To the questioner above: More than 5,000 people have gotten ink in The Invitational -- most of them just once. These days, though, there are far fewer one-off entrants, since nobody's getting here by idly paging through the paper and seeing a contest; everyone's a Gene Pool subscriber, and a higher percentage are the devoted Losers who see the Invite as a primary hobby every week.
And when the contest requires a lot of skill and craft (e.g., a rhyming poem, a song parody) rather than just a funny idea, the very best people among the week's entrants tend to blot up the ink. You're allowed to submit up to 25 entries, and my strong hunch is that some of this week's winners sent me their best 25 poems -- or at least 10 of them.
That said, we really enjoy hearing from new people, and I'm always thrilled to award them the coveted Fir Stink for their first ink -- a tree-shaped "air freshener" you (shouldn't) hang from your rearview mirror.
Some of us are situationally funny - maybe we could do a night of stand-up, but a career? No way. I envy people who can turn funny and smart on and on like a faucet.
Yes, but it's really easy to make a typo when you're writing quickly. You have to make allowances for any writing that's done live, just as you do with texts etc.
Kind as always, Pat. Or, as kind as a former copy editor can be. But I suggest there are far more complicated and thus correct, answers. William of Ockham was a notorious liar. For one thing, after careful consideration, one is left with the inescapable conclusion that Gene's typos are his equivalent of the so-called "Easter eggs" often found on DVDs. Those who remember DVDs, no doubt remember "Easter eggs" which were hidden bonus features, like extra movie footage, special offers, gags and the like. Gene knows how they delight his readers (and his ingrate brother in particular) who find them and thus, he occasionally sprinkles them in, and often in a foreign language, just for the sport of it.
Then there is the little known fact that the Pulitzer confers a lifetime exemption for both syntax errors and typos. So Gene has two lifetimes' worth and (almost certainly, smirking), makes these egregious howlers on purpose just because he can, and to sadistically rile up some members of his base. You, of course --- poor you --- on the other hand, have taken a blood oath which leaves you incapable of making these boo-boos (I use the euphemism here out of respect), let alone punctuation miscues, for fear of being visited in the dark of night by the hooded enforcers of the Perfection Society.
It was deliberate, a choice for clarity. "Lees" reads weird, as though it is the plural of a nautical term. Sometimes, one must defy rules for clarity.
Ever read “ The Lees of Virginia?” As an older brother of a know-it-all younger brother who is often wrong but never uncertain, I once again find myself siding with Don.
I said I prefer twist ties but in all honesty, I don't know which I prefer. You see, everyone that shares DNA with my husband in this household (read: everyone except me) has some sort of genetic predisposition for losing whatever is supposed to hold the bread closed. I even attempted to use the reusable clips and they have gone the way of the twisty ties and plastic thing-a-ma-jigs. The thing disappears the moment one of these people touches the bread bag and they resort to twisting it shut and then inverting the open end back over the loaf to hold it closed which does work BUT WHAT ARE YOU ALL DOING WITH THE CLOSURE DEVICES? I occassionally find a twist tie in the cat food bowl along with a few hair elastics becuase my cat likes to keep her most precious things all in one bowl. However, I suspect (hope) that most of them end up under some heavy piece of furniture courtesy of a playful cat paw. The alternative possiblity will surely result in a larger vet bill when it comes to light... or doesn't come to light... however you want to look at it.
I probably shouldn't be revealing this in light of recent "whistleblower" testimony about supposedly government concealment of non-human alien remains and other UAP-related info (we don't officially call them UFOs anymore) --- but I have it on questionable authority that the government has also been withholding information about the recently discovered Alaska cavern location of disappearing bread wrapper closures and much more importantly, those inevitably missing socks.
The dryer is not eating the socks. The washing machine is. They wash over the barrel. The dryer is blameless - there's no way it could eat anything.
Also, the twist ties are very useful in the garden. The plastic thingies make great wine glass ID tags at parties. Color coded or names sharpied on them.
