Zirealism

Probably contains pat of mad cow lips and butt-holes, pulverized chicken peckers, with genetically mutated grain cereal binders, xanthan gum, red dye #5, and a dash of rat-droppings for added zest.

...some hot dogs come with a lot of emotional baggage.

At the free clinic we used to just deal with the same old classics that we've been dealing with since the dawn of time, Salmonella, Trichinosis, E. coli. But now... Jesus Christ. This type of freewheeling unprotected relationship between man and foodstuff just isn't safe anymore. The stuff out there now will eat away small pieces of your brain, violently inflame every mucus membrane in your body, or some new horrors we try to keep locked down in Fort Detrick. And the kids these days, Jesus, it used to be effective culinary education to throw up a picture of someone with an advanced case of Trichinosis on a projector and afterwards you'd watch half of 'em run off to join a monastery and swear off meat all together. I always tell 'em, "It's all fun and games until someone catches a food-borne disease found only in undercooked okapi flesh.", but they don't listen now. No, times have changed, Biscuit. Times have changed.

Yes, times have changed a lot. I've been to Ft. Detrick, the big building with many, many exhaust stacks and pipes sticking out of the roof looks scary because it gives one an idea of how many air-tight rooms there are inside and how hazardous the stuff they work with might be. I'd heard of the New Guinea disease "kuru" some time ago, but lately it seems that the researchers are relating the prion diseases like kuru, BSE, and several other diseases to protein prion variations. One recent bit has a kind of monkey that doesn't get monkey AIDS because it doesn't have site receptors on certain protiens. Blocking site receptors or adding protiens that site bond to capture the bad guys could be done. Proteins don't always replicate with 100% accuracy. There is a Swiss Protein Data Base that has models of lots of proteins and software for working on them. I think that there are 22 basic amino acids that make all of the proteins. Maybe someday they can build a better hot dog.

SPDB

Heheh....funny is a man talkin to a sammich.

A couple of distributed computing projects are being run concerning protein folding and misfolding. Standford has one called Folding@Home.
A few other universities, as well as Intel, set up Distributed Folding. I envision a future where we might fold hotdogs with total awareness and security.

Distributed Folding

It's one thing to be taken down by tuberculosis since that's several million years of evolution at work there. I mean, I can respect losing to another cellular lifeform, especially since the little bastards adapted to antibiotics so quickly. Then there's the virus, little mercenary bits of nucleic acid that they are. That's a toss up. I can respect a virus like Ebola simply for the theatrics of the 'crash and bleed out', but they're not technically living. It comes down to that, really. For all the elegance of their programming they still rely on the superior evolutionary resources and structures of the cell to propagate. But prions? Screw that. Anything so fundamental that I could create it using a cup of primordial ooze and a Van de Graaff Electrostatic Generator doesn't deserve to take down a complex multicelled organism such as myself. They don't even use the ingenious intercellular mechanisms we've developed to propagate. We're just heaping piles of raw material to them. It'd be like Ford taking apart all their meticulously designed and perfectly functional cars and car-building robots for scrap just so they could make them into improvised soapbox derby cars and sell them to twelve-year-olds.

Damnit, humanity is not supposed to be slowly deconstructed simply because of the laws of chemistry.

...Unless you're talking about strong acids or bases, or certain types of solvents, or fluorine, chlorine, or any of the other five halogens, or... The point is that type of stuff is not supposed to happen unless a chemistry lab goes horribly, horribly wrong, and even then if you screw up you damn well know. My brain doesn't literally rot away in my mid-forties without warning because I screwed up the bananaline lab twenty-five years ago.

