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What a beautiful depiction. Reminds me of high fidelity 3D animation videos I used to watch about DNA replication, cell signalling etc. One of the most fascina

What a beautiful depiction. Reminds me of high fidelity 3D animation videos I used to watch about DNA replication, cell signalling etc. One of the most fascinating parts to me was DNA transcription. The engineering is quite precise. Found the video I was referring to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Hk9jct2ozY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Hk9jct2ozY

ofrzeta 5mo ago
Looks fascinating. Related: The Machinery of Life https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-0-387-84925-6 https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-0-387-84925-6 (actually it is the book of the person who drew the first illustration in the article but I could not see any mention of the book).
- bhagyeshsp 5mo ago
  Wow, aptly named "The Machinery of Life".
gavmor 5mo ago
Ugh, makes my skin crawl, it's so chaotic! And delicate-looking!
- IAmBroom 5mo ago
  I feel that, too. And the speeds those move at! There's a spot in the video where it refers to "real-time" replication of DNA, but that has got to be more like "sped up until smooth". Miles of DNA aren't getting reproduced in a few minutes at that speed. One thing that these animations always remind me of is that speeds at that level are tied to size. We're use to a world where birds and cars are faster than pollen and insects (mostly), but the fidgety twerking of all those big proteins is due to collisions with higher-velocity, invisibly small molecules like water (Brownian motion). When was the last time a pollen grain made you flinch? Everything is kinetic/EM energy exchange; everything is in the gray area between Newtonian and quantum physics. (Shout out to Einstein, but also Boltzmann through Dirac.)
  - bhagyeshsp 5mo ago
    > Miles of DNA aren't getting reproduced in a few minutes at that speed. I didn't get the "miles of DNA" reference. A single strand of DNA is approx 3 meter in length when uncoiled. Now I'm thinking how many strands may be replicated at a time.
mncharity 5mo ago
A cautionary note: the jiggle can be misleading, making one think motion is fully represented. These are traditional 3D animations, with their profoundly misleading handling of motion, just with a "jiggle filter" added. For illustration, consider the classic animation of a walking kinesin towing a vesicle. One could jiggle-ify it. But that won't convey that during every step, the vesicle has done a "balloon in a hurricane" exploration of every possible position it can reach while remaining tethered. Won't clarify that the very very misleading "I'm just a peaceful barge" vibe is entirely animation fantasy. Secondary content could have been added to defuse this negative educational impact, but the choice was made to optimize for, and I'm quoting, "pretty". Jiggle-ification takes perhaps the biggest educational downside of these animations, and makes it even more misleading.

ofrzeta 5mo ago

Looks fascinating. Related: The Machinery of Life https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-0-387-84925-6 https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-0-387-84925-6 (actually it is the book of the person who drew the first illustration in the article but I could not see any mention of the book).

bhagyeshsp 5mo ago
Wow, aptly named "The Machinery of Life".

gavmor 5mo ago

Ugh, makes my skin crawl, it's so chaotic! And delicate-looking!

IAmBroom 5mo ago
I feel that, too. And the speeds those move at! There's a spot in the video where it refers to "real-time" replication of DNA, but that has got to be more like "sped up until smooth". Miles of DNA aren't getting reproduced in a few minutes at that speed. One thing that these animations always remind me of is that speeds at that level are tied to size. We're use to a world where birds and cars are faster than pollen and insects (mostly), but the fidgety twerking of all those big proteins is due to collisions with higher-velocity, invisibly small molecules like water (Brownian motion). When was the last time a pollen grain made you flinch? Everything is kinetic/EM energy exchange; everything is in the gray area between Newtonian and quantum physics. (Shout out to Einstein, but also Boltzmann through Dirac.)
- bhagyeshsp 5mo ago
  > Miles of DNA aren't getting reproduced in a few minutes at that speed. I didn't get the "miles of DNA" reference. A single strand of DNA is approx 3 meter in length when uncoiled. Now I'm thinking how many strands may be replicated at a time.

mncharity 5mo ago

A cautionary note: the jiggle can be misleading, making one think motion is fully represented. These are traditional 3D animations, with their profoundly misleading handling of motion, just with a "jiggle filter" added. For illustration, consider the classic animation of a walking kinesin towing a vesicle. One could jiggle-ify it. But that won't convey that during every step, the vesicle has done a "balloon in a hurricane" exploration of every possible position it can reach while remaining tethered. Won't clarify that the very very misleading "I'm just a peaceful barge" vibe is entirely animation fantasy. Secondary content could have been added to defuse this negative educational impact, but the choice was made to optimize for, and I'm quoting, "pretty". Jiggle-ification takes perhaps the biggest educational downside of these animations, and makes it even more misleading.