April, your family's method of just twisting the bag works fine. About the cat - Mine didn't like the twist ties or the tags, but she really loved to eat rubber bans. They killed her.
Call me a snooty, pedantic party-poop, but if you are using "crore" you don't also use "million" to name numbers, you use "lakh" meaning one hundred thousand. So the winning entry should begin "Six crore and fifty lakh years ago".
Well, I was being overly snooty, hopefully with a mild comic undertone. But I worked for a short while in South Asia where people commonly speak about large numbers in terms of crores and lakhs, and the juxtaposition of crore and million made the entry seem funny "odd" to me, which took away from its being funny "ha ha". I don't know how to fix it. It would have worked for me just using "millions", but that wasn't the point of the contest.
It did occur to me, but not on first reading. "Four score and seven" is poetic. The juxtaposition of crore with million was like saying someone was five feet ten centimeters tall, or that a baby weighed 3 kilograms and 17 ounces. It struck me as odd, and as incorrect as a misplaced apostrophe. I know that this is too much attention paid to such a small point. In my defense, I'm in the middle of editing a long document — a task I normally don't do — by a brilliant man writing in English as a second language, and constantly correcting his usage is making me crazy. By the way, you're a great judge, Pat, and my comments are in no way intended as a personal attack on anyone. If they have raised some hackles, I apologize.
I see money in units of lakhs in Indian publications, so I thought it was a unit of measure. Is crores and lakhs a foreign concept or English language-wide? I was thinking maybe it is a specifically asian unit of measure?
I believe that lakhs and crores are Hindi terms borrowed for use in South Asian versions of English. For example, they are used by English speakers in Bangladesh even though the national language there is Bengali, not Hindi.
I struggle to understand why people feel the need to respond to things that clearly have nothing to do with them. If you don't eat chicken, you don't need to weigh in on a post about whether you'd eat a type of chicken. There doesn't need to be a third category for "I don't eat chicken but I nevertheless feel it is important to take part in your poll." Just move along and talk about song lyrics or politics or farts like the rest of us.
Ah but counselor, you (I assume politely...) overlook the Opinion Imperative --- the guiding principle of the Age of Opinion in which we find ourselves, thanks to the ubiquity and reach of social media and the flaws in our educational system. Certainly, as you undoubtedly know, opinions about the law, its processes and procedures, rank high on the list of favored, if largely uninformed, judgments. Now, I'm not about to defame my fellow Wordies here --- I graciously and gratuitously forgive them their trespasses --- but, for everyone else, the only requirements apparently are, not necessarily understanding what it is you're opining about or --- even actually having read it --- but a limber index finger (or thumb) and the (more or less) ability to bump a noun and verb together. A sufficient supply of exclamation marks is also evidently a must.
I don't know how to answer the poll. I prefer the little plastic thingies for bread, but twist ties for whatever. I reckon because the bread already comes with the little plastic thingy so I don't need to go searching for something to tie it back up. If I have to search for something to tie up whatever, I know exactly where the twist ties are stored.
Over on this side of the Atlantic, bread manufacturers do not use either of the objects pictured. The most common solution is a short strip of firm plastic, just over a 1/4 inch wide, with stiff wires on either edge. Instead of twisting, these doohickeys (for lack of a better name) are folded around the twisted end of the bag. They are much easier to apply (and remove) than any twist tie. Here's a link to a picture in which they can be seen:
They ARE versatile -- and I save (and use) mine for many things -- but they're not as good as the plastic clips for keeping the bread bag more tightly closed. And it's easier to snap on the clips than to twist the bag closed and then twist the tie around the twisted bag. If you get my meaning. . .
