If you can read the links on the side bar, thank a Biochemistry professor.

Or maybe a geneticist.

They're codons when they can be, and letters when they can't. The only problem is that this alphabet doesn't have a "B", "J", "O", "U", "X", or "Z". It's a shame about the two vowels. And B is a fairly common letter. I'll use DNA instead of RNA because then you don't have to be confused about a "U" that needs to be translated versus one that doesn't. And because I like DNA better.

Translations for the non-geneticist (from the top): Ayn, Emily, Duff.

I wish I was synesthetic. It would be really awesome to be able to live a metaphor. Like, something that actually tastes blue or green or round or something other than sweet, salty, bitter, spicy, etc. Normal taste things. I was reading something on synesthesia, this neuropsych guy who thinks that synesthesia is the root of language - phonemes and the movement of your mouth mimicking various elements of the object/representation/whatever to be symbolized by the word. And of course then variations on that theme. But then he talks about poets and artists as being half-synesthetic, as in, their senses aren't unitary but all messed together, and so they see in metaphors and similies and things, they think of the world not as a place that can be rigourously and accurately described but in imagery and metaphor. It's all separated up for me, and maybe that's good in the field I'm in; precise and accurate physical descriptions are more useful to scientists than evocative imagery. But I was thinking about the other things I do, and I realized that part of the reason I hate poetry is because you have to think in that fuzzy way, and I can't do it. I actually sat at my computer for about an hour trying to find a metaphor because I could tell that there should be a metaphor for me to use in a certain spot in a story, and I couldn't. Just out and out couldn't, and in the end settled for a precise description instead. Maybe that's why my writing always takes up more words, because when I could use a metaphor I instead use a description, and it takes up more space.

So I would like to be a little bit synesthetic. I think it would be cool, in a fuzzy, artsy sort of way. And by synesthetic, maybe I just mean able to come up with really cool metaphors. So maybe I just want to be artsy.

But that would be silly, because if I was artsy I wouldn't know what the hell the links on my sidebar meant without being clued in, and I certainly wouldn't have thought to put them there.