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.

Rejected PostSecrets

By now, pretty much everyone is familiar with PostSecret, the blog made up of anonymous postcards with awful, sometimes sad, sometimes horrific secrets written on them. What you may not know is that PostSecret doesn't use all of the secrets sent to them. In fact, there are some categories that automatically get dropped in the discard pile. In a stunning exposé, I am presenting here 3 types of secrets that never manage to make it onto the PS blog or into one of the books.




Category 1: Adolescent Male Humor








Category 2: Cultural Reference




















Category 3: Meta

Trivial Tuesday

The 1904 St. Louis World's Fair had a lasting impact on food and culture in the United States. Among the foods that were either first introduced or were widely popularized as a result of the event are the ice cream cone, hamburgers, hot dogs, peanut butter and which soft drink that is still sold today?

Yeah, But You Are Aware That There's An Invention Called Television and on This Invention They Show Shows, Right?

I have no problem with people who do or don't watch TV. It's a personal choice and I can understand both view points. What I do not understand, however, is why people who do not watch television feel the need to announce it in the most condescending way possible. Take this exchange that happened at my work recently, during a meeting:

Person 1: Oh, I think I saw that on the news last night. Was that the same thing you were talking about?

Person 2: Well, I don't watch television, so I don't know.^*

Was "I don't know" or "I didn't see" not a good enough answer? Saying that served no purpose other than attempting to sound superior. In addition, answers like that almost always cause everyone else around them to start denying or trying to justify their own TV habits. Continuing the conversation above:

Person 1: Oh, yeah, I don't usually watch it either but it was on, and I happened to hear.

If the way you say things makes people feel like they need to really stretch the truth or make some sort of attempt to justify themselves, chances are no one really wants to continue conversing with you.

I don't understand why people do this. If someone tries to tell you a story about jogging, you don't brush them off by saying that you don't jog in a way the suggests that anyone who does may as well throw himself off a cliff, because he's pretty much useless anyway.

Look, if you don't watch TV, that's perfectly acceptable, and it's your option, but unless you're taking that time you would spend watching TV and using it to cure cancer or ensure that everyone in the world has both food and shelter, don't expect me to give you a medal for that choice. For that matter, curing the world of hunger, homelessness and cancer may grant you a pass on many things, but it doesn't allow you to be a pompous jerk.

^*I actually like person 2, but this exchange bothered me. . . and no, I was not person 1.

A Post About Nothing

I'm still running on empty here, so here are a bunch of things that have nothing to do with each other and aren't long enough to be a full post.

I started playing the game Guild Wars recently (about a month ago), and it's very fun and addictive. Once again, I can blame members of my family for getting me addicted to a game. It's a MMORPG much like WoW and Everquest, but without a monthly fee. In addition, the game uses instancing for many explorable areas, so I don't have to worry about you coming along and stealing the respawn I've been waiting for (or the other way around).

I'm very glad that most of the shows I enjoy watching are back, but I can't help feeling a little disappointed that Lost isn't starting yet. Every week, I get to the middle of the week and am completely worn out and think, "Oh but at least it's time for Lost...Oh, right. February."

Have any of you watched Kitchen Nightmares? I'm not a huge Gordon Ramsey fan, mostly because I'm not a big fan of verbal abuse, but this show is fairly interesting. Also, the people he verbally abuses in this show deserve it most of the time. At the end, things usually turn out well and people have a much nicer restaurant and thank him for what he did. There was one a couple weeks ago that still disturbs me, because of how bad the food was and how bad the pest problems at the restaurant were. *shudder* I saw an episode of the British version of his show on BBC America and was surprised that he seemed to be a completely different guy. No yelling and screaming, just talking firmly. I can't help wondering if this is him being two different characters on the two different shows (neither being necessarily who he is in real life) or if over time, his patience has worn thin enough that he just has to scream at people.

As an Alabama fan (which I have been for most of my life), watching games with John Parker Wilson at quarterback makes me long for the days of Brodie Croyle. It's not that JPW isn't talented, but at some point you have to stop making stupid mistakes and looking like it's your first game as a starter.

On the subject of college football, this article by Ivan Maisel was an excellent read and really showed how much of an impact being a fan can have on someone, even much later in life when they have no real connection to that team.

The other day, I put one of the quick dissolve Listerine strips in my mouth, only it didn't dissolve right away. It just sat there for a second, and then when I moved my tongue it decided to attach itself to the roof of my mouth. For the thirty seconds or so it took for it to dissolve, I looked like a dog with peanut butter stuck on the roof of its mouth. Cinnamon flavored peanut butter.

Speaking of dogs...As if we didn't have enough going on, our dogs decided to try to run around and play inside today. Chewie tried to get Booker to chase him, and when Booker took the bait, Chewie ran and launched himself up onto the couch to turn around and go running the other direction. Unfortunately, the couch in our living room sits under the window, so Chewie's backside smashed into the window, which is now in a million pieces (fortunately, the storm window was up at the time, so it was not broken and could be put down so there isn't a gaping hole allowing the outside to be inside). He's fine (his fur is so thick there was no way glass could get to him), but I'm not so sure about me.


That's all I've got. I'm obscenely busy at work, so I have no left over motivation or mental capacity. I'll try to keep writing something here, but if it's like this post, I'm not sure I see much point.