After thinking about it for a few days, I finally realized that the reason that I would never eat lab-grown "meat" has nothing to do with any "ickiness" of the final product, but simply because the whole concept is morally insane. My apologies for the screed, but these people are wasting an unbelievable amount of time and money to engineer a faux product to (either) salve the consciousnesses of tender-hearted wanna-be non-vegetarians, or (even worse) just to make a boatload of profit by exploiting the feelings of the same target audience. The resources they are wasting on this ivory-tower first-world morality show would be better spent on finding a way to help starving third-world countries to produce enough food to feed their own populations, without depending on a lot of "feel-good" donations from countries that are so worried about their own morals that they have to pick and choose what they are willing to eat.
P.S. I would have fewer objections if those scientists really were trying to engineer human cellular material, such as could be used to create artificial skin grafts for burn victims.
No one appointed me official gadfly here; Gene and Pat handle that role well all by themselves. But, allow me to suggest that the theoretical benefits of cultured meat extend well beyond the moral superiority to which you claim it would entitle us omnivores. Beyond the obvious, related to climate and animal cruelty, they could even include adding a piece to the complicated jigsaw puzzle of global food insecurity, much like genetically modifying crops to make them drought-resistant, while increasing yield and nutritional value, could yet be another piece. However, neither is a cure-all for the nagging, underlying issue of inequality. We already produce enough food --- the issue is access to it because of seemingly intractable political, environmental, and socioeconomic barriers. Thus there is no mutual exclusivity here and in fact, you could multiply the investment in cultured product many times over and apply it one way or another to world hunger and it would make little difference so long as these barriers remain. The core issues at this point for cultured product (apart from that naturally occuring "ick" or "eww" factor) is whether it can be scaled up sufficiently, at what cost and with what energy and other trade-offs, to realize these now theoretical benefits in any meaningful way. And FYI --- we have been growing skin for grafts in labs since the '80s with well-funded research regularly producing advances like natural-looking pigmented human skin equivalents. So again, if we have a mind to, we humans are capable of doing many beneficial things at the same time. If we have a mind to...
The final success or failure of "lab grown" meat will come down to whether it can be manufactured for a price that will turn a profit for the producers, but the fact remains that the proteins used for the production will have to come from a natural (living) source (presumably vegetable rather than animal), since the cost of assembling synthetic amino acids into artificial protein would be astronomical (even when compared to a 100% "organic", free-range chicken farm). This process will therefore add zero food to the global supply, it will merely repackage existing food into another shape. Just as with the ruinous practice of turning edible corn into gasohol, I think it would be more sensible to use the grain in its original form.
It will only turn a profit if it is sold at a price that allows the cultured product to be broadly and regularly consumed. I'm not sure where you got your information about amino acids, but they can be synthesized relatively inexpensively at scale. Research (for use in biomedical applications as well) shows promise in further reducing costs. Scale, at what cost and with what trade-offs, is the core consideration in everything to do with cultured product and the driving force that would allow it to eventually earn its keep, if it is to do so. I also take exception to your characterization about "repackaging existing food" with cultured product. If anything, you're actually multiplying "existing food," since you only need a relatively few cells from an existing animal to produce it. Your assumptions are based on the nascent state of the industry. Adding to the world food supply is thus aspirational and in the event, unlikely, as I said, to ever be more than one small piece of a very large puzzle that has little to do with food itself. That cultured meat can have a range of other potential benefits is clear, with all the caveats I mentioned. And, gasohol need not be made from edible corn. It can be made from biowaste. Brazil, for example, uses primarily sugar cane for upwards of 80% of its ethanol. But let's not get into a debate about the benefits of a renewable source of energy versus a complete reliance on fossil fuel. This is hardly the place to do that. The food v fuel issue is far more a political (and economic) matter on a country by country basis than anything else, and it not need be an "either/or" decision with the proper stewardship of arable land.
Yes, amino acids can be synthesized cheaply, but replicating them into specific proteins (and duplicating a structure) is not. Even if only a small amount of real chicken is used as a template, the proteins that they will be using for the foreseeable future will be siphoned off from grain. Similarly, while gasohol CAN be made from biowaste, that is not what is happening in America: almost all of the ethanol is coming from corn.
