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Confusing Science Names.
So today in biology class I learned about intron and exon sequences in genes.
Introns are the parts of the gene that intervene with gene transcription and are removed before it starts. Exons are the parts that are expressed in the transcribed mRNA.
The problem here is that the exons are the parts included in gene transcription and introns are the ones excluded from it. Seriously, who came up with these names?
Comments
Biologists, one assumes.
From what I remember of my biology classes, introns are on the inside of a gene (in- is a Latin prefix for inside) and exons are on the outside (ex- means outside). I may be wrong, though.
Cations and anions. Cations gather at the cathode, which is negative, thus cations are positive.
Not that hard. Opposites attract.
The one that always got me was positive feedback, which is a bad thing.
See: birth.
The problem here is that you are seeing it the wrong way. Think of coding, what the programmer does in the background is "introduce" the code (intron) and what the end user does is see the "expression"(exon) derived from it.
When you turn on a light, you are closing a circuit. When you turn off a light, you are opening a circuit.
It makes sense when you think about the term "closed loop".
However, that didn't prevent it from being confusing. Especially since the word for turning something on in Chinese is the same as the word for opening something.
All those rules for how to name compounds in Chemistry...
^Have you taken Organic Chemistry?
Because you haven't SEEN confusing until you've taken Orgo.
Yeah, just looking at one of my friends' o-chem homework nearly broke me.
But at least orgo names have systematic names, apart from some common names.
What's worse is biology. Stuff inevitably gets named after whoever discovered it. So you get names along the lines of "Jones cells" and "Smith's complex". All over the fucking place. There is no sense of order.
And then there's taxonomy and the arguments over whether x or y discovered something first, leading to different sources giving them completely different names.
Well, you have that sort of thing in math and physics too. What's even more confusing is when stuff is named after people who didn't discover it (L'Hospital, you cheating ass), or after people whose more notable achievement was something completely different (Newton's Laws? What about all of calculus?).
This is the standard, actually. (If it weren't, too many things would be called after Euler.)
Maybe it's because my career is heavier on physics (or Leibniz), but Newton's laws are what first comes to mind when the name comes up.
There's no excuse for Newton's law of cooling, though.
I think mathematicians like Leibniz more anyway. Or at least my first year university teacher did.
Well, people seem to like his dy/dx notation a whole lot better. I have to agree with them, really.
dy/dx tells it like it is. All y' is good for is taking less time to write down.
y' isn't even Newton's notation. Newton's notation was ẏ.
But dy/dx isn't even a fraction.
It's been awhile, but don't you treat it as one when solving differential equations?
Yeah. Plus, it can be defined as the limit of a fraction, so the notation at least makes some intuitive sense.
OH DEAR GOD FLASHBACKS TO THE KREBS CYCLE SOMEBODY SHOOT ME NOW ;.;
We used dot notation for derivatives like, once ever. I think it was Lagrangians in classical mechanics.
Not only that, but you also do that to cheese some of the trickier integrals, like arc length. And because the derivative increment carries physical significance as an actual amount when determining the geometry of your elements of integration.
Ever the contrarians, engineers do sometimes use dot notation. From the top of my head, power, heat transfer rate, mass flow, volumetric flow (when not using Q, anyway), etc.
Ugh. Don't even get me started on the overlap between engineering and software. There's relatively little way to know ahead of time whether you'll be using theta or phi as azimuth, or y or z as up.
IJBM: "sin^-1 (x)" (for arcsine of x) and "sin^2 (x)" (for sine of x, squared) being used together.
This is why I write "arcsin".
That's the typical reasoning behind preferring "arcsin". Argument against is, seriously, six-word function names? I used always use "asin" when it wasn't on something I was handing in, but I guess it's too easy to confuse that with some variable a multiplied by sine of whatever.
It's rather fast to type or even write (in cursive) "arcsin" anyway. It takes maybe about a second or less longer to write "arcsin" than "sin-1".
Oh, in my math work, I write variable names in print, and function names in cursive.
I'm not annoyed at it taking a long time to write, I just find it aesthetically unappealing.
Also I can't cursive lol.