2  Introduction

There’s something you want to understand, probably about yourself, maybe something health- or wellness-related, but it might be something about the world around you. The point is that it’s a question of deep interest to you, though unlikely in its current form to be of enough interest to involve professionals. You’d like to apply the principles of science — hypothesis, experiment, analysis — but you don’t know enough of the mechanics to get started.

In other words, like a hungry person in a kitchen full of ingredients, you need a cookbook of recipes that can explain in a step-by-step, repeatable manner, how to go from the raw data around you to some fully-baked insights. That’s the purpose of the Personal Science Cookbook. Each “recipe” is short and self-contained. Some are more complex than others, but none require any tools or knowledge beyond what is explained in the book.