Can we simply agree to disagree? You think that this is an exciting opportunity, and I think it is a stupid waste of technological resources. Neither of us is likely to change the other one's opinion any time soon.
Amino acids are used as a component of the cell culture medium. To the extent they and the other components of this "soup" can be produced relatively inexpensively, the protein biomass can also be produced relatively inexpensively -- again at scale. Energy to produce this protein is the telling cost factor and debatable trade-off, not the cost of amino acids. As far as the almost exclusive use of corn in ethanol in the US, the US is also the world's largest exporter of the grain. The issue is the ethanol itself, not the corn it's derived from --- at least in the US. What I think is --- cultured product can help alleviate some enduring and critical issues. It will never be a cure-all, but to the extent it can mitigate these problems, it is worthwhile pursuing, until it isn't. What I do agree with you on is that whether this pursuit is "a stupid waste of technological resources" is very much in the eye of the beholder.
"Why would you eat fish and not chicken?" I have wondered about this. Fish clearly can feel pain. I have friends who love to "catch and release."They think they're doing the fish a favor. I think it's torture. Catch and eat I'm OK with; that's the food chain, but to inflict pain as sport? No.
I think it's because fish more or less swim freely, almost all land animals raised for food cannot move freely and live their short lives in a small confined space. Less guilt with fish maybe?
My dog (Maltese) is as sweet as they come. Still a dog. Full set of dog reflexes. And I get bit. So far nothing serious, but that is possible. I am faster now and avoid most bites and often go months if not years between bites. But, Biden is OK. Just that he may need to keep dogs at another place. get a cat for the White House.
"Get the App." And I am on my computer (Dell XPS) and it will not run in Windows. So give me a bit of a break. I do like bread twist ties, because no matter how much I twist the plastic bag it is never tight enough to get the flat plastic back in its proper place. it usually unwinds and sometimes just falls off. I save ol twist ties in my kitchen drawer. However, some advise us to save the flat plastics in our billfolds. Why? I never bother to look why. Some safety myth, I expect.
yes this and also the plastic things break easily. def a twist tie girl! what won't run in windows. the whole gene pool? I have a pc and I get it as a website geneweingarten.substack.com no problem. What specifically is the issue?
And if I were using a phone, I might want an app. But it will not work on a Windows 11 PC. Just a minor point. But at that time it seemed worth a comment.
I voted for "slitted wafers" (otherwise known as "bread tabs") only because they're easier to get off the first time. After we remove one, we put it in a Ziploc bag of similar tabs and replace it with a different kind of closure that's similar to a hair barrette (but designed for the purpose of closing bags). When the Ziploc bag gets full, we take it to an elementary school, where kindergarten teachers can use the tabs to teach colors, shapes, counting, etc.
I think the key is an alternate meaning of the word "mocked." Here it is used as in "mocking up," or replicating/reproducing something. "The heart that fed," refers to the heart of Ozymandias himself which fed the passions captured by the sculptor. Or...something else.
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, the heart that fed;
The sculptor's hands created a mockup (statue) of Ozy, and while doing this, the sculptor's heart (creativity) fed on (was inspired by) Ozy's passions (words and deeds).
To the questioner above: More than 5,000 people have gotten ink in The Invitational -- most of them just once. These days, though, there are far fewer one-off entrants, since nobody's getting here by idly paging through the paper and seeing a contest; everyone's a Gene Pool subscriber, and a higher percentage are the devoted Losers who see the Invite as a primary hobby every week.
And when the contest requires a lot of skill and craft (e.g., a rhyming poem, a song parody) rather than just a funny idea, the very best people among the week's entrants tend to blot up the ink. You're allowed to submit up to 25 entries, and my strong hunch is that some of this week's winners sent me their best 25 poems -- or at least 10 of them.
That said, we really enjoy hearing from new people, and I'm always thrilled to award them the coveted Fir Stink for their first ink -- a tree-shaped "air freshener" you (shouldn't) hang from your rearview mirror.
