New Agora

Want to read a "great parable about instrumentation, measurement, knowledge, and epistemology"? Then read Jon Udell's fascinating post about how we digest raw vs cooked food:

The energy that we humans take from our food has almost all been extracted by the time it reaches the end of the small intestine. But it has a long way to go yet. It must also pass through the large intestine, where dwell a myriad of gut flora. And they, Wrangham says, are hungry. If you eat a raw banana you only get some of its energy, and they get most of the remainder. If you eat a cooked banana, though, you get a lot more of its energy and leave less for them. The end result looks the same, but the internal distribution is quite different ...

What other profound errors of basic understanding arise from misplaced instrumentation? And what might we learn by making simple — and in retrospect obvious — adjustments?