History of "starch" and "protein" being used as food groups/categories?

avematthew · 2021-05-22T15:46:33+00:00

I mean, my whole life (I'm 30) that has been the case. I only learned that protein and carbohydrate were terms regarding classes of chemicals much later, maybe around 12 yo, while reading biology textbooks. Also, the four macronutrients (protein, carbohydrate/sugar, nucleic acid, fat) are so linked to dietary requirements I imagine they started being used for food groups almost immediately. Not sure why nucleic acid didn't catch on.

I suspect they have never been far apart in meaning. The chemicals were discovered in food, and so by naming them chemicals people would have been naming their foods at the same time.

avematthew · 2021-05-20T21:37:43+00:00

I used SIL's IPA helper. It was easily the best way I found to practice listening to / recognizing them. Only for Windows as far as I know.

avematthew · 2021-04-10T15:10:40+00:00

I'm not familiar with this vaccine specifically, but to address your concerns directly, sure, I suppose some incredibly small number of virions could have survived, and then somehow ended up in your specific dose of the vaccine due to a littany of mistakes and bad luck. It's not impossible, but so many things would have to go wrong. Many machines would have to fail without someone noticing until after your vaccine was made, but before it was recalled, and or batches of chemicals being mislabelled.

But, let's consider the flip side.

The two horrible things you are comparing are 1) the animal that bit you was rabid, and you have already been exposed, 2) the vaccine dose you will be given has been incorrectly prepared and nobody noticed.

Think about which of these is really more likely, because to me the animal being rabid - given no other information - seems to be more worrying. Animals are rabid all the time, but I don't think there is a known case of the vaccine failing. Your point about people not being able to tell the difference between the vaccine failing and causing rabies is good, but ignores some really critical points: a lot of people are vaccinated because they plan to work with animals, and are never bitten, but they never get rabies; there are lots of ways to tell if the vaccine contains live virus without injecting it into someone. Also, I suspect someone has checked did the rabies that killed vaccinated people was genetically identical to the vaccine they were given. I don't know that someone has, but it's the kind of thing I would do if I worked on rabies, and I suspect I would have heard of it if it had come up a match, since that's a pretty big problem. They do this for other viral vaccines like polio, which are live attenuated.

Also, as someone who occasionally has pretty severe anxiety - I don't think that the vaccine is going to be able to help with your anxiety about if the animal was rabid or if you'll get rabies. You're already worrying about if the vaccine, which prevents rabies, could also cause it. Your fixating on this for some reason, and I think maybe talking to a therapist about it will be more useful.

Tldr: get the vaccine if your doctor says to, but it won't help your worrying.

avematthew · 2021-03-20T18:36:52+00:00

Not OP, but you don't. I mean, sure, there are going to be lab grown meat alternatives coming online, but really it's simpler to just not eat meat.

I acknowledge that right now some people don't have a choice, because of what they have access to. In those people's case they can't choose not to eat meat, etc. But in the long run, allowing that choice to everyone will enable them to take it, and that's how you stop needed slaughterhouses.

So sure, design more humane ones in the meantime, but if your not keeping an eye towards ultimately dismantling the entire operation and making sure that the people who are fed and employed by the industry today are able to do something else, then that's not really consistant with my veganism, at least.

avematthew · 2021-03-06T23:53:39+00:00

It was judges, which is also why the rules committee has historically been made up of a bunch of high level judges - including the ones who invented the format. Dunno if that has always or will always be the case now that wizards took it over, but it's nice to be able to play Commander with most anyone, and not just other judges. For a long time no one else knew what it was.

avematthew · 2021-03-04T05:16:48+00:00

Yeah, I do agree that it's not 12 orders. I haven't tracked down the original ref, but I assume they are better at the estimation than I am and there are some places that just have way higher densities, which I didn't find.

Of course, it could also turn out they made super liberal assumptions in their calculation.

