Have a meal with families with infants these days, and you might get the impression that the planet is full of dietary allergens.

Dads and mums have been taught to winnow away culprits like egg whites, citrus, peanuts, berries and beef from the babies' menu. But be not beguiled. If such conventional wisdom or long-held dogma is a reliable guide - which, of course, it often is not - the food allergy rate should have been declining.

So it goes. There's no perfectly neat

"Gee, what's that sound?" An elephant turns his head and finds his best friend Piggie doing cartwheel. Who wouldn't read on to find out what will catapult Piggie into the elephant's life?

Piggie says, "What do you want to do today?"

"I want - aaa."

"Yes?"

"aaaaaa"

"A what?" Piggie is flummoxed. And we too.

"aaaaaaaa!!"

By then, our brain is wired to sniff out what

R.A. Fisher's null hypothesis significance test transformed his field as few statisticians ever do. It goes like this. We run an experiment and assign half of subjects (like flipping a coin) to a wonder drug and another half to get a placebo. If we somehow show good results with our proposed drug, we have to prove that there's only one chance in twenty of getting results this good.

One out of twenty. Enter those numbers into calculator and we see that equals 0.0

Imagine taking a class in integral calculus, frustrated and puzzled. A long exhale. "What the heck is the point of studying mathematics?"

That's what Jordan Ellenberg is showing in his book How Not to Be Wrong .

Right now, I'm learning from this professor of mathematics why mathematics is the extension of common sense by other means. Soon after borrowing his book from the public library, I found mathematics everywhere.

It happened to be the numeracy week in my daughter's school; there were

I was told stage version of any book won't be as attractive as the original book. That's the rule, everyone says so.

It would be natural for me to read Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl , without bothering to watch the film version.

True wit, however, exists onstage, and Toby Mitchell's drama version of the picture book The Snail and the Whale changes the way I look at adaptations. For those of you who haven't read the book version, that's

Ask parents how their children act (or react) in different situations, and chances are good that mums and dads make wrong guess half of the time. Just don't pretend you know more about your kids than you do, because you don't.

During the festive lunch last Sunday, I entertained my friend's daughter by making a few drawings. It turned out that I had chosen an unfinished page of my daughter's sketch book. By the time I realised my mistake, I had nearly

I worked overnight in hospital this New Year's Eve, and didn't have time to make any resolution.

That's supposed to be the ideal time of setting goals. After 365 days, it's time to take stock of any gain (in terms of waist circumference) and loss (think the time with Facebook).Let me be honest. I am not used to make new year's resolution. I don't think there is science with this tradition.

Except now

Sure, many of you flew out of town to celebrate the Christmas. We didn't.

Last night, we slept in a waterproof tent at a country park campsite. That's our holiday idea. Oh, and I should mention that our idea of wild camping started with two families, and ended up with the third family joining us impromptu. With that, the fun more than triples.

Call me a fox who doesn't need sour grapes, or just plain jealous, but I do think that

It should come as no surprise that the most common introductory sentences in doctors' commentary are about the age. These opening remarks appear every now and then in the morning round: "This is a 75-year-old man who came in with a fever."

That's the way medical students have been taught to describe a patient, I know.

The at-a-glance knowledge of a patient's age is so important (universal, I might add) that nobody dares to skip it

Jasmine turned five yesterday.

How do you know when your kid is five? That's the question I put up in the Facebook on my daughter's birthday.

What's so eerie about this question is that I don't quite know how to answer it.

Many parents have trouble with telling how five-year-olds should be different from those below five - some kids, too. I have no problem with the grey zone. What's wrong, I believe, is to prescribe the