Global Review Explains the Mysteries of the Universe

...with the use of our favorite crystal ball: Wikipedia. Have you ever wondered what "extra virgin" means on olive oil? Or who invented paintball? Well, you could go look it up on the wiki, but Global Review beat you to it.

Extra Virgin Olive Oil. In countries belonging to the International Olive Oil Council, the following standards apply:

• Extra-virgin olive oil comes from the first pressing of the olives, contains no more than 0.8% acidity, and is judged to have a superior taste. There can be no refined oil in extra-virgin olive oil.
• Virgin olive oil has an acidity less than 2%, and judged to have a good taste. There can be no refined oil in virgin olive oil.
• Olive oil is a blend of virgin oil and refined virgin oil, containing at most 1% acidity. It commonly lacks a strong flavor.
• Olive-pomace oil is a blend of refined pomace olive oil and possibly some virgin oil. It is fit for consumption, but it may not be called olive oil. Olive-pomace oil is rarely found in a grocery store; it is often used for certain kinds of cooking in restaurants.
• Lampante oil is olive oil not used for consumption; lampante comes from olive oil's ancient use as fuel in oil-burning lamps. Lampante oil is mostly used in the industrial market.

Good to know.

Chemical Wedding. If you use the words "chemical wedding" in a sentence, you certainly sound sagacious and cultured, even mystical. But what do you mean? The phrase is derived from the Rosicrucian manifesto, Chymische Hochzeit Christiani Rosencreutz (the Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz), which is an allegory for alchemy. As C.S. Lewis writes in The Abolition of Man, "The serious magical endeavor and the serious scientific endeavor are twins: one was sickly and died, the other was strong and throve". Both owe their birth not to medieval superstition but to renaissance alchemy. So you can use the phrase "chemical wedding" to deride dogmatic empiricists and scientific utopians; e.g. "Cloning's children are born from the chemical wedding of hubristic scientists and complicit nationalists."

Aside: will your olive oil lose its extra virginity if it has a chemical wedding?

Paintball. Straight from the wiki:

The first paintballs were created by the Nelson Paint Company in the 1950s for forestry service use in marking trees from a distance, and were also used by cattlemen to mark cows.[2] Two decades later, paintballs were used in a survival game between two friends in the woods of Henniker, New Hampshire, and paintball as a sport was born. In 1976, Josef Venable, a stock trader, Bob Gurnsey, and his friend Charles Gaines, a writer, were walking home and chatting about Gaines' recent trip to Africa and his experiences hunting buffalo. Eager to recreate the adrenaline rush that came with the thrill of the hunt, and inspired by Richard Connell's The Most Dangerous Game, the two friends came up with the idea to create a game where they could stalk and hunt each other.[3]

Knowledge is a matter of comparison, not of value.

Feminist Economics. Hat tip to Harry on this one. A few economics departments proudly proclaim that they research "feminist economics". Is that the study of the production and distribution of scarce shoes? Surprisingly not. The wiki:

Feminist economics broadly refers to a developing branch of economics that applies feminist insights and critiques to economics. Research under this heading is often interdisciplinary, critical, or heterodox. It encompasses debates about the relationship between feminism and economics on many levels: from applying mainstream economic methods to under-researched "women's" areas, to questioning how mainstream economics values the reproductive sector, to deeply philosophical critiques of economic epistemology and methodology.

Deeply philosophical, eh? The article goes on to detail that feminist economics abandons the neutrality of modern economics, and takes a "specific moral position" on economic issues. That is to say, feminist economists complain that women are unappreciated.

The most useful contribution of feminist economists may be some work on measuring informal-sector GDP. Women working in the informal sector, it is true, create a great deal of unmeasured value. The same, I fear, cannot be said for these economists. More fairly: feminist economics is an approach to economic issues under the rubric of feminism, not an approach to women's issues under the rigor of economics.