28 ms·
This reminds me of one of the hardest lessons I ever learnt from college worksheets. We were asked whether a cell’s ribosomes fit in the cell normally or if the
by jon_richards 5y ago
This reminds me of one of the hardest lessons I ever learnt from college worksheets. We were asked whether a cell’s ribosomes fit in the cell normally or if they required compression of some sort. Subtracting the total volume of ribosomes in a cell from the total volume of the cell itself, we got a negative number, and indicated there must be some sort of compression.
Almost everyone got marked wrong. A simple difference, lacking context, is not a useful measure. What we should have calculated was a ratio.
It seemed arbitrary, but the entire class was a crash course towards scientific writing and everything was graded as if up for review. Picking the right metrics, assumptions, and descriptive language was crucial.
- fennecfoxen 5y agoThis is interesting but... how does it remind you of that? i don't follow in the slightest
- jon_richards 5y agoThe headline just didn’t convey any sense of scale to me. I found this metric much more interesting: > 500 times as powerful as the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, at the end of World War II.
- sterlind 5y agowhich is funny, because 10 megatons intrinsically conveys scale. it's equivalent to 10 million tons of TNT.
- mrleinad 5y agoI never bothered to look it up, but that still tells me nothing. Is everyone into what's the destructive power of one ton of TNT but me? All I can think of when I read TNT is some old cowboy movie where they threw TNT cartridges around, or some cartoon.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- rq1 5y agoVc - Vr < 0 <=> 1 < Vr / Vc What kind of information the ratio gives you that the difference doesn’t?
- Dylan16807 5y agoYeah, this doesn't make sense to me. If you're trying to go for good scientific writing, you want to use detail where it's important. A ratio is great if you're describing the compression. If you're simply saying it doesn't fit raw, noting which number is bigger is effective and simple.
- Wiseacre 5y agoI was expecting an explanation as how to ribosomes fit in a cell despite having more volume.
- kfarr 5y agoAnd thus leading to the creation of the most powerful thermonuclear weapons known to man... ?