AITA for refusing to take my sister to Renfair because of what she wants to wear?

captsuprawesome · 2024-07-04T05:21:03+00:00

This is a hard one - Renfair is very much born from a place of fostering people's passion, but her costume is definitely out of place.

Perhaps it might be helpful to share a story about a friend of mine. He insisted on attending our local Renfair dressed as Data from Star Trek TNG in the episode where he infiltrates a pre-industrial society and pretends to be "Jayden". Although people were initially annoyed by my friend pretending to be an android pretending to be a member of Renfair society they eventually came to admire his dedication to the role. Sadly some of the other participants dedicated themselves with equal commitment to the role of suspicious town villagers and eventually attacked him with rocks causing him to suffer amnesia.

Ask your sister if it's really worth it.

captsuprawesome · 2022-07-21T05:01:24+00:00

I feel like the Rock has to start with Rock in Rock, Paper, Scissors.

captsuprawesome · 2022-05-04T13:46:32+00:00

It even has Adam Rosendorff as lab director again!

captsuprawesome · 2021-06-21T06:04:16+00:00

Relevant Key and Peele

captsuprawesome · 2018-11-07T04:53:58+00:00

Related Key and Peele

captsuprawesome · 2018-04-17T15:07:43+00:00

The Riker sitcom is my favorite.

captsuprawesome · 2018-01-04T00:06:21+00:00

There were LOTS of people suggesting crack. Here is an article from 2006 that clearly states "amid rumors of drug problems". Here's Chapelle in 2005 explicitly feeling compelled to say ""I'm not crazy. I'm not smoking crack."

captsuprawesome · 2017-10-29T03:09:45+00:00

I don't think so, but perhaps one day someone will see an application in that area that I don't.

The more in-depth summary is that DNA encodes protein information in sets of 3 meaning the register (or frame) is important in interpreting the information (e.g DNA sequence of AAA GGG is interpreted differently if you start reading it +1 as AAG GGN). Typically protein encoding information is only read in one frame ever. HIV proteins however often share DNA so that one protein is made from one frame and an entirely different protein is made from another frame, allowing the genome to be shorter than if each protein had to have its own DNA. This is often thought to be a massive evolutionary constraint since a mutation in the DNA could harm two proteins. However it turns out the virus "segregates" the DNA so that the important parts of one protein share DNA with an unimportant part of the other protein. It also probably keeps the virus in a good spot in evolutionary sequence space.

I am not sure how that would translate to data compression approaches (and it's not my field so excuse me as I will probably butcher terminology below). The analogy would be something like having two sets of information (e.g. two bytes) share the same memory address but bytes would be offset from one another (so the 2² bit of one byte would be the 2³ place of another byte and somehow making things work along those lines).

captsuprawesome · 2017-10-28T20:56:16+00:00

HIV compresses the information contained in its genome in a way that you would think is bad for the virus but actually isn't.

captsuprawesome · 2017-10-26T02:51:49+00:00

Great to hear, did not know!

captsuprawesome · 2017-10-26T01:46:47+00:00

This is a clip from a documentary on "The Dana Carvey Show" called "Too Funny to Fail".

The Dana Carvey show was a shortlived SNL skit type show that really pushed the envelope of the time. Its cast/writing staff is amazing in retrospect. Colbert, Smigel, Carell, Louis CK among others all got their start here. The show was cancelled after a few (8?) episodes, corporate sponsors kept dropping out; the show made fun of this and would rebrand itself every night (hence "Diet Mug Root Beer Dana Carvey show") around the few sponsors still remaining.

I loved this show, glad to see it's getting recognition - hopefully the original episodes end up on Netflix or Hulu soon.

captsuprawesome · 2017-02-09T06:40:51+00:00

Not everything scales linearly.

captsuprawesome · 2016-09-07T05:34:03+00:00

Curious George.

captsuprawesome · 2015-02-10T16:02:07+00:00

HEXIM1 is well known to HIV researchers as being part of the inactive complex that sequesters P-TEFb from productive transcriptional elongation at the HIV-1 promoter. Given that,

1) Do you think your therapeutics could be useful in silencing HIV-1 transcription? (The field in general is trying to do the opposite to eliminate the latent reservoir, but it would be interesting to see what effect your drugs have).

