#42 Fragano: I work in a lab that has emergency phones--you pick them up and they immediately connect to the local dispatch. No keypad or anything.
I was working in the lab once, and one of them rang. I thought it was possible that the local emergency folks were calling to alert us to something, so I picked it up. Robocall. I hadn't even known that the phone had a *number*.
Xopher 266/269: Synthesizing whole proteins on a bench top (as opposed to in an animal) in the way you're talking is a royal pain in the rear.
First, you have to add each individual amino acid in the right order, which involves washing the molecules after each step before adding the next amino acid group. A rough guesstimate is that your average antibody has about 1000 amino acids in it (~150,000 kDa protein, a high average of 150 Da/amino acid). A lot of that stuff is automated, but he facility I used to purchase peptides at, they charged 30$/aa for 10mg quantities (that is, you start with 10 mg of material. There's a good amount of loss after every step.) That gives a sense of the amount of work involved.
Second, having the chain doesn't mean that it folds correctly. There's an amazing amount of machinery in cells to make sure things fold right, and all the recognition ability of antibodies is dependent on the folding.
Even if you could get things to fold right, you'd need to figure out some protein shapes that would plausibly fit into the protein shapes the viruses present. That's wicked complex, computationally.
The way antibody synthesis usually happens (for biological purposes) is that you inject a useful piece of protein into an animal, pull some blood a few days later, and purify the antibody left over. But for recognition useful to humans, you'd need to raise the antibodies in people (any other species and our immune system would attack the antibodies before they did anything useful). And human products for humans are also fraught--not only ethically, but for the FDA, you also need to prove that there's no chance that the product contained any disease that could ever exist.
Nicole #68, that exact line was the one that got me. A black man that gives shoutouts to the working class is going to be my president. My mind is completely blown.
Funny, I just recently wrote about how I feel like our house has been nothing but making. Even my relatively-new job involves lots of tinkering, which satisfies the same part of my brain.
Somewhat new-to-me makings that still feel awkward include bento lunches (though even the ugly food usually tastes good) and more strenuous seamstress-ish work than rectangles and pants hemming, for costumes. And after about 7 years I finally have my guitar living with me again, so I can rediscover just how awkward I am at making music. Fun, though.
The Speech Accent Archive, which I found when trying to explain to a colleague who is a non-native English speaker about what non-Midwesterners sound like.
Also nice to get a little vocal slice of home if you've moved away.
I have a friend who's a Homosexual. I wonder if they're related? Maybe if the runner is one of the New Hampshire Homosexuals.
#36: I know quite a few non-drivers (none Famous Actors With Chauffeurs), but I think it's something you discover more often when you're a non-driver. We look just like everyone else, I swear.
I am, however, aware of all automotive traditions.
#45: That's another thing I was thinking to check, because I can't remember where the respective parts were located. But then, there's the counterargument: "God helped hold them up. And, er, engineers caused the Black Plague, while we're at it." /parody
#17 Michael Martin: Whoops, I meant the Tabernacle. It's not the existence of the technology so much as the scale of processing that'd need to be happening. I'll have to consult with my bible and the back of an envelope tonight when I get home, because it's been a while. But I remember my BS alarm going off when I was reading about the various large and/or structural pieces that were supposedly solid precious metal.
Ancient metalworkers were generally smart enough to make large objects from a very thin sheet of metal, either alone or covering something else, because there just wasn't that much of the stuff around, and because it's HEAVY. (this guy is 6 inches tall according to the Met website, solid gold, and about as big a solid piece as you'll see. And that's Egypt, which had way more resources to exploit. And then I'm remembering some details of, but not the key Googleable words for, that huge stash of gold objects archaeologists found in Russia. I recall being struck by their delicacy--they covered a huge surface area but were incredibly thin.)
I'd be much more likely to buy that things were carved of stone or wood and coated with a thin hammered sheet or foil of those metals, which would be just as dazzling to behold, while requiring less than 1/1000 the resources. From there it's easy to exaggerate and write down that things were solid metal. Biblical literalists would have the same problem with that as with the earth taking more than 7 days to create, though.
