Kieley Taylor

I'm entering the world of twits with a mild sense of wonder.

[Kieley Taylor @Kielstar11]

@summitbeer how many calories in Nialas IPA?

[Kieley Taylor @Kielstar11]

Here for this!

[Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D @RVAwonk]

I’m sorry and please feel free to unfollow me for not joining this collective march into extremism, but why is it so hard to understand that someone can be against antisemitism and also against the state-sanctioned murder of innocents? Those are extremely congruent beliefs.

[Dan Wuori @DanWuori]

Every parent begins as a first time parent.

I often get responses from parents of older/adult children wishing they’d had access to some of the information I share when their children were younger.

You know what? I wish I’d had it too.

At the time of my children’s birth I had a masters degree in early childhood education.

I was teaching kindergarten. (That’s me in my header photo.)

Did it give me an advantage?

Maybe to some degree. I certainly had a strong interest, and perhaps a little more knowledge than some.

If my son had been born at age 5, I would have crushed this whole parenting thing.

But when it came to babies, my knowledge was all academic.

On the day our son was born, my wife and I had exactly 0 days experience caring for a baby of our own.

The same holds true no matter who you are… every parent begins as a first time parent. And we all make mistakes and learn as we go.

I wish I’d had access to the great video examples made possible by social media as both a parent and a teacher… which is why I do what I do here on X.

“Back in my day” the primary opportunity to learn about child development was by reading. What an advantage it is to actually see some of these concepts in action.

I love thinking this platform might give new parents and grandparents a leg up.

But rest assured… we all do the best we can with the knowledge we have. And you were great.

So is this terrific new dad, shared to IG by ownitbabe.

[Jason Helmes @anymanfitness]

Last year, my daughter got cut from her 7th grade volleyball team.

She made the first cut, and thought she had a good chance. But on the second and final cut, they called her name, and she put her head down and walked out to the car where her mom and I were waiting.

She opened the car door, sat down, and started bawling. It was so hard to watch. She wanted to be on that team more than anything. I thought she was good enough, but the coach didn't.

My heart went out to her. But we didn't sugarcoat things for her. We told her we understood how much it stings. I've been cut before. Her mom had been cut from sports before, too. It's an ego shot and a gut punch.

We told her to go ask the coach what she could work on for next year. The coach gave her good feedback. And told her she was the "first girl cut". Which sounded promising, but only added to the sting. She said to me, "If only I had been a little bit better and made a few more serves..."

We told her she had a few choices. She could let this be the end. Or she could use this as fuel and fire. And to use it as motivation to work hard to make the team next year.

For a solid year, she practiced 4-5 times per week minimum. She went to every camp, every practice session she could find, found a travel team she could play on, and spent her entire summer at camps, practices, or in our backyard smashing the volleyball against our house (and denting our siding lol).

She had her tryouts this week. In the first tryout, she unleashed her new jump serve and hit 20 straight volleyballs over the net. The coaches were stunned. She said all the coaches came up to her immediately in the first 5 minutes with their clipboards and said, "What's your name?"

They started using her as a demonstrator, saying "Hey, Brooklyn, can you show everyone how to do this?" Even over the returning starters.

I asked her how she did when she got back. "Hey, you've been around a lot of volleyball in the last year. How did you do? Were you in the upper half of the players?"

She's a humble girl. And she proudly said, "I was the best player on the court."

She made the team, obviously. I'm beaming as a father this week.

I told her how proud I was of her. But not just because she made the team, or she's a great player now. But because she didn't give up. She didn't cry about it (after that first day). She didn't ask mom and dad to go lobby for her to be on the team.

She got after it and worked hard for a full year, taking no breaks. Her other volleyball friends were for sure taking it easier. Chilling out and vibing during the summer. She was attending camps and practicing and getting better while they were relaxing.

Sometimes as a parent, you hope you're teaching your kids how to do things.

But this was a case where she taught me how to do things. 100%.

[Mohamad Safa @mhdksafa]

Never tell a little girl that when a boy is mean or rude to her it's because he has a crush on her. Don't teach her that abuse is a sign of love.

[Kieley Taylor @Kielstar11]

@annikaemj You are many many things. I’m sorry the bad days are extra tough for you.

[Kieley Taylor @Kielstar11]

Wow!

[Niko McCarty. @NikoMcCarty]

Day 14 of great synthetic biology papers. Storing a video in DNA.

“CRISPR–Cas encoding of a digital movie into the genomes of a population of living bacteria,” by Shipman et al. (2017).

This is the GIF that made synthetic biology go viral. But how did it actually happen?

*****

DNA is an incredible way to store information.

It is information dense (it can store nearly 1.5 terabits per square millimeter of space, 800-times more dense than a hard drive) and extremely durable (last year, scientists sequenced a 2.4 million-year-old DNA sequence from an ice sheet in Greenland.)

Another way to think about this, from my prior essay: "a coffee mug filled with nucleic acids could store all the data produced in the last two years.” (https://t.co/odrTLYBVJC)

Despite the promise of DNA storage, this 2017 paper is the first demonstration of a movie being encoded in a living cell. The video itself is a recreation of Eadweard Muybridge’s running horse movie, which was made by stitching together still images in the late 1800s.