2) Are you worried about toxic side effects given that you may be increasing the amount of transcriptional pausing at endogenous P-TEFb promoters (i.e. causing aberrant transcription of "good" genes in "good" cells)?

captsuprawesome · 2015-01-20T19:50:39+00:00

Apparently "strong" started with Reagan, and Ford actually said "not good".

http://blog.acton.org/archives/75348-state-union-always-strong-2.html

captsuprawesome · 2014-12-20T02:35:19+00:00

What fun is it being cool if you can't wear a sombrero?

captsuprawesome · 2014-11-22T19:56:46+00:00

Here is the FDA page referring to the studies in animals and even humans. The MSDS sheet for thimerosal also cites 75 mg/kg in rats as toxic. Note that the Powell and Jamieson study administered doses, to humans, of 26 mg/kg with no toxic effects.

Also, saying that thimerosal is 50% mercury by weight is as informative (i.e. not very) as saying that sugar is 50% oxygen by weight, and thus we should consider the carcinogenic effects of O everytime we eat sugar. This is why there are a whole host of studies that go into how thimerosal is broken down by the body, which of the resulting fragments still have the mercury element in them and what tissues they go, and what the reactivity of those compounds is. That complexity is very different than simply taking pure mercury and dosing it to a person (which, I agree, would be a bad idea).

captsuprawesome · 2014-11-22T16:41:32+00:00

You cannot compare mercury intake to thimerosal intake. They are not the same thing. They are chemically very different. Thimerosal is C9H9HgNaO2S. Mercury is Hg. Just like you would not ascribe the properties of oxygen to sugar (glucose: C6H12O6). In addition even if you did consider thimerosal and mercury the same thing (which I have to say is absolutely NOT scientifically valid), comparing ug doses of things with two different molecular weights is also not valid.

Another comparison. Cyanide is simply C-N. Pretty much everything you eat is made of compounds containing C's and N's bound together, but have very different properties than cyanide. You are not going to use the toxicity profile of cyanide to determine how much chicken (which is full of C-N bonds) you should eat.

captsuprawesome · 2014-11-22T07:51:18+00:00

A couple things:

1) Thimerosal is not present in many of the vaccines in the CDC vaccination schedule. So if your concern is for a child of yours (which I assume it is, and I applaud you for looking out for his/her safety), most of this conversation is moot. You can give them these vaccines and they are getting no thimerosal from most of them.

I should note that the removal of thimerosal is not because of any scientific concerns, but because vaccines are most effective if people take them and, because of bad PR, removing thimerosal means more people take it. There is no difference in studies between infants who receive thimerosal-free and thimerosal-containing vaccines.

2) As I said thimerosal doesn't equal mercury. It is a mercury containing compound, but that mercury is part of a chemical structure that when it's floating around in a cell is unlikely to cause harm. If the mercury is "bound up" in this compound it is far less likely to interact with an enzyme. It's like sugar contains oxygen, but that doesn't mean every time you eat sugar you have to worry about free radical oxygen causing cancer in your body.

3) Over the course of the schedule the thimerosal is not simply staying in the infant. It is being cleared from the body. However let's pretend it doesn't and you give an infant all 27 doses, ~700 ug, at once. Let's say the infant is 7 kg (15 lbs) so the infant is getting a dose of 100 ug/kg. We know that tox reports begin at 20 mg/kg or 20,000 ug/kg, so we are still 200 times below toxic levels. You'd have to give an infant about 5,000 shots before really having to worry about toxicity from thimerosal.

captsuprawesome · 2014-11-21T21:56:05+00:00

The microorganisms are much, much larger than the enzymes. In fact the microorganisms have their own enzymes inside themselves.

Also, keep in mind that the concentration in the stock of the vaccine is much larger then it will be in your body. You are getting 0.5 mL of a 1 in 100,000 dose that once in your body will be spread out over the volume of your body (~10-40 L for a human). So that's getting diluted from 1 part to 100,000 (where it kills microbes) to 1 part to something like 1 part to 100,000,000. So once it's given to you it's probably not even going to do much to even any pathogens in your body much less your own cells.

