple damaged discs. Nevertheless, none of these people were in pain. The study concluded that, in most cases, “the discovery of a bulge or protrusion on an MRI scan in a patient with low back pain may frequently be coincidental.”

* Nook Version Of War And Peace Turns The Word “Kindled” Into “Nookd” Ars Technica

In one of the truly bizarre incidents we’ve seen out of the e-book publishing world, a translation of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace for Barnes & Noble’s Nook platform has replaced all mentions of the word “kindled” with “Nookd.”