Sushi, Ice Cream and The Fourth Dimension
We had dinner last night with two of my cousins, a freshman in high school and a NYU student. Dinner was sushi from the western burbs' finest Japanese restaurant, Yokohama, and ice cream at my first employer - Baskin Robbins. As we caught up over sushi and later ice cream, we had one of the more interesting dinner discussions I've had in a long time. As it turns out, completely independent of one another, my cousins share a recent intellectual pursuit: the fourth dimension.
If you're shaking your head you're having the same reaction I did when the discussion first came up. As they articulated their thoughts on tesseracts, dimensional folding and Carl Sagan I found myself more and more interested. Despite the fact that the concepts they were describing were "out there," each used logical and informed descriptions to teach my wife and I. Little is known about the fourth dimension, but it involves logic gathered from the relationship between the third dimension (the one in which we live) and the second dimension (often referred to by scientists and mathematicians as "Flatland").
The basic logic is that in the third dimension objects have shadows which are 2D. The theories suggest that an object in the fourth dimension would cast shadows which are 3D. Shadows are cast in a dimension below the one in which the observer exists. Because we have no way of knowing what something looks like in 4D, the furthest that scientists have come is to show what the shadow of a 4D object would look like. It gets more and more complicated, but some of the videos below really do a good job of explaining the fourth dimension in a way that sort of makes sense. No doubt it's heavy, purely conceptual thought - but it's fascinating.
Carl Sagan Fourth Dimension Explanation
Fourth Spatial Dimension 101
Re-thinking dinner…
We had some average sushi from Zen for dinner tonight. At least I thought we did.
From Wired.com:
Sushi DNA Tests Reveal Fraud
A biologist walks into a sushi bar and orders some tuna. What does he get? Escolar, a nasty fish with buttery flesh that can cause bizarre episodes of diarrhea, accompanied by a waxy intestinal discharge.
It’s not a joke. It happened five times to the same scientists during a brief research project. The results of that study were published Wednesday in PLOS One.
“A piece of tuna sushi has the potential to be an endangered species, a fraud or a health hazard,” wrote the authors. “All three of these cases were uncovered in this study.”
The team of researchers from Columbia University and the American Museum of Natural History ordered tuna from 31 sushi restaurants and then used genetic tests to determine the species of fishes in those dishes. More than half of those eateries misrepresented, or couldn’t clarify the type of fish they were mongering. Several were selling endangered southern bluefin tuna.
Although their results were shocking, exposing sloppy sushi joints wasn’t their main goal. The scientists were trying to improve on a new species-identification technique, called DNA barcoding. A coalition of labs has been collecting fish, reading their genes and uploading the information to a database called FISH-BOL.
Their goal is to build a catalog of every fish species on earth so that anyone with a handheld DNA reader could definitively identify fish within minutes. Wildlife officials could use that technology to spot-check fish markets, and fine people who are selling protected species.
Right now, the FISH-BOL database is roughly 20 percent complete, but zooligsts can’t seem to agree upon the best way to condense the genetic information from each fish into a concise signature. That’s where this study comes into play. By checking 14 carefully selected spots on a gene called cox1 and matching them up with the database, the scientists could accurately identify any kind of tuna.