Some of us are situationally funny - maybe we could do a night of stand-up, but a career? No way. I envy people who can turn funny and smart on and on like a faucet.
>> Rachel was one of those Harper Lee’s.
Er...
Shouldn't that read "Rachel was one of those Harper Lees?"
I mean, I don't want to be picky, bro, but.....
Yes, but it's really easy to make a typo when you're writing quickly. You have to make allowances for any writing that's done live, just as you do with texts etc.
Kind as always, Pat. Or, as kind as a former copy editor can be. But I suggest there are far more complicated and thus correct, answers. William of Ockham was a notorious liar. For one thing, after careful consideration, one is left with the inescapable conclusion that Gene's typos are his equivalent of the so-called "Easter eggs" often found on DVDs. Those who remember DVDs, no doubt remember "Easter eggs" which were hidden bonus features, like extra movie footage, special offers, gags and the like. Gene knows how they delight his readers (and his ingrate brother in particular) who find them and thus, he occasionally sprinkles them in, and often in a foreign language, just for the sport of it.
Then there is the little known fact that the Pulitzer confers a lifetime exemption for both syntax errors and typos. So Gene has two lifetimes' worth and (almost certainly, smirking), makes these egregious howlers on purpose just because he can, and to sadistically rile up some members of his base. You, of course --- poor you --- on the other hand, have taken a blood oath which leaves you incapable of making these boo-boos (I use the euphemism here out of respect), let alone punctuation miscues, for fear of being visited in the dark of night by the hooded enforcers of the Perfection Society.
Wow, I can't believe I missed that. Gene obviously knows the difference, and this was obviously a typo, but he should be ashamed nonetheless.
It was deliberate, a choice for clarity. "Lees" reads weird, as though it is the plural of a nautical term. Sometimes, one must defy rules for clarity.
Ever read “ The Lees of Virginia?” As an older brother of a know-it-all younger brother who is often wrong but never uncertain, I once again find myself siding with Don.
I said I prefer twist ties but in all honesty, I don't know which I prefer. You see, everyone that shares DNA with my husband in this household (read: everyone except me) has some sort of genetic predisposition for losing whatever is supposed to hold the bread closed. I even attempted to use the reusable clips and they have gone the way of the twisty ties and plastic thing-a-ma-jigs. The thing disappears the moment one of these people touches the bread bag and they resort to twisting it shut and then inverting the open end back over the loaf to hold it closed which does work BUT WHAT ARE YOU ALL DOING WITH THE CLOSURE DEVICES? I occassionally find a twist tie in the cat food bowl along with a few hair elastics becuase my cat likes to keep her most precious things all in one bowl. However, I suspect (hope) that most of them end up under some heavy piece of furniture courtesy of a playful cat paw. The alternative possiblity will surely result in a larger vet bill when it comes to light... or doesn't come to light... however you want to look at it.
I probably shouldn't be revealing this in light of recent "whistleblower" testimony about supposedly government concealment of non-human alien remains and other UAP-related info (we don't officially call them UFOs anymore) --- but I have it on questionable authority that the government has also been withholding information about the recently discovered Alaska cavern location of disappearing bread wrapper closures and much more importantly, those inevitably missing socks.
The dryer is not eating the socks. The washing machine is. They wash over the barrel. The dryer is blameless - there's no way it could eat anything.
Also, the twist ties are very useful in the garden. The plastic thingies make great wine glass ID tags at parties. Color coded or names sharpied on them.
April, your family's method of just twisting the bag works fine. About the cat - Mine didn't like the twist ties or the tags, but she really loved to eat rubber bans. They killed her.
Sorry. PSA. Don't let your cat near rubber bands.
Call me a snooty, pedantic party-poop, but if you are using "crore" you don't also use "million" to name numbers, you use "lakh" meaning one hundred thousand. So the winning entry should begin "Six crore and fifty lakh years ago".
