i hate how they market alexa as a ‘member of the family’ like that’s SO fucking blatantly insidious and terrifying also if i wanted an untrustworthy/cold/emotionless machine in my life i’d just talk to my fuckin father
And this is why we used to make cars out of STEEL instead of FIBERGLASS! Sure, fiberglass is a lot lighter in weight and hence a hell of a lot better for gas mileage. But you hit anything at more than 20 mph and the entire body explodes off the fucking thing, and now you’re spending more to repair the car than it’s worth because you need a entire front end, read end, or side panel. They can’t just take the damaged section off, beat it out with a hammer, sand it, and repaint it.
Everything is made with the idea of it being easier to replace than to maintain, aka planned obsolescence. Thanks, capitalism
You guys are obscenely, dangerously wrong.
It’s not planned obsolescence, it’s physics.
Modern cars crumple to absorb and distribute the forces of impact in an accident in an effort to protect the occupants. When cars didn’t have those crumple zones, the occupants, being the soft, squishy things they were, took those forces and were mangled or killed in horrible ways. Also, those older cars took hidden damage that often went unnoticed and made them very dangerous to drive.
I recently watched a TV show where a small sedan was run over by the trailer of an eighteen-wheeler. Run. Over. They had to unwrap the crumpled ball of a car from the undercarriage of that trailer. Guess what? The driver suffered only minor injuries because the car collapsed in exactly the way it was designed to so that she, in the very strong frame surrounding the passenger compartment, was protected.
And no, don’t thank capitalism for these modern cars. Thank Ralph Nader and countless other safety activists who worked tirelessly to make car manufacturers accountable for the safety of the people who drove their cars.
Julius seizure (does NOT interact with cleopatra, unfortunately. Causes seizures)
Cheap Date (increases alcohol sensitivity)
Ken and Barbie (causes loss of external genitalia)
Also, the hox genes, like antennapedia. Not a particularly funny name, but if you mutant antennapedia flys grow legs where their antennae should be.
IT
KEEPS
GETTING
BETTER
Some others fun ones:
The sonic hedgehog gene has a signal inhibitor called robotnikinin.
The halloween genes, a gene complex composed of spook, spookier, shadow, shade, shroud and phantom. Tampering with this one fucks up the exoskeleton development of fruit flies and makes them freaky looking among other things, so the name is apt.
Tinman (mutations prevent the development of a heart, à la the Tin Man from Oz)
Flippase and floppase (a pair of proteins that pass phosphatidylserines back and forth across the outer side of the cell membrane)
MAP kinase, MAP kinase kinase etc. This stacks four times to result in MAP kinase kinase kinase kinase
Mothers against decapentaplegic (represses the decapentaplegic gene in the embryo if it’s mutated in the mother).
Fun fact, there’s a hedgehog gene, and Indian hedgehog gene, and a sonic hedgehog gene
Also, the sonic hedgehog gene has expression that gets messed up my some chemicals (including alcohol) during pregnancy. So this leads to doctors having to explain to patient the something is wrong with their sonic hedgehog gene.
There’s actually a really good reason for these funny names though! Aside from scientists being dorks. Because if you discover a gene that is expressed wrong during cancer, and call it lung cancer gene 1, later on you might discover that it’s normal function is to make brain cells or something. That’s a problem, because it’ll forever bias research into that gene, because people will assume its a cancer gene, rather than playing multiple important roles in different pathways. Funny names, or naming the gene after the phenotype (the physical appearance of individuals with mutations in the gene), avoid this problem!
Naming the gene after the phenotype?
Well… this is what the hedgehog gene does to fruit flies, which is the species it was discovered in.
It. Literally makes the fly larvae look like hedgehogs.
This is why
makes caterpillars floppy is called that! The authors Did A Good And Funny, and more importantly, other scientists aren’t going to look at that gene in the database and assume we already know everything about its function. Other scientists are going to look at that gene and go “floppy lol”.
So what have we learned today? Scientists giving genes funny names and other scientists going “floppy lol” actually serves an important role in keeping scientists from missing crucial research by assuming they know everything already. Every time you think science can’t get any more amazing it… just… does.
(admittedly though, some funny name genes do stand for their functions. Pokemon stands for “POKerythroid myeloid ontogenic factor” and diablo stands for “Direct IAP binding protein, low”.)
