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like, do you guys realize that talking to me is sort of like hearing someone recite this blog? Like, unsolicited asian celebrity news, verbatim rap lyrics, mathematical proofs, and then I tell you I invented a sauce?

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Frances Arnold:

Let me start with a question: “Why did Newton’s apple fall to the ground?”

First the answer from the physicist: “There is a force called gravity that exists between any two objects, with a magnitude proportional to the product of the objects’ masses, and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the centers of the masses. The apple is therefore propelled by this force towards the center of the earth when it leaves the tree.”

Now we will move to the answer from the evolutionary biologist: “Once upon a time, apples used to go in all directions, up, down, sideways – the world was full of ricocheting apples. However, only those apples that fell to the ground were able to germinate and grow new trees. Over millions of years, the forces of evolution selected for those apples which fell to the ground. Which is why apples now fall to the ground.”

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Romney, Arnold and Lipshutz:

It is true that old-school biocatalytic reactions may have resembled a witch’s cauldron, with catalysts being added in the form of ground-up snails (14) but this view is outdated. Nowadays, enzymes can be overexpressed in organisms like E. coli and prepared as solutions or powders that are used just like any other catalyst.

(14) Petricic, J; Kalogjera, Z.; Stanic,́G. Conversion of Glycosides to Aglycones or Shortened Glycosides Using a Biocatalitically Active Extract from the Sea Snails Monodonta Turbinata and Patella Aspera. Pharmazie 1989, 44, 508.

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youzicha liked your post “like, do you guys realize that talking to me is sort of like hearing...”

oh, I made @youzicha last night, youzicha.

I bought a glass of iced youzicha in japan, because I saw it in a marketplace and recognized it from your URL. It was good, so I ordered some on amazon.

I never got around to making it until last night when I was texting S, and she suggested I buy some. I said I already had it, but I hadn’t gotten around to making it because I didn’t want to figure out how. And she said, just put a spoonful in a cup of water and microwave it. And I was like, really?

And it was really good!

The conversation about korean like, products started because I had sent her a picture of some persimmon vinegar I had in my cabinet. And ‘casue I’m always showing off the tiny bit of chinese I know so I she thinks of me as a person who likes to display knowledge of asian culture, she thought where I was going with that is that I’m some kind of korean cooking expert, but instead I told her about how I bought it because I thought it was iced tea and then took a sip of it right in front of the korean guy who sold it to me

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Sacks et al, “Design and Analysis of Computer Experiments“ (1989):

Many scientific phenomena are now investigated by complex computer models or codes. A computer experiment is a number of runs of the code with various inputs. A feature of many computer experiments is that the output is deterministic--rerunning the code with the same inputs gives identical observations. Often, the codes are computationally expensive to run, and a common objective of an experiment is to fit a cheaper predictor of the output to the data. Our approach is to model the deterministic output as the realization of a stochastic process, thereby providing a statistical basis for designing experiments (choosing the inputs) for efficient prediction. With this model, estimates of uncertainty of predictions are also available. Recent work in this area is reviewed, a number of applications are discussed, and we demonstrate our methodology with an example.

I’m becoming increasingly sure I want to work on this kind of thing after graduating, maybe for computational chemistry application