little bits of everything

A word of explanation for the blog title. My children have brought to my attention the YouTube phenomenon of videos entitled "(social grouping) reacts to (meme)", e.g. "teens react to Flappy Bird". It consists of watching the expression of a member of these social groups watching the meme on YouTube. They also get asked questions about it. I thought about recording my own "I react to (social grouping) react to (meme)", which would consist of me with a puzzled expression on my face as I really don't see the point of watching someone else watching YouTube. However I thought it made a good title for this post. The elder is me, because my children tell me I'm old. Magic: The Gathering  has been around for over 20 years and at some point in the past few years I became aware of it as some sort of trading card game. Recently one of my children has bought a set of cards and so I can play it too, after a fashion. It's a fantastically complicated gam...

From Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything", talking about a cell in the human body: Typically a cell will contains some twenty thousand types of protein, and of these about two thousand types will be represented by at least fifty thousand molecules. 'This means,' says Nuland, 'that even if we count only those molecules present in more than 50,000 each, the total is still a very minimum of 100 million protein molecules in each cell. Such a staggering figure gives some idea of the swarming immensity of biochemical activity within us.' In a single cell. Wow.