> No weird side-band edge cases effects, like if the IP stack could affect DC balance by changing the mix of 1s and 0s it sends out. As someone who started in

> No weird side-band edge cases effects, like if the IP stack could affect DC balance by changing the mix of 1s and 0s it sends out. As someone who started in chemistry and moved into computers, this made me laugh out loud hard. It's an absurd and absolutely perfect analogy for the weird shit biology does all the time. I think it is intrinsically hard to make clean abstractions out of chemistry. Biochemistry even more so. Chemical synthesis in the lab is all about the loop of: react under ideal conditions, work up, extract, purify, repeat. Biochemistry is just...fancy soup. You get some barrier, especially for really nasty stuff, like peroxisomes, but there is just tons of diffusion. Especially with neurochem, where usually drugs have to be the right lipophilicity to cross the BBB but also specific to targets.