This is what’s on the front page of the Washington Post right now:

It’s totally crass to be complaining about this given that people died, but Oklahoma is not a Midwestern state!!! And you can argue about Missouri.

I’m a Midwestern girl born and bred. Since I moved away, it’s become pretty obvious to me that the vast majority of people in media have no clue about the Midwest. So here’s a lesson.

The term “Midwest” refers to the states that were part of the Old Northwest Territory. After the westward expansion took us past the Mississippi River, this area ceased being the Northwest of the country and people started calling it the Middle-West, or Midwest. The Old Northwest Territory included Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and part of Minnesota. These six states make up the Midwest.

Most of the states to the west of the Mississippi and east of the Rockies were acquired during the Louisiana Purchase. And most of those states are part of the Great Plains and are thus referred to as Plains States.

I can grudgingly accept Iowa and Missouri as Midwestern states even though they weren’t part of the Old Northwest Territory because they’re not far enough west to really be part of the Great Plains. This acceptance is particularly grudging in Missouri’s case because part of Missouri properly belongs to the South, which is a whole different can of worms, historically and culturally.

But Oklahoma is clearly a Plains State (if not, then it’s part of the South) and referring to it as part of the Midwest is…BAH!

Updated May 11 @ 8pm

The front page now says this:

Thank you, invisible hand of correct geography.

A rant.

Please, for my sake, stop using the phrase “scientific proof.”

Science is about probabilities, not proof.

Absolute proof, the determination that something must be true in every situation with no exceptions, is only possible if you can construct your own universe. You prove things in mathematics (which is the language of perfection and does let you define your own universe), but we cannot prove things in science because we are stuck with the highly noisy and imperfect universe that we were born into.

The phrase “scientific proof” is an oxymoron. You will never see an actual scientist use this phrase in scientific writing. I cross this phrase out every single time I see it in my undergrads’ papers. Using this phrase tells me immediately that you have not been trained in scientific reasoning and that your scientific commentary should be accompanied by a salt lick.

Science relies on statistics, and statistics are about probabilities. A lot of people seem to equate the phrase “statistically significant” with “proof” and…WRONG. Statistically significant just means that there is only a small chance that this particular experimental result is spurious.

We usually use a threshold (alpha value) of .05 in science. If your statistical test turns up a p-value of .05 , it is statistically significant. It means that there is a 5% chance that you could have gotten this size effect, or a bigger effect, through random chance. There is a 5% chance that this is a false positive. Five percent. One in twenty.

If p is smaller, than there is less of a chance that the finding is random, but p is never zero.

So for every 100 experiments that are statistically significant at a value of p = .05, that means 5 of those findings are likely spurious.

This is why replication and corroborating evidence are the hallmarks of good science. The more times you can successfully repeat an experiment (or related/similar experiments), the more likely that you are onto something real.

The kinds of things that have been accepted as scientific fact are things that have been replicated so many times, that have been corroborated in so many ways, that the odds that these things are happening randomly are extremely low.

And the corollary is also true: if people have tried to demonstrate something experimentally and failed repeatedly, the odds that they are hunting a phantom are extremely high. The “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” argument has been used to perpetrate many a nonexistent controversy, but this argument is only true within the bounds of formal logic (which is a branch of mathematics). In science, a series of failed studies (assuming said studies are well-designed and well-executed) is evidence that what you’re looking for just isn’t there.

End rant.

My favorite Chinese restaurant in Pittsburgh closed last summer and since then I’ve been without my Chinese watercress.

Chinese watercress, which is sometimes called on choy, is my favorite vegetable in the world. The Mandarin name for it literally translates to “empty-hearted vegetable”, a nod to its hollow stem. It’s sweet and tender and utterly delicious when blanched and then stir-fried with a bit of garlic. I could eat it every day.

But it’s a pain to cook at home. First, I’ve never been able to find it in any regular grocery store. You have to go to a specialty Asian market (and usually one that favors Chinese cuisine). The long, thin, and very numerous leaves are a nightmare to rinse. And even after you’ve picked off all the bad leaves and chopped off the woody, inedible parts the stem, you still have so much plant that you must cook it in batches. Which then wilts down into a tiny and not-very-satisfying plate.

Paying $12 for a big plate of this stuff is entirely worth it.

Since my favorite restaurant closed, I’ve been looking for another Chinese restaurant that both makes edible Chinese watercress and will deliver to my house. And last week, a random Chinese take-out menu showed up in my mailbox.

It had Chinese watercress on the menu.

I ordered from there today and…mmmmmm. China Palace, you may have one of the most generic restaurant names ever, but you have a repeat customer. Thank you.