Hi, Snooty Pedant! Do you tell jokes so that people can't understand them?
Well, I was being overly snooty, hopefully with a mild comic undertone. But I worked for a short while in South Asia where people commonly speak about large numbers in terms of crores and lakhs, and the juxtaposition of crore and million made the entry seem funny "odd" to me, which took away from its being funny "ha ha". I don't know how to fix it. It would have worked for me just using "millions", but that wasn't the point of the contest.
You did get that it was a play on "Four score and seven."
It did occur to me, but not on first reading. "Four score and seven" is poetic. The juxtaposition of crore with million was like saying someone was five feet ten centimeters tall, or that a baby weighed 3 kilograms and 17 ounces. It struck me as odd, and as incorrect as a misplaced apostrophe. I know that this is too much attention paid to such a small point. In my defense, I'm in the middle of editing a long document — a task I normally don't do — by a brilliant man writing in English as a second language, and constantly correcting his usage is making me crazy. By the way, you're a great judge, Pat, and my comments are in no way intended as a personal attack on anyone. If they have raised some hackles, I apologize.
I see money in units of lakhs in Indian publications, so I thought it was a unit of measure. Is crores and lakhs a foreign concept or English language-wide? I was thinking maybe it is a specifically asian unit of measure?
I believe that lakhs and crores are Hindi terms borrowed for use in South Asian versions of English. For example, they are used by English speakers in Bangladesh even though the national language there is Bengali, not Hindi.
I struggle to understand why people feel the need to respond to things that clearly have nothing to do with them. If you don't eat chicken, you don't need to weigh in on a post about whether you'd eat a type of chicken. There doesn't need to be a third category for "I don't eat chicken but I nevertheless feel it is important to take part in your poll." Just move along and talk about song lyrics or politics or farts like the rest of us.
Ah but counselor, you (I assume politely...) overlook the Opinion Imperative --- the guiding principle of the Age of Opinion in which we find ourselves, thanks to the ubiquity and reach of social media and the flaws in our educational system. Certainly, as you undoubtedly know, opinions about the law, its processes and procedures, rank high on the list of favored, if largely uninformed, judgments. Now, I'm not about to defame my fellow Wordies here --- I graciously and gratuitously forgive them their trespasses --- but, for everyone else, the only requirements apparently are, not necessarily understanding what it is you're opining about or --- even actually having read it --- but a limber index finger (or thumb) and the (more or less) ability to bump a noun and verb together. A sufficient supply of exclamation marks is also evidently a must.
DON’T FORGET THE CAPS LOCK!!!!!!
"The question is biased and intellectually unsound. I refuse to answer" will now be my stock response instead of "I don't know."
I don't know how to answer the poll. I prefer the little plastic thingies for bread, but twist ties for whatever. I reckon because the bread already comes with the little plastic thingy so I don't need to go searching for something to tie it back up. If I have to search for something to tie up whatever, I know exactly where the twist ties are stored.
Over on this side of the Atlantic, bread manufacturers do not use either of the objects pictured. The most common solution is a short strip of firm plastic, just over a 1/4 inch wide, with stiff wires on either edge. Instead of twisting, these doohickeys (for lack of a better name) are folded around the twisted end of the bag. They are much easier to apply (and remove) than any twist tie. Here's a link to a picture in which they can be seen:
https://www.harry-brot.de/fileadmin/user_upload/220706-HAR-Kachel-1176px-Topmarke.jpg
I've run into those occasionally and like them.
Ohhh, those used to come on Saltines.
And just like the square bread tags, the strips can be color coded and imprinted with the "sell by" date.
I don't like either one and replace them with reusable clips. Our local recycler collects the plastic doodads for some obscure purpose.
...and that's what makes twist ties better. They are more versatile.
They ARE versatile -- and I save (and use) mine for many things -- but they're not as good as the plastic clips for keeping the bread bag more tightly closed. And it's easier to snap on the clips than to twist the bag closed and then twist the tie around the twisted bag. If you get my meaning. . .