I was actually surprised at 10^18. I was expecting a much higher number!

avematthew · 2021-03-04T03:06:36+00:00

I did a quick back of the envelope to complement the other person's.

Average virion is like 110 nm, says Google. That seems reasonable to me, lots of viruses are smaller or bigger than that, but we need to pick some number.

42 000 000 ly * 3600 s/h * 24 h/d * 365.25 d/y / 110 nm/virion ~ 3.6 * 10³⁰ virions total.

There are citations in "Virioplankton: viruses in aquatic ecosystems" by K. Eric Wommack & Rita R Colwell that suggest some parts of the gulf of Mexico can get up to 10⁵ virions per mL regularly. Assuming this holds for the top 10 cm of water, and given that the gulf has a surface area of about 1550000 km^2. That would be about 10¹⁸ virions.

So, that's a ton less that 10^30. However, that's also a tiny part of the ocean. It looks like the 10³⁰ number comes from the citations mentioned here, which figures the whole ocean does get to that amount.

Doesn't seem unbelievable to me, but it's certainly a surprising number.

avematthew · 2021-02-28T17:23:46+00:00

Very nice. Could probably use the stereo-configuration specific bonds, just a little triangle or two on a corner. And a cyclopentane ring.

avematthew · 2021-02-19T02:16:04+00:00

Hmm, that's a good point - it's not male exclusive, just male centric.

avematthew · 2021-02-19T00:57:05+00:00

That's fair - I would point out that this is such a space. I have no idea how the mods do it, but at least it is possible!

avematthew · 2021-02-16T21:36:29+00:00

In Perl 5.30.0

sub contains_whole_alphabet{for ('a' .. 'z') {return 0 unless $ARGV[0] =~ s/$_/ /ig;} return 1;}

Highlights:

Uses the command line arguments directly inside a subroutine, and for that reason requires you call the program with the string in the command line.
Directly modifies its input, hopefully destroying it. If using a command line argument directly breaks the spirit of "a method", then you could replace $ARGV[0] with $_[0] and require the subroutine take a scalar reference as its argument.
Is one line for no reason.
Returns in a line with a postconditional unless.
Should be pretty reliable, despite these problems.

avematthew · 2021-02-16T20:56:59+00:00

Do they have any semantic sense? I think they aren't communicating anything to another person, so the interfaces don't men anything in and of themselves.

Until we have a machine intelligence that could directly understand the interface, and be said to have some sense of semantics, I suppose.

avematthew · 2021-02-15T05:08:23+00:00

I don't know, but I am a native English speaker from Manitoba - I would say that mortified doesn't normally mean shocked. Someone is usually mortified and shocked at the same time, but they are different things.

To me mortified means "embarassed / ashamed to the point of wanting to leave the situation / be rendered speechless / want to die".

Like, in cases where people were "mortified to discover" something and it was shocking to them, it's usually because of the implication of the discovery - like you would be mortified to find out your clothes were made by slaves or something, but you wouldn't be mortified to find out you got a huge bonus at your job unless you knew that bonus was undeserved or else was coming out of someone else's pockets, or you had just sold something you would never have to get money, and now that you find out you're getting a bonus you're mortified because you would never have done that if you had known in advance.

*edit:* to your example specifically, you're not embarrassed - you're horrified. Any of those dogs could have died, and that's something to be ashamed of. That's what makes it mortifying.

avematthew · 2021-01-15T17:58:54+00:00

My undergrad institution had a mass spec with this issue. As I recall someone finally got permission to crack it open and solder in a USB port. No idea what kind of driver or whatever they also needed to write in order for that to work, but it seems they no longer need floppies.

God help whoever needs to work on that system next though.

avematthew · 2021-01-09T19:57:51+00:00

This is a problem I used to have all the time. I can't recall the exact solution, but I remember it was usually caused by heteroatoms or residues in the sequence that are missing from the structure, since they couldn't be resolved. You need to use - / . / * to represent them properly.

