A Weather Haiku, Complete with Onomatopoetic Expression of Disgust

the year's first real snow

wet disgusting slushy mess

'tis the season. Blech!

Either a Useful Learning Tool or a Complete Misapplication of Chemistry and a Waste of Candy

For a lot longer than I should admit (several years), the idea of comparing enzyme kinetics to people eating candy from a community candy dish has been floating around in my head. It all started when I was in graduate school and I noticed that the Jolly Ranchers that had been brought in after Halloween seemed to be eaten in a certain order. I thought that it would be amusing to chart this over time (but was too lazy and not quite nerdy enough to do so). The more I thought about this the more I liked this idea and the more I realized that it works pretty well as a model for how enzymes work^*.


The basic requirements for an enzyme catalyzed reaction are that you have:

Substrate: Basically this is your starting material. In our case, Jolly Ranchers.

Enzyme: This is a biological catalyst, which helps to convert the substrate to product while remaining unchanged. In this case, our enzymes are people^**.

Product: This is the end material. In this case we'll call it the empty candy wrappers.


You start off with a high concentration of substrate (candy) and a steady concentration of enzymes (people). On occasion, an enzyme and and substrate will collide (i.e. someone walks past the candy dish) and if the substrate is appropriate, a reaction may occur (the person unwraps and eats the candy). As time goes on, different substrates (flavors) collide with the enzymes and some are found to bind and be metabolized better than others. By graphing the amount of substrate used over time (or in this example, the amount of candy still remaining over time) it is possible to look at the rate of consumption and determine which is the preferred substrate.


When I have paid attention to this in the past, what I have found looks something like this.




You can see that clearly Cherry is eaten the fastest, with Watermelon, Apple and Lemon right behind. Grape is typically not consumed at the same rate and the preferred substrates are used first. Why no one bothers to eat the last Lemon is beyond me. I guess everyone is trying to be polite, but enzymes aren't usually concerned with manners.

Another thing that can be learned is that if one were to repeat this experiment with the new "Original Flavors" of Jolly Ranchers which substitute Blue Raspberry for Lemon, the resulting curves would likely look like this.





This graph indicates that Blue Raspberry is not only not the preferred substance but goes essentially untouched by the enzymes.

Much like actual enzymes, it is possible to obtain mutants which may show increased or decreased preference for various substrates. A mutant^*** which uses Blue Raspberry as the preferred substrate is highly desirable because...well, that means more of the others for the rest of us.

^* A highly simplified model with huge flaws, it should be noted.

^** Technically, our enzymes don't meet the requirements because they are changed when they become fat from all the candy, but surely you don't expect perfection from a silly model like this.

^*** A mutant which prefers Blue Raspberry is pretty much a freak. Good luck finding one to eat all the nasty Jolly Ranchers while leaving all the good ones for you.

Remember, Remember

Today, as you know is November 5th. You may or may not remember that today is also Guy Fawkes Day. I really don't know how you can have a cooler holiday than one that remembers the thwarting of a plot by a guy who wanted to make sure things blow'd up real good, and celebrates it by blowing other things up real good.

Other things bouncing around in my head at the moment:

I'm tired of hearing Sally Field talk about how well Boniva fits into her busy schedule. You know, some of her girlfriends have to set aside time every week to take their osteoporosis medicine. What are you doing that you can't take the time to take one single pill a week? Is the pill the size of a football? Do you have problems swallowing? Seriously, if you are at that point in your life and not taking a half dozen pills a day, you're doing pretty good. One more a week doesn't seem like a big deal to me.

We went to the grocery store last night and as we left I wondered "Can we sue Meijer for getting a Gloria Estefan song stuck in my head?" I'm fairly sure the answer is no, but it should be yes.

Really little kids dressed up in costumes and going trick-or-treating are cute. Obnoxious teenagers doing the same are not. We bought way too much Halloween candy, as always. We were popular, however, because we discovered that if we went to one of the warehouse type stores we could give away full sized candy bars without spending more than buying the minis at the grocery store.

The store we went to was Gordon Food Service, which is designed mostly for restaurant and catering needs. I love the store because you never know what absurd thing you are going to find. For example, the one gallon container of imitation vanilla.



Speaking of strange things found at the store, I noticed recently that one of our local stores has a very large can that claims to contain a whole cooked chicken. I just found this to be amusing.

Want to see me alienate a significant percentage of my readers? I liked The Daily Show much better when Craig Kilborn was the host. I find it entirely too self-important and not funny now. I keep thinking I'll eventually write a whole post about this, but I have to put it out there even without devoting an entire post to it.

Reaper is funny. Pushing Daisies is clever and sweet, if a little eccentric. Chuck cracks me up. I still wish Lost was already back on.

Lolsecretz is absolutely hilarious. You should go read it now. Of course, if you aren't familiar with Post Secret (but after my last post you should be) or the unstoppable phenomenon that is Lolcats (but if you are online, you pretty much have to be), it won't make much sense.

I have a few other things I want to write about, but they will have to wait until later when I have time, energy and the mental capacity to write it properly.

And finally, I'm not promising anything, but if you happen to watch the college football game on ESPN 2 tomorrow night and see a very fat man dressed in black, it could be me. Of course, it's a football game where the home team's main color is black, so it could be just about anyone else, too.