I like cool biology articles because I really understand this stuff so poorly
Heh. This morning I had a consultation with a statistician, about a problem I'm working on related to how particularly antigenic epitopes are generated from the background of all cellular proteins. The consultant turned out to be a PhD candidate in the math department; a very nice lady, but completely, and I mean cmopletely, blank on biology. I mean, I started to give a brief explanation of the problem -- three words in, I said "amino acids" and a look of utter panic crossed her face. So I dropped down about five levels of complexity, and she seemed to sort of flounder along. Eventually I got to the part where I had a 20x15 table of frequencies to compare to background frequencies and she sighed with relief, drew a deep beath, and started muttering about regressions.
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Date: 2006-08-31 03:05 am (UTC)Heh. This morning I had a consultation with a statistician, about a problem I'm working on related to how particularly antigenic epitopes are generated from the background of all cellular proteins. The consultant turned out to be a PhD candidate in the math department; a very nice lady, but completely, and I mean cmopletely, blank on biology. I mean, I started to give a brief explanation of the problem -- three words in, I said "amino acids" and a look of utter panic crossed her face. So I dropped down about five levels of complexity, and she seemed to sort of flounder along. Eventually I got to the part where I had a 20x15 table of frequencies to compare to background frequencies and she sighed with relief, drew a deep beath, and started muttering about regressions.