After thinking about it for a few days, I finally realized that the reason that I would never eat lab-grown "meat" has nothing to do with any "ickiness" of the final product, but simply because the whole concept is morally insane. My apologies for the screed, but these people are wasting an unbelievable amount of time and money to engineer a faux product to (either) salve the consciousnesses of tender-hearted wanna-be non-vegetarians, or (even worse) just to make a boatload of profit by exploiting the feelings of the same target audience. The resources they are wasting on this ivory-tower first-world morality show would be better spent on finding a way to help starving third-world countries to produce enough food to feed their own populations, without depending on a lot of "feel-good" donations from countries that are so worried about their own morals that they have to pick and choose what they are willing to eat.
P.S. I would have fewer objections if those scientists really were trying to engineer human cellular material, such as could be used to create artificial skin grafts for burn victims.
No one appointed me official gadfly here; Gene and Pat handle that role well all by themselves. But, allow me to suggest that the theoretical benefits of cultured meat extend well beyond the moral superiority to which you claim it would entitle us omnivores. Beyond the obvious, related to climate and animal cruelty, they could even include adding a piece to the complicated jigsaw puzzle of global food insecurity, much like genetically modifying crops to make them drought-resistant, while increasing yield and nutritional value, could yet be another piece. However, neither is a cure-all for the nagging, underlying issue of inequality. We already produce enough food --- the issue is access to it because of seemingly intractable political, environmental, and socioeconomic barriers. Thus there is no mutual exclusivity here and in fact, you could multiply the investment in cultured product many times over and apply it one way or another to world hunger and it would make little difference so long as these barriers remain. The core issues at this point for cultured product (apart from that naturally occuring "ick" or "eww" factor) is whether it can be scaled up sufficiently, at what cost and with what energy and other trade-offs, to realize these now theoretical benefits in any meaningful way. And FYI --- we have been growing skin for grafts in labs since the '80s with well-funded research regularly producing advances like natural-looking pigmented human skin equivalents. So again, if we have a mind to, we humans are capable of doing many beneficial things at the same time. If we have a mind to...
The final success or failure of "lab grown" meat will come down to whether it can be manufactured for a price that will turn a profit for the producers, but the fact remains that the proteins used for the production will have to come from a natural (living) source (presumably vegetable rather than animal), since the cost of assembling synthetic amino acids into artificial protein would be astronomical (even when compared to a 100% "organic", free-range chicken farm). This process will therefore add zero food to the global supply, it will merely repackage existing food into another shape. Just as with the ruinous practice of turning edible corn into gasohol, I think it would be more sensible to use the grain in its original form.
It will only turn a profit if it is sold at a price that allows the cultured product to be broadly and regularly consumed. I'm not sure where you got your information about amino acids, but they can be synthesized relatively inexpensively at scale. Research (for use in biomedical applications as well) shows promise in further reducing costs. Scale, at what cost and with what trade-offs, is the core consideration in everything to do with cultured product and the driving force that would allow it to eventually earn its keep, if it is to do so. I also take exception to your characterization about "repackaging existing food" with cultured product. If anything, you're actually multiplying "existing food," since you only need a relatively few cells from an existing animal to produce it. Your assumptions are based on the nascent state of the industry. Adding to the world food supply is thus aspirational and in the event, unlikely, as I said, to ever be more than one small piece of a very large puzzle that has little to do with food itself. That cultured meat can have a range of other potential benefits is clear, with all the caveats I mentioned. And, gasohol need not be made from edible corn. It can be made from biowaste. Brazil, for example, uses primarily sugar cane for upwards of 80% of its ethanol. But let's not get into a debate about the benefits of a renewable source of energy versus a complete reliance on fossil fuel. This is hardly the place to do that. The food v fuel issue is far more a political (and economic) matter on a country by country basis than anything else, and it not need be an "either/or" decision with the proper stewardship of arable land.
