10 October 2017

Ignorance clarified on a single blow

OK, so I am doing this course of blender 3D modelling and animation on Udemy (by the way the course is being great in case you're interested). so far so good. I was taking a break, and was thinking to myself "this Udemy thing is a very good idea, I'm quite sure that they take like a 1-5% cut of the money paid for the course and everyone wins", and then my mind wandered to the realm of "would there be good genetics courses in here or maybe even something much more advanced like next generation sequencing data?" (which is what I do for a living, see where I was going?). So far so good again. So I type the word Genetics in the search box and only three results appear, and I think "maybe I should try and set up a basic genetics course or an advance NGS data processing course here" and while I think that, I notice how my brain was imploding, without knowing why yet. The signals from the screen in front of me were caught first through my optical nerve, and as they made it through the mesh of neurons, they were all dying in agony, until the doomed message reached my cortex. Screen capture below.


So, see something weird? out of the ordinary? no? leave me give you a hand.



All these years of research culminating in the CRISPR/cas9 and other genetic editing tools, which will probably be awarded the medicine Nobel prize a year or two from now. And now we learn that you could do that in a gym. Probably complementing it with dog's food and dying at 40 if I have to pay attention to the photo. Millions wasted in Science.

Why does this make me want to cry? inculturation, illiteracy, ignorance, all clarified in a single blow. Every time they say on the news things like "the people that have this gene or this other gene die younger or whatever". FOR FUCK'S SAKE, we all have the same genes, there are no humans that have genes that others don't, and those who do (have more or less genes) usually are never born or they die horribly soon after. Or like this guy up here, which I am sure that all the ladies love: your genetics don't change on your lifespan, unless it is to get cancer. I don't know maybe you are talking about that...

So we are clear, there is an almost exact copy of your genome in each of your cells (and by almost exact I mean 99.9999999% of the 3,000,000,000+ nucleotides in your genome are the same in each one of your 37.2 trillion cells) with very few exceptions (like some very specialised cells of the immune system; or erythrocytes, which don't have a nucleus) and none of them have anything to do with muscle, not by far. And if some bright mind wants to even mention chimerism, just don't. That does not happen while lifting.

So, if you don't know shit about something, please, I beg you, just don't stain terms you do not understand, or even better, worry to understand them before using them. Get to know what's a light year (no, it's not time measure, it's distance, get over it), a quasar, a lymphocyte, a gene, a spleen or whatever it is the thing you want to mention because you think it sounds cool and it will make you sound more clever.

Meanwhile, I'll be crying. Every time someone says something like "redefine your genetics" on a "build muscle" course on Udemy (WTF, by the way, and I am not even going to go into this) please, remember that Justin Beaver kills a cute kitten. or a pup.