cocculin

Many important findings in biology have involved the Western blot, but also likely a lot of fraud and needless grad student/technician suffering. If I could have one question answered by God, it would probably be on the technique’s net utility. I spent a whole month of my Honours trying to get a blot to work to no avail, and it turned out the postdoc who was supposed to teach me intentionally left out a bunch of instructions. I hear that these days you can get similar info from mass spec, with the advantage of not relying on antibodies which are statistically likely to be dodgy, but it’s expensive. Lord, let me outlive the usefulness of Western blots.

When Vista first came out, the reception was pretty negative. Kids at my school were performatively partitioning their drives to install Linux on their school laptops. The UAC pop-ups were annoying, and performance could be pretty bad if your hardware wasn’t up to it. In hindsight, it wasn’t that bad, and Microsoft has pushed far worse things on us since.

My most behated condiment. In my opinion, it is Thailand’s most regrettable contribution to the world.

Love it or hate it, its impact on culture at large can’t be denied. I’ve been on the site since 2010. Before egirls and woke went mainstream, we had all the nose-pierced rainbow haired girls/nbs gpoy-posting between arguments about the validity of neopronouns, which sexualities were orientations and not merely preferences, what should go on the Pride flag, and so on. I saw some of them grow up to have legit careers in the arts. But beyond the woke fandom stereotype: Blake Masters’ notes from Peter Thiel’s Stanford course, Sam Bankman-Fried’s girlfriend’s blog, shoplifting tips, a Triple J presenter writing Angus and Julia Stone hatefic, the “teacher crush” and “true crime” communities accidentally sharing the same tag, eshay vandals popping the guardie, train guards secretly aiding the vandals, long ADHD walls of text about something you really loved or hated… the incredible breadth of humanity on display in a time when not everyone was brainrotting online.

There are better lettuces. To me, iceberg lettuce has become a signal for a cheap and shoddy meal, e.g. a filler in a burrito assembled using an Old El Paso kit, or a sandwich from an eatery whose clientele is almost entirely tradies. But I also recall with some fond nostalgia the school tuckshop chicken burger with a sprinkle of shredded lettuce glued to the patty with a gob of mayonnaise. So maybe it has its place.

Gets me to the shops, gets me to the train, improved my relationships with my bosses

Makes me annoying, makes everyone else annoying to me, but necessary for understanding ion channels

Pretty good we have this, otherwise we’d all be forced to be shorter/smaller

Lost half a star for the foul smelling poo

99% of the time, a broom would be doing a more effective job without the noise and air pollution. Only valid use is combating tear gas at protests.