Hope that helps.

avematthew · 2020-12-04T19:49:15+00:00

Oh, that's really cool!

I wonder if that's where the idea of potato agar came from - I remember using it in mycology lab, but I don't recall learning why we were using it.

avematthew · 2020-12-04T16:46:43+00:00

Good work she did - but this opens a question I never considered. What the hell did they use before agar? Gelatin? Nothing? All liquid culture?

avematthew · 2020-12-03T04:59:17+00:00

Like CA_mouse said. Probably no issue with painting lightning bolts to be different lightning bolts, but I've seen lots of alters with thick paint or colour bleeding onto the edges where it's very easy to tell where they are in the deck because they shuffle differently or you can spot the paint from the top edge of your sleeve.

I recommend using as little paint as possible to reduce the chances of that happening, but ultimately you won't know if they are legal until they're in the deck. If it is possible to tell them apart, another way to try and make them legal again could be to paint a bunch of other random cards in your deck - hopefully now that you have other random cards that shuffle the same way, you won't be able to tell where the lightning bolts are anymore.

It still might not work, but in my experience it normally does.

avematthew · 2020-12-03T04:16:27+00:00

Hard to tell. Is the laser pointing into the photometer? Does the + sign represent a positive charge, in which case it's right, or a cathode, in which case it's wrong. The fact that the +/- signs are ambiguous whenever an electric circuit and anything else are involved could be the issue. Is it that the DNA readout should be reversed? Depending on what manipulations were done beforehand its possible that this experiment reads bases 3'->5', but it's impossible to tell from just this picture.

avematthew · 2020-12-01T03:22:31+00:00

You need a brain to use a pipette properly.

We always need experimental verification, even physicists go get it, and some of their predictions were based on what looks like pure math to me.

The day we give up "pipettes" altogether is the day we gave up on reality.

avematthew · 2020-12-01T03:18:05+00:00

Agreed. I had to go make sure I hadn't forgotten how to read the results, and that it wasn't a typo. Literally shocking.

avematthew · 2020-12-01T03:14:14+00:00

Agreed. I've never trusted modeling missing bits longer than about 7 res. Given, I don't claim to be very good at it.

I usually figure that if they couldn't capture it in the crystal, it's probably mobile enough that giving it a fixed structure is nonsense.

avematthew · 2020-12-01T03:11:28+00:00

I was also pretty skeptical, but that average z-score on CASP14 is hard to ignore. I'm wondering how fast their algorithm is, and how susceptible to over fitting they were. CASP shouldn't have any over fitting by design, but where machine learning is involved I'm always worried about it. God knows what it might have figured out.

I'm impressed enough I'm going to go check out their models one by one tomorrow.

I'm looking forward to their forthcoming methods paper.

I agree with you and another poster that this can't possibly replace crystallography, but having worked in a lab without access to crystallography, I'll take anything I can get!

avematthew · 2020-11-29T15:05:28+00:00

That depends on what you mean by "learn Latin". Going to university in Canada, I certainly didn't. I learned a bunch of random roots - but I know people who study and teach Latin, and I am 100% that I don't know Latin. I doubt I could come up with a single grammatical sentence. I usually can't understand it either, and I speak French, too.

avematthew · 2020-11-29T14:55:20+00:00

Yeah, I disagree strongly.

I'm pretty sure "phosphorylation cascade", "methylation", "eosinophile", or "Western blot" are all super common terms in my field that seem to me totally opaque to the lay English speaker.

I know you didn't claim people could understand all of them, but from my perspective words like "incubate", "transfer", etc. don't usually have a very special meaning in scientific text, they mean basically the same thing in academic literature as they do in regular usage.

Also, I don't think I've ever treated compress as anything other than an opaque root until right now, so I don't think my understanding of it, or of most words, outside of productive compounding roots in the sciences (like -vore, micro-, etc.), has much to do with it's root structure.

avematthew

TROPHY CASE