Those small proteins that you can make with goo and static electricity, they found them floating in space, too. They're everywhere! The Seeds of Life are floating around all over the place. After I wrote above that proteins don't always replicate with 100% accuracy, I thought that it is sort of a good thing that they don't or there wouldn't have been any evolution. The down side is that the virii without a shell go around being Merry Pranksters not waiting for nanotech to invent them. One of my favorite pictures from the Book of Industrial Accidents was the analine dye factory in Kiel, Germany that blew-up making a hole a quarter-mile wide and 350 feet deep. That, and the bat guano explosions. But I don't know what the Creations are going on about because Life is implicit in matter, those little protein guys are all over the place just waiting to start a primordial ooze colony so they can do some cluster-computing.

Carbon-caged metals have sort of got my interest. They've found some more than 200,000 years old, so there not new and occur in nature. I saw one listed at LANL, I think, that was one molecule of platinum inside of a C60 molecule with the in-between laced with nitrogen. They said that it was harder than a diamond and way more bang than plastique. It's a catagory they call sub-atomic energetics. There's a Japanese method that produces a better than 50% yield. But you could do it in your garage with a heliarc welder. I have no idea how to detonate something harder than diamond. The Army DARPA is working on this stuff, too, caged metal energetics. I believe than it has an expansion rate of way more than 35,000 feet per second, the C60 platinum. That could be an exploding hot dog!

Damn, I could have sworn the Buckyball occurred only in the laboratory. I mean, everything I know about chemistry I learned through osmoses, but my old high school chem. teacher hyped Buckminsterfullerene like it was the greatest thing since Avogadro's number (Christ, we made these little geodesic spheres out of paper and hung them from the classroom's ceiling, then the bastard made one of us explain the meaning of the little paper soccer balls every time anyone new walked into the classroom). I just assumed it was like technetium, and the naturally occurring stuff got beaten all to hell before someone could discover it. Buckyballs rock, though. They originally thought it could be used to transport medication in a handy-dandy carrying-case, but the nanotech guys are on this thing like rat feces on a carnie hotdog. Carbon nanotubes are the way of the future, my friend. Unbreakable ceramics, alloys, and glass, mile-high skyscrapers, space elevators, nanocircuitry, it's like there's nothing fullerene structures can't do.

And they're up to a 50% yield now? Kickass. Bring on the graygoo umm... artificially constructed mechanical prions mrmm... helpful nanoagents That could never ever, ever, ever, harm us in any way and they'll brush your teeth and cut your hair for you and spontaneously manufacture ice cream and candy out of airborne particulate on command, too. Yes that's the ticket! Bring on the Blue Goo!

I must've pissed some sorority chick off pretty bad back in the Alpha Delta Pi comments.

From: adpiprincessXX@XXX.com*
Please have a look at the attached file.
Hotmail has permanently blocked the following potentially unsafe attachment(s): your_website.pif (23 KB)

From: sgdesai@XXXXXXmail.com*
Please read the attached file.
Hotmail has permanently blocked the following potentially unsafe attachment(s): all_document.pif (23 KB)

Sure I called the whole lot of 'em shockingly illiterate microcephalic imbeciles fanatically participating in a jailhouse matriarchy akin to the Kool-Aid chugging activities of Jonestown, and I did leave my email at the top of those posts just one short, tempting click away. But still... Jesus Christ!

Addresses censored to protect umm... yeah... I really don't know why I bothered. Just a 'heads up'.

I can't find the pertickular reference that has C60 caged metals found in coal deposits but they occur naturally, there's lots about carbon caged metals; Fuller didn't invent them but more like discovered them. One thing that I would like to try with nanotubes now that they are abundant and commercially available is to try making large quantities of polymer water: H02H02H02...etc...It was done with glass microcapillaries, and polymer water has some strange characteristics: it has the consistency of thick latex paint and boils at a low temperature, so low-energy cool steam engines might be possible. But it has to be made by chaining water molecules through a tiny tube, so you can see that you'd need lots of tubes to get any kind of a yield quantity. Gentlemen! Start the Engines of Creation!

Don't open a .pif file, especially one from an enraged up-the-butt-taking sorority chicklet. Meanwhile, here's a nice picture of Vanna White eating a Hot Dog.