Yes, amino acids can be synthesized cheaply, but replicating them into specific proteins (and duplicating a structure) is not. Even if only a small amount of real chicken is used as a template, the proteins that they will be using for the foreseeable future will be siphoned off from grain. Similarly, while gasohol CAN be made from biowaste, that is not what is happening in America: almost all of the ethanol is coming from corn.
Can we simply agree to disagree? You think that this is an exciting opportunity, and I think it is a stupid waste of technological resources. Neither of us is likely to change the other one's opinion any time soon.
Amino acids are used as a component of the cell culture medium. To the extent they and the other components of this "soup" can be produced relatively inexpensively, the protein biomass can also be produced relatively inexpensively -- again at scale. Energy to produce this protein is the telling cost factor and debatable trade-off, not the cost of amino acids. As far as the almost exclusive use of corn in ethanol in the US, the US is also the world's largest exporter of the grain. The issue is the ethanol itself, not the corn it's derived from --- at least in the US. What I think is --- cultured product can help alleviate some enduring and critical issues. It will never be a cure-all, but to the extent it can mitigate these problems, it is worthwhile pursuing, until it isn't. What I do agree with you on is that whether this pursuit is "a stupid waste of technological resources" is very much in the eye of the beholder.
"Why would you eat fish and not chicken?" I have wondered about this. Fish clearly can feel pain. I have friends who love to "catch and release."They think they're doing the fish a favor. I think it's torture. Catch and eat I'm OK with; that's the food chain, but to inflict pain as sport? No.
I think it's because fish more or less swim freely, almost all land animals raised for food cannot move freely and live their short lives in a small confined space. Less guilt with fish maybe?
My dog (Maltese) is as sweet as they come. Still a dog. Full set of dog reflexes. And I get bit. So far nothing serious, but that is possible. I am faster now and avoid most bites and often go months if not years between bites. But, Biden is OK. Just that he may need to keep dogs at another place. get a cat for the White House.
"Get the App." And I am on my computer (Dell XPS) and it will not run in Windows. So give me a bit of a break. I do like bread twist ties, because no matter how much I twist the plastic bag it is never tight enough to get the flat plastic back in its proper place. it usually unwinds and sometimes just falls off. I save ol twist ties in my kitchen drawer. However, some advise us to save the flat plastics in our billfolds. Why? I never bother to look why. Some safety myth, I expect.
yes this and also the plastic things break easily. def a twist tie girl! what won't run in windows. the whole gene pool? I have a pc and I get it as a website geneweingarten.substack.com no problem. What specifically is the issue?
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Get the app
And if I were using a phone, I might want an app. But it will not work on a Windows 11 PC. Just a minor point. But at that time it seemed worth a comment.
I voted for "slitted wafers" (otherwise known as "bread tabs") only because they're easier to get off the first time. After we remove one, we put it in a Ziploc bag of similar tabs and replace it with a different kind of closure that's similar to a hair barrette (but designed for the purpose of closing bags). When the Ziploc bag gets full, we take it to an elementary school, where kindergarten teachers can use the tabs to teach colors, shapes, counting, etc.
The hand that mocked them, the heart that fed;
I understand every line but this one; can anyone explain the meaning here?
Thanks!
I think the key is an alternate meaning of the word "mocked." Here it is used as in "mocking up," or replicating/reproducing something. "The heart that fed," refers to the heart of Ozymandias himself which fed the passions captured by the sculptor. Or...something else.
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, the heart that fed;
The sculptor's hands created a mockup (statue) of Ozy, and while doing this, the sculptor's heart (creativity) fed on (was inspired by) Ozy's passions (words and deeds).
Gene analyzed the poem in his chat many years ago, and said that is the one line that makes no sense!
Oh, I'm so glad to have Gene as company on this!
"Questions / observations to be answered in real time!"
Thank you.
Gene comes by his radicalocity (radicalness?) honestly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Shorr
Pink urine foams
Glomerulonephritis?
It must be summer.