Day: December 21, 2004

Engineering a Christmas Miracle

Linked from Instapundit (I wonder why? :-), this article by Glenn Reynolds at Tech Central Station extols the renewal of Christmas civility brought to us, well, let him say it:

…with online shopping picking up some of the slack, and in the process relieving the crowds, congestion, and frustration associated with traditional retail Christmases, old-fashioned Christmas shopping might actually become pleasant again, in a way it hasn’t been in decades — all thanks to the Internet.

Now there’s a Christmas miracle. Brought to you not by elves, but by the people responsible for most of the miracles in our lives: Engineers!

(Glenn, for those who are still unaware of it, is a blogophere giant. His Instapundit blog is a daily must-read. Oh, no wonder his article is linked from Instapundit… [heh, heh] Yeh, I’m not exactly giving him a hat tip for linking his own article. 🙂

Yeh? Well, get your own dirt

Instapundit links a story about researchers who are making “progress toward artificial life”—what was once called “creating life in a test tube.” However, key info from the article reveals that they are close to building an “erector set” version of life, not even approaching creation at all:

The soft cell walls are made of fat molecules taken from egg white. The cell contents are an extract of the common gut bug E. coli, stripped of all its genetic material.

This essence of life contains ready-made much of the biological machinery needed to make proteins; the researchers also added an enzyme from a virus to allow the vesicle to translate DNA code.

When they added genes, the cell fluid started to make proteins, just like a normal cell would.

Yeh, well, if they want to create a lil life on their own, they ought to get their own dirt first. This is more akin to someone being proud of baking cookies they bought at WallyWorld. Sure, they opened the package and put ’em in the cookie jar. Big whoopie.