Finches and Pizza

Over a couple week period I had two separate people (other than my wife who has said it for years) tell me that a Hawaiian pizza is blasphemous and sacrilegious, which as a member of the Hawaiian pizza faith I was rather insulted.  Now one of these people was from Napoli and as such has some authority on the subject.  So as you can imagine this lead to a heated exchange.

However, I have since realized that pizza is just a good example of a phenomenon that we have observed in other foods.  Pizza adapts to its region.  When I lived in Grenoble the pizza was more Italian style, but with potato on it.  While you can only presume that the Hawaiian pizza is the result of pizza arriving in a land obsessed with pineapple and spam (I assumed the ham came from when the Hawaiian pizza came back to the continental US and us not liking spam).  Of course, I can't explain Chicago deep dish pizza or explain (defend) stuffed crust, but evolution is like that sometimes.  So just like finches evolving pizza evolves too.  And just like finches pizza kept the original name (lets call it a Genus or Family name).   Of course, this principle applies to all kinds of foods and not just pizza.

One of the things that my wife and I have come to enjoy about traveling so much is going to an "ethnic" cuisine restaurant in different countries and noticing the differences.   The two most common cuisines were Sushi and Chinese.   What is interesting about Japanese cuisine is that in two cheese countries (France and Holland) they have found a way to include cheese into the notoriously lactose intolerant Japanese cuisine (cheese and meat skewers).   And while we were in France we tried to find egg drop soup and were unable to do so.  In fact, when we talked to the cook at a Chinese restaurant he made something for us that we were fairly sure was the origin of American egg drop soup.  So both are strong examples food evolution.


In fact my wife and I have been living this theory.  While we were in France and then Holland we (really she) made French and Dutch style enchiladas.  In fact when you include Real enchiladas (from New Mexico), Mexican enchiladas, TexMex enchiladas, and the Greek enchiladas my wife is experimenting with and we are well on our way to a full enchilada cook book.  Therefore, you can do Evolutionary genetics of enchiladas just from us (if our theoretical book ever becomes famous).

So the next time you call food blasphemous remember that it is just a difference species of the genus pizza or sushi.

neutrinos and graphene

So I just wanted to post something that I thought was very interesting.  As a physicist I have seen a lot and gotten a lot of questions about neutrino's traveling faster than the speed of light.  Though I have not read the paper my response as a theoretical physicist was about the same as when I read an experimental paper in my own field that is exciting:  Hey - that would be cool (in this case ground breaking) if it pans out, and then I proceed to wait for the next paper (or three) to confirm it one way or another.  Because one of the key things that little Scientists (cough- undergrads/gradstudent) learn as they grow up is that science is a process of discovery, check, re-check, confirmation, and validation.  So if a single paper stands out it must be proven by others before we are confident in it. 

This is the case of the recent Nobel prize winners who discovered graphene using scotch tape.  Everyone was amazed (for nearly 60 years graphene had been proposed to possibly exist (and be heavily studied experimentally) but no-one could create it or any other purely 2-D materials), but they didn't win the Nobel prize until graphene could be recreated by other groups with the same and other methods.  And now graphene is one of the most exciting materials that people can study.  Going further on a tangent - I just want to say to those who say Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov and got their Nobel Prize early, that graphene only has potential but hasn't been proven to be as important as everything thinks it will be:  They proved  2-D structures can exist after 60 years of debate about the subject USING SCOTCH TAPE!!!!

But anyways getting back to the neutrinos going faster than light.  Some theory (some versions of string theory leave the possibility open) and experiment already exist (according to the blog I am going to link to below) but they are a little contradictory and also the experiment was for a different "flavour" of neutrino.  So this is all a big build up to link to a friends blog who read the paper and gave a nice analysis of why Scientists look for confirmation from other sources before they believe new break discoveries.  So I suggest that you go look at Miss Atomic Bomb's post.