Nanograms.

Madison.

An interesting article in the New York Times this morning about the latest conflict between haute cuisine and food inspections. Though I haven't had the opportunity (read: time and, especially, money) to try anything cooked sous vide, I can understand the principles behind it to see how it'd be a definite improvement over some traditional cooking methods. But it does sound like heaven for Clostridium botulinum: warm, moist, and oxygen-free. According to the FDA, an infective dose of the bacterial toxin can be as little as a few nanograms. I can see where the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene might be concerned.

You have to love that name. It conjures up an image of an old skater shirt I remember from high school: a stick figure holding a string running in one ear and out the other, with the caption, "Mental Floss." It's as though two tangentially-related city departments were mashed together to save on office space.

Nanograms, though. Damn. I can't really conceive of an amount that small. Just the prefix nano- makes me think of measuring things on an atom-by-atom scale, of interesting but beyond-my-grasp science like quantum mechanics and string theory. It's neat to read about these things in the newspaper, but I'm probably well past any meaningful, practical understanding of them. I can only pretend to discuss them with people as clueless as me, as small talk at parties. Even with a concept like relativity, I'm more or less stuck at an Einstein's Dreams level of comprehension.