I'd vote for genuine, or as Xopher says, a hoax, not a parody, because of the total lack of winking.
Does anyone know if that weird anti-Semitism argument a common one among ID people? Because that was the point at which I started boggling.
Reading this stuff is hard--on one hand, with the ink-is-still-wet "Dr." I can now put at the beginning of my name, I feel like I should put that official-sounding title to good use by helping my fellow scientists deal with this junk (particularly as there is a dearth of religion vs. reason type arguments out there about materials science*, so I don't get kept busy with arguments in my own field.) On the other hand, what's the point of trying to educate willful ignorance with an open heart? Even dipping my toe in Creationist arguments just frustrates me too much to even respond.
*Maybe I should start one. Hmm. Implausibility of available technology being able to build the Ark of the Covenant as literally described?
#494 Serge
You could have changed it to Bacon, I guess.
That would have raised even more eyebrows, between the Jewish side of the family and our vegetarianism. :)
Another aspect is that both our last names are unusual enough that almost anyone with them in the US is our family, so we're particularly fond of them, and can calculate the chances of their dying out.
The plan for any theoretical kids is for a female to get my last name and a male to get his. I like the second-middle name idea being floated here, though.
Serge 483: Back when my husband and I were talking about how our family naming would work, before we got married, we considered doing something of that type.
Until we put our names together and "Porker" came out.
(We both kept our names as-is, because we like them that way. When we mentioned this at a family gathering, a relative of my husband's declared loudly "Well, I guess THAT marriage isn't going to last very long!" Grr.)
Rt. 96 is the road I'll be taking to my new home in a little under two months. Not the 96 in California, though.
Re: Sleeping beauty: There's also the walking wheel (also known as a great wheel). Predates the flyer mechanism on what now gets thought of as a "traditional wheel", has a great pointy thing that I'd undoubtedly stick myself with if I had one.
Okay, so it's been nearly 7 months since I watched this. I'd never heard "Apache" before or since.
This afternoon I was in a cafe buying a muffin and Apache came on--different version, of course, but I had to stifle the insta-giggles. Had a smile on my face all the way home.
*That* is the power of this video.
#26 Keith:
You might have ended up with that mental-imagery combination even without having seen the trailer. I read the books a few years ago and was flipping back and forth between Ann and Nicole in my mind; that one bit of casting alone got me really excited about the movie.
I think it's the descriptions of Mrs. Coulter which add up to, roughly "this person *should* be beautiful, according to society's standards, but is terrifically creepy anyhow" that does it.
"Can anything else besides mentos be used to make soda erupt?"
My little sisters got their soda to bubble over at my wedding using Jordan almonds. If I'd seen the mentos thing at the time I would have grabbed a bottle of soda from the bar and run outside with the kids.
Xopher: I'll start with the scary stuff (not so scary). Here is the MSDS for one of the components, the other one is here(pdf). What they boil down to for me is: wear gloves, and do it while the weather's still nice so you can open the windows.
Now that that's out of the way, I think that sounds like a really excellent idea. The polyurethane itself, so long as you mix the components thoroughly, is quite safe. Depending on the ratios, you can end up with a very stiff but bubble-filled material, or one that's pretty much identical to the yellowish blocks of stuff you see if you cut open a couch. It wouldn't be hard to cut away any excess that oozed out, the harder stuff is still quite crumbly when you thwack at it.
The reaction usually takes 1-2 minutes to get going after mixing, and once it does it expands for about a minute and is completely cured in, oh, less than 10 minutes, certainly. Probably more like 5. You wouldn't be able to make a huge batch all at once, but the mixture is thick enough--somewhere between cheap maple syrup and molasses--that it would stay pretty well put.
After I wrote all this I found this place that sells the stuff for sealing cracks in boats for less than the lab demo place, so I guess this isn't a new idea. But at least we know it'll definitely work!
"Alcohol and sugar are very bad in hot weather"
The root beer float I had when it was 95 and humid here last week agrees with you. Fortunately there was a well-cooled public space with lots of drinking water nearby, because I could tell I was one step from official Disorientation, which for me is the feeling that I'm observing myself doing whatever I'm doing.
Be careful, all.
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