Venkatesh Rao

More later, just having some fun.

9. Upon reflection, I don't really know what cells are _for_. (I know, I know, that may be the wrong framing entirely.) Should I think of them as little factories, taking simple inputs (sugars etc) and pumping out complex proteins? Not sure, exactly.

10. If you look naively at a lot of diagrams, it often seems the cell wall is a relatively small part of the cell. In yeast, at least, it makes up 10-25% of the dry mass of the cell(!) I don't know the % of the volume, unfortunately.

11. There's something like 6 orders of magnitude between small-genome life and large-genome life! In terms of linear dimension it's something like the difference between the height of a large ant hill and the height of Mt. Everest.

12. Related: One thing the book does well is just put in-your-face over and over and over the staggering diversity of life. Protons, electrons, and neutrons are nifty things.

13. Also related: the book rubs in your face the extent to which the biological world is a repository of extraordinary nanomachines which we humans can go discover. It's just this incredible extant resource of ideas and principles and machinery.

And we understand so little about it still. Fun to realize, for instance, that we only pretty recently understood the basic structure of the ribosome - the nanomachine that turns messenger RNA into proteins.

(I know, I know, the broad point here certainly isn't news. Still, the book is fun to read for the onslaught of lovely examples.)