How many basic tastes are there? Most people list four: sweet, sour, salty and bitter. Those with a background in the chemosensory sciences usually add a fifth, umami. But why stop there? There is growing evidence that there are more—perhaps many more. The idea that there are four basic tastes goes back at least as far as ancient Greece, so if there are more than four basic tastes why haven't t...

Interest in Mediterranean diet began 30 years ago, when Ancel Keys published the results of the famous Seven Countries Study, Since 1945, almost 1.3 million people have come to Australia from Mediterranean countries as new settlers. There are 18 countries with coasts on the Mediterranean sea: Spain, southern France, Italy, Malta, Croatia, Bosnia, Albania, Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon,...

'How many species are there' is a question receiving more attention from biologists and reasons for this are suggested. Different methods of answering this question are examined and include: counting all species; extrapolations from known faunas and regions; extrapolations from samples; methods using ecological models; censusing taxonomists' views. Most of these methods indicate that global tot...

The commonsensical assumption that any language has only finitely many words is shown to be false by a combination of formal and empirical arguments. Zipf's Law and related formulas are investigated and a more complex model is offered.

We consider an revealed preference based method which will partition consumer microdata into an approximate minimal number of preference types such that the data are perfectly rationalisable by standard utility theory. This provides a simple, nonparametric and theory-driven way of investigating unobserved preference heterogeneity in empirical data, and easily extends to any choice model which h...