MISTERy B

Why isn't there a 3Blue1Brown for biology? For context, 3Blue1Brown is a YouTube channel, founded by Grant Sanderson, that publishes videos about math. Sanderson built an "animation engine," called manim, to help create these videos; it's a Python library that uses code to render smooth animations. So why is nobody making highly visual, explanatory videos for biology in the same way that 3Blue1Brown is for mathematics, where each video explains a concept using a consistent visual aesthetic? I think there are at least three plausible explanations: 1. Biology demands a larger visual palette than math. Whereas many different ideas in math can be explained using a small number of symbols (charts, equations, shapes), maybe biology just requires a larger array of symbols. Showing a kinesin protein walk on a microtubule demands a completely different set of elements compared to, say, the evolution of a species. Perhaps this makes it harder to create visuals for biology. I'm not sure this holds up to scrutiny. Math is arguably as broad as biology. 3Blue1Brown has made videos on everything from Bayes' theorem to Hilbert's curve and how Bitcoin works, and all of them have the same visual aesthetic. 2. Biology doesn't have a rich history of visual ideas, so maybe it's harder to align on an aesthetic. Graphs and geometric shapes are many centuries old, and mathematicians consciously draw on these historical norms and conventions. A line chart looks like a line chart regardless of how it's styled. Biology, though, has no such "fixed" visual language, so it takes more effort to create each new visual. Maybe there's merit to this idea? Everyone draws a chromosome differently, for example; some people might show all 23 pairs at once, or zoom into a single locus, or abstract the entire chromosome down to a few letters. Biology operates across so many orders of magnitude that choosing the scale at which to convey an idea is itself part of the creative act, and there's no inherited convention telling anybody which scale to pick. 3. Maybe it takes too long to build visuals in biology, or the technical bar is too high? If you want to show how an enzyme works at the molecular level, for example, you'd need to understand PyMOL, Blender, etc. Iteration speeds are low, and the skill set needed to build one type of visual — like how molecules bind — won't necessarily apply to higher-order ideas, like evolution. This bottleneck is collapsing with AI tools, though. Claude now works directly in Blender and Adobe products, for example, so iterations will be much faster. Maybe we'll see a 3Blue1Brown-esque creator emerge for biology? I'm not sure. I'm hoping to write about these ideas, so if you have feedback (or reject my claims entirely) please let me know! I'd be keen to hear from you. > Painting by David Goodsell, whose visual aesthetic has been extremely transformative in terms of how people think about molecular biology.

If you are writing a book; make it a mystery. 😑

>The aliens are 5'4, 49 kg catgirls I have to go

JUST IN: 🇺🇸🇩🇪 Newly declassified FBI documents suggest Nazi Germany secretly developed saucer-shaped aircraft capable of hovering in the air.