But how was it made?

***

To encode a video inside of living cells, we must first make the DNA.

DNA includes four letters, or nucleotides: A, T, G, and C. Each letter can be used to encode a distinct color, such as white, light gray, dark gray, or black. That is four colors in total; one for each letter. It is possible to encode more colors if you use pairs or triplets of nucleotides.

So that’s our colors sorted. But how do we know which color goes where in the image? In other words, how do we encode spatial information in DNA?

The secret is that DNA itself contains spatial information. We often say things like, “Gene A is encoded on Chromosome 6,” or “Gene B is located upstream of Gene C.”

We can take advantage of DNA's natural spacing to encode our video.

If you wanted to encode a 50 x 50 pixel image in DNA, for example, you would first map out the color of each pixel. Let’s say A = white, T = light gray, and so on. Then, you would synthesize a DNA strand, 50 letters long, for each row in the image. Next, you would insert these DNA strands into the genome in the order of their rows, such that the sequence located furthest upstream corresponds to row 0, and the strand located furthest downstream in the genome corresponds to row 49.

The challenge, of course, is getting the DNA snippets into the genome in the correct order, so that this spatial information is preserved. But there's an easy way to do that, too.

***

If you insert all the strands into the genome at random places, there will be no way to read them back out and reconstruct the image. The spatial information will be lost.

But there is a solution for this. In a 2016 Science paper, Shipman and co. figured out a clever way to insert DNA into the genome in a specific order. This technology has made all the difference for embedding videos in DNA. (https://t.co/QglKlLgPFH)

The 2016 paper shows that two proteins, called Cas1 and Cas2, can grab onto snippets of DNA that are electroporated into cells (literally, a pulse of electricity forces DNA into the cell) and then integrate them in the genome. These special proteins ALWAYS insert DNA in the same location, such that the first DNA snippet is inserted at position 0. A second DNA snippet is inserted at position 0, and the first DNA snippet moves to position 1. And so on.

After Cas1 and Cas2 have inserted dozens or hundreds of DNA strands into the genome, the final outcome is that the DNA snippet located furthest from position 0 must have been the first one to be acquired by the cells!

For the 2017 paper, Shipman synthesized all the DNA needed to encode the various pixels for each frame in the running horse paper. He then "shocked" this DNA into a population of cells. These cells took in the DNA snippets, embedded them in their genomes, and went about their day as if little had happened. When the researchers later sequenced these DNA arrays and averaged the results over mllions of cells, the team was able to retrieve the video’s information with >90% overall accuracy.

This paper is a beautiful demonstration of how a simple discovery (DNA acquisition via Cas1 and Cas2) can be used to capture and inspire people’s imagination. I like it a lot.

[Scope @scope]

90% of disabled people who experienced discrimination told us it led or contributed to them leaving their job.

Underestimation of his skills, negative attitudes, and a lack of support at work kept Kevin from using his talents 🧵

[Peter Yang @petergyang]

Shopify deleted 12,000 meetings this year.

Today, they went a step further with a tool that shows the $$$ cost of holding meetings.

I spoke to @nejatian (Shopify's COO) about meeting bloat and protecting craft time.

Here are 6 spicy takes from our interview 👇

[Monica Hesse @MonicaHesse]

1/ Earlier this week I became a Pulitzer finalist in the field of Commentary. I had to leave the ceremony early because my toddler was sick and wanted her mom, and yes, it felt a bit on-the-nose to write about feminist issues and then bug out of the Pulitzers for that.

[Dr. Nicole LePera @Theholisticpsyc]

Good girl conditioning will have you saying yes because you feel too guilty to say no.

Stop betraying yourself.

Say no. Often.

[Kieley Taylor @Kielstar11]

Yup.

[SXSW @sxsw]

.@chefjoseandres serving words of hope for the SX community during his Keynote at #SXSW 2023.

[Dr. Nicole LePera @Theholisticpsyc]

We have a generation of men struggling to understand their anger who act out in dysfunctional ways.

Let's talk about "Nice Guy" syndrome.

[Leslie Jones 🦋 @Lesdoggg]

We are fucking tired! How much time do y’all need?

[Zack Bornstein @ZackBornstein]

I don’t understand how COVID is spiking again after we’ve tried everything from pretending it’s over to pretending it never happened

[Techni-Calli @Iwillleavenow]

Hello, all, it's thread-o-clock.

Today, we're going to describe various privacy issues using only John Mulaney gifs.

[Kieley Taylor @Kielstar11]

Watch until the end. This just made my day.

[Kieley Taylor @Kielstar11]

Absolutely love this. As someone without a mind’s eye (aphantasia) and the cadence of the writing is much more forward in my interpretation of the writing. Take notes.

[Kieley Taylor @Kielstar11]

@DrGJackBrown When someone swears in a work presentation, stopping to apologize exclusively to me, a woman. Wtf.