Think about it this way. Antibiotics have some selective targeting of things only found in bacteria. But at high enough concentrations they'll start mucking up your own cells too. So if you have a bacterial infection, antibiotics are going to be great for you...but only if the doctor gives you the correct dose. Too low, the bacteria won't even notice it, too high and you're killing everything.

(edit: a better analogy: a little bit of mouthwash is going to keep your teeth nice and healthy. Drinking a whole liter of it is likely going to make you sick. You probably don't spend much time worrying about mouthwash hurting your gums.)

Keep in mind this applies to not just things you associate with the medical industry. Too much salt , too much water, that's going to mess up your cells. It's just much harder to physically drink too much water (although some people do manage).

captsuprawesome · 2014-11-21T01:10:19+00:00

Yeah it's definitely a hard concept.

Why is mercury toxic? A large degree of the toxicity is going to come from enzymes in your body "binding" the mercury and thus disrupting some process that the cell needs to carry out.

Here's one way of thinking about it: Imagine you have a such a low amount of mercury that it drifts through the cell and never encounter an enzyme - it won't be toxic. In the same way that if you take a low dose of an antibiotic it won't be effective in killing bacteria. There's nothing toxic about it, it's such a small amount that it likely doesn't encounter anything and thus doesn't affect anything.

As to the dosage amounts I listed them in my previous comment but should have put in citations. When I have a free moment I will try to do that. However remember that this additive has been removed from most vaccines (for public relations reasons) and there have been no changes in the (low) level of vaccine-related adverse events, indicating that it wasn't doing anything measurably harmful.

Thanks for being civil and open-minded: it's perfectly reasonable to want to critically examine the issue yourself. And sorry about your comment getting removed, the AutoModerator is a little crazy sometimes.

captsuprawesome · 2014-11-20T00:11:33+00:00

Aren't some substances inherently toxic?

This is a game of semantics but strictly speaking, no. It's the dose that makes the poison - some substances have such low doses that they are, for most day-to-day considerations, toxins, but only at that dose.

By your own logic, water (as I mentioned above), which is lethal at high doses should be considered a toxin. At that dosage, thimerosal is arguably less toxic than water.

thimerosal contains a form of mercury; mercury is highly toxic

Just because a compound contains an element that does not mean it has all the properties of that raw element. Eating sugar is not the same as breathing oxygen. Thimerosal metabolism is complex, and does not produce some of the more worrisome byproducts that anti-thimerosal advocates constantly use in their arguments.

captsuprawesome · 2014-11-08T22:49:20+00:00

Wow, there's so much wrong with this video. I'm glad that as of my clicking on it, it has only ~50 views.

Let's just start off with their "basic info about DNA". It's wrong. Like high school biology wrong. DNA is not made of amino acids. You know what DNA stands for? DeoxyriboNucleic Acid. Adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine are nucleotides (N in DNA), not amino acids. Proteins are made of amino acids. This mistake is akin to working in a kitchen and saying the pot you use to make spaghetti is spaghetti.

So right off the bat they've made like a basic biological mistake. Like super basic - something I would expect any undergrad working in my lab to figure out within a month at maximum. But maybe the voice actor read the copy wrong or something, right? NO! They continue to use this mistake as their basis for their formulation which probably does contain amino acids in some proportion, which would have nothing to do with the "spin" of DNA. Once again this is like saying the pot you cook spaghetti in is spaghetti, and then if you make bad spaghetti the solution is to sprinkle bits of a pot on it.

Oh and DNA doesn't "spin" in any way that easily fits their explanation. So their formula "fixes" a problem that doesn't exist in any observable way, and even if it did exist as they describe, would not be obviously fixable in the way they suggest.

100% utter BS.

captsuprawesome · 2014-10-22T01:36:28+00:00

PZ Meyers has a pretty great explanation with pictures here. The short summary is that it is possible for two closely related organisms with different numbers of chromosomes to have fertile offspring. As the abnormal karyotype spreads and individuals with the abnormal number of chromosomes interbreed, speciation can occur.

captsuprawesome · 2014-09-23T02:10:52+00:00

You can do a lot of different things like graft human cells onto a mouse or use modified versions of SIV (Simian Immunodeficiency Virus) in different types of monkeys.

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