13 minutes ago, Force Majeure said:

Its sort of like listening to a meta discussion if you've only ever played Settlers of Cataan.

26 minutes ago, Biophysical said:

I was at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. Not as nice as Oxford, but assaj good structure department. Had the opportunity to take an X-ray Crystallography class from Michael Rossman, if that means much to you.

Protein structure via EPR is pretty cool, and I was, doing simple stuff, mostly large domain movement. It's nice to do work at reasonable concentrations, in solution. I did a post doc at Washington University in St. Louis, now I'm in industry.

Very cool. I had to look him up but I recognize where I saw the name now, we had a whole segment on rhinoviruses and picornaviruses in virology in my undergraduate and we went through viral structures. That's awesome!

Yea, I've been working at unreasonable concentrations for years, it always bugs me working on systems with low copy number in a cell and trying to observe them at two or three orders of magnitude higher than anything remotely resembling a reasonable local concentration, so that has huge appeal. Good pictures though once you get above 1 mM!

13 minutes ago, citruscannon said:

Very cool. I had to look him up but I recognize where I saw the name now, we had a whole segment on rhinoviruses and picornaviruses in virology in my undergraduate and we went through viral structures. That's awesome!

Yea, I've been working at unreasonable concentrations for years, it always bugs me working on systems with low copy number in a cell and trying to observe them at two or three orders of magnitude higher than anything remotely resembling a reasonable local concentration, so that has huge appeal. Good pictures though once you get above 1 mM!

Yeah, resolution is king, in so many ways. So of course I went the other way and did kinetics as a post doc with FRET. Basically hybrid structure/kinetics where we watched domains move in real time to try and understand how our protein worked.

I don't think I ever got to 1mM. That sounds like a nightmare. I don't think I ever had enough material to get to that concentration.

3 minutes ago, Biophysical said:

Yeah, resolution is king, in so many ways. So of course I went the other way and did kinetics as a post doc with FRET. Basically hybrid structure/kinetics where we watched domains move in real time to try and understand how our protein worked.

I don't think I ever got to 1mM. That sounds like a nightmare. I don't think I ever had enough material to get to that concentration.

awesome. I'm looking at the feasibility of supplementing my current work with PREs (via lanthanides or something similar) via NMR, or working on a FRET-based assay right now actually, trying to deal with mechanics of disordered domains. I may have to PM you about your experience with FRET and EPR... We've got an EPR spectrometer they are about to set-up which I may have access to next year. This forum is the last place I thought I'd be talking about this...

23 minutes ago, citruscannon said:

awesome. I'm looking at the feasibility of supplementing my current work with PREs (via lanthanides or something similar) via NMR, or working on a FRET-based assay right now actually, trying to deal with mechanics of disordered domains. I may have to PM you about your experience with FRET and EPR... We've got an EPR spectrometer they are about to set-up which I may have access to next year. This forum is the last place I thought I'd be talking about this...

Hah! Feel free! It's been a few years for me on EPR, but I could probably be a little useful. Certainly my odds of being helpful with FRET are a fair bit higher.

some work I did before christmas:

Major Rhymer on an attack run with advanced proton torpedoes. I envisaged some kind of side on attack going on, before Rhymer makes a flanking dive from above inflicting massive damage. I took strong inspiration from the dive bombing runs taken by American planes on Japanese carriers during the battle of midway, (and the reverse) - composition was strongly informed by art of these images.
Hope you like it!

8 hours ago, citruscannon said:

some work I did before christmas:

Major Rhymer on an attack run with advanced proton torpedoes. I envisaged some kind of side on attack going on, before Rhymer makes a flanking dive from above inflicting massive damage. I took strong inspiration from the dive bombing runs taken by American planes on Japanese carriers during the battle of midway.
Hope you like it!

Beautiful work!!

FFG needs to hire you for doing the art of some new ship!

On 12/31/2017 at 5:51 AM, Odanan said:

Beautiful work!!

FFG needs to hire you for doing the art of some new ship!

haha, thanks! So much yet to learn though, I don't think I'm even close to what the current artists for FFG do on their bad days, so still a ways yet to go!

Just now, citruscannon said:

haha, thanks! So much yet to learn though, I don't think I'm even close to what the current artists for FFG do on their bad days, so still a ways yet to go!

That is objectively untrue.

12 minutes ago, Biophysical said:

That is objectively untrue.

I have spent an inordinate amount of time scrutinising the minor details of Darren Tan's paintings mostly repeating to myself "how does he DO that so well?!"

1 hour ago, citruscannon said:

haha, thanks! So much yet to learