That’s a very useful quote

Larry Moran cites a great quote from Bill Martin.

Life is an exergonic chemical reaction. It’s the energy releasing redox reaction at the core of metabolism that makes life run, and throughout all of life’s history it is one and the same reaction that has been running in uninterrupted continuity from life’s onset. Everything else is secondary, manifestations of what is possible when the energy is harnessed to make genes that pass the torch.

If you need any of that explained, read Larry’s summary.

I teach cell biology, and that could be the theme for the entire class. The course has a strictly enforced prerequisite of general chemistry, and students typically take it concurrently with organic chemistry. I tell them from day one that this is basically a chemistry course that focuses narrowly on the reactions that go on inside cells, and yes, life is all about electrons getting cycled through reactions that provide the energy that drives other reactions — it’s mostly redox chemistry.

Focusing on that is also helpful in understanding the origins of life, because it really is just a transition from geochemistry to self-contained bags carrying out continuous redox reactions. I teach the first half-year of our second year core curriculum, and we really do emphasize metabolism and the energetics of the cell, while the second half is basic molecular biology that focuses on DNA/RNA. That makes a lot of sense, because as we all know, metabolism came first, information came second.

A gathering of wickedness and ignorance

I just saw on Facebook that someone I know is going to peek into this rally in Buffalo today.

wlm

Yikes. This is not good. That symbol on the poster is the runic odal — it stands for the Volksdeutsche movement, or the ‘pure’ Germans. WLM is a racist movement, plain and simple; the NSM are outright neo-Nazis. The ARS is the Aryan Renaissance Society. ANA is the Aryan Nationalist Alliance, an umbrella organization trying to bring a hodge-podge of bigots together. The person posting it is Rebecca Barnette, who is a nasty piece of work. The “88” in her email address is a “Heil Hitler” reference.

I suspect this rally will be small, but the reek of concentrated flaming shit will be intense.

Still, this is in upstate New York, home of CFI. I just learned that it may also be home for my son Captain Connlann, who has been given a preliminary (it may change between now and November) assignment to Fort Drum. If he ends up there, I’ll certainly be making the trip to the Syracuse area every year or so.

I will credit them for honesty, though. They at least know what the “All Lives Matter” slogan implies.

truemeaningofalm

They’re also big fans of Donald Trump. Surprising, I know.

It was a rout.

Is it a neo-Nazi rally when only one neo-Nazi shows up?

On a warm, sunny Saturday at Cazenovia Park in South Buffalo, well-known white supremacist Karl Hand of Lockport was the only evidence of a much-anticipated “White Lives Matter” rally.

And Hand was outnumbered by about 350 to 1.

Beware of empowr

A couple of days ago, I started getting all these messages from something calling itself “empowr”, a social networking site. First alarm: they announced that I had made a post to their site. No, I didn’t, I had never heard of it. Second alarm: they kept sending me messages announcing that I had earned $X from my post and my photo (remember, I had made no post or photo). It was up to $25 today, which sounds rather sweet for two days earnings from something that involved no work at all on my part.

Wait…money for nothing? Don’t trust it. So I looked into it.

Empowr is a scam. It’s not illegal, but it is a cheat in which they give you imaginary credits to monetize connections with imaginary dollar values, but to cash in on those monetized links, you have to repay empowr for all those credits they loaned to you. And, surprise, those loaned credits cost you more than your earnings from links.

Get out while you can. Don’t give them a credit card or paypal information, because you’re authorizing them to buy out all those ‘credits’ they give you.

I checked out the site myself, and here’s another warning: they don’t give you any way to quit empowr once you’re in. Fortunately, I didn’t give them access to facebook or any credit info, so they don’t have any hooks on me, and I just blocked all their messages in email. I expect there will be urgent notifications of ever-growing sums of money piling up in my fictitious account, all getting automatically thrown in the trash.

How to fix gender representation in vidyagames

I have thought of a way to get more representation of women in video games. I was inspired by the latest Feminist Frequency video, which asks “Are Women Too Hard To Animate?”

And my first thought was yeah, well, boob physics is really hard and requires adding lots more math to the code, if you want to be properly salacious.

And my second thought was gosh, game programmers must be really lazy.

And my third thought was that game programmers sure put a lot of thought into sexualizing their games.

And that’s when my new idea popped into my head. Have you ever seen a naked man running? There’s this small dangly bit that you can’t avoid noticing that is bouncing and flopping and twirling as they move, and it can even, sometimes, change shape in response to the environment. I imagine simulating penis physics is even harder than boob physics, and you can’t cheat and just have an immobile lump down there on a naked man, because all the viewers would see that as sad and sick (either that, or it’s really cold in the game environment), especially the male viewers.

So that’s my solution. We have to demand more male nudity in video games, and not just when they’re standing around — we must insist on full frontal nakedness in action shots. And of course, there must be graphical accuracy in the animation.

Imagine the design phase of games. Everytime the designers suggest a male protagonist, the programmers will say “Aww, man, that’s gonna be hard, I’m gonna have to spend weeks coding shape-shifting pendulums, and then we’re going to have to spend months playtesting his junk. Can we just have the hero be a woman?”

This is going to work. It draws on what are clearly entirely natural impulses in programmers: to throw in lots of sex, while doing as little creative work as possible.

Ghostbusters ain’t afraid of no Ghostbusters

ghostbusters

I saw the new Ghostbusters last night…and it wasn’t bad.

It’s not going to make my list of top ten films of the year or anything, but it was good light entertainment. The story line was familiar, but it’s not as if you can do a lot with the core premise — even the original Ghostbusters sort of exhausted all the potential of the genre. It’s a genre that’s actually sui generis.

The real focus of this movie, and of the original, is the characters. Murray, Akroyd, Ramis, and Hudson were independently and as an ensemble entertaining, and the movie was just an excuse to bring a group of unique comic characters together in a strange situation. This version is exactly the same, and Wiig, McCarthy, McKinnon, and Jones pulled it off. The whole point of the movie is to bring four distinct, unique weirdos together and to have them riff off of each other.

What I also liked is that, while the story is familiar, and the whole point of the movie is the title characters, they did it without resorting to simply mimicking the original. You can’t line up Gilbert, Holtzmann, Tolan, and Yates against Stantz, Spengler, Venkman and Zeddmore and make any correspondences. As each of the original four were distinct from each other, the new four are also uniquely unique from each other and the originals.

And that was charming. Derivative as the story was, this one only added to the original by creating a new cast of distinctive individuals…who happened to all be women. Women with personalities? No wonder this movie has received all kinds of weird hatred from the alt right.

I thought he was supposed to be the stable, normal one?

Mike Pence. Establishment politician. There to add a little gravitas — as much as a wingnut Republican can — to the chaos of the Trump ticket. So what’s the calm one saying?

GOP vice presidential nominee Mike Pence on Thursday predicted that Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion, would be overturned if Donald Trump is elected president.

I’m pro-life and I don’t apologize for it, he said during a town hall meeting here. We’ll see Roe vs. Wade consigned to the ash heap of history where it belongs.

OK, the Republicans were already the lunatic party, do they need to keep re-emphasizing it?

Meanwhile, Jill Stein is making vague anti-vaccination noises.

I think there’s no question that vaccines have been absolutely critical in ridding us of the scourge of many diseases — smallpox, polio, etc. So vaccines are an invaluable medication, Stein said. Like any medication, they also should be — what shall we say? — approved by a regulatory board that people can trust. And I think right now, that is the problem. That people do not trust a Food and Drug Administration, or even the CDC for that matter, where corporate influence and the pharmaceutical industry has a lot of influence.

You know, vaccines aren’t the big money cash crop for the pharmaceutical companies that the anti-vaxxers think — and Stein ought to know that — and accusing the FDA and CDC of being in the pocket of Big Pharma is a rather strong accusation. But then, she sees an opportunity to get out of the tenth of a percent bracket in the coming election, so she is pandering madly to the ignorant lefty vote right now.

Should I mention Gary Johnson, as long as I’m looking at the competition? Nah, not worth it. Libertarian, <hiss> <makes sign of the cross>

On the positive side, Amanda Marcotte makes a good case that Hillary Clinton has a winning strategy.

Donald Trump gave Clinton a huge gift with his ridiculous “I alone” line from his convention speech last week. It allowed her to portray herself as the opposite: A team player, a listener, a coalition-builder, and humble public servant. She literally said of being a public servant that “the service part has always come easier to me than the public part”.

“None of us can do it alone. That’s why we are stronger together,” Clinton added. It was a masterful stroke. By framing the presidency in terms of service and community, Clinton both contrasted her vision with Trump’s narcissistic one and fought back against stereotypes that hold that ambitious women are heartless shrews who don’t care about anyone else.

It’s also a good look next to Pence’s anti-woman stance.

OK, enough politics. My wife is taking me out to see Ghostbusters shortly, obviously because she wants to indoctrinate me in this silly idea that women can do the same things men can do. Like catching ghosts.

Scientist smackdown!

John Benneth is a homeopath, and he wants to explain something to those godless scientists.

Atheists hate homeopathy because [this is going to be good] they worship science[wait for it…], and not knowing the science behind it they thinkthe pharmacy is inert [wait for it…]. They think the solute molecule disappears due to dilution [get ready…], when in fact it is “quantumized,” ionized into plasma by dissociation into the diluent as a perpetuating entangled wave[BOOM! Kook explosion!].

Whew. Was it good for you, too? Quantum plasma entangled argle bargle bibbity boo!

Wait. After the climax, there has to be a little letdown.

Some people just need to shut up about homeopathy until they learn more about it and it’s actual chemistry…

I call that “smugma,” the slime you get from arrogant cranks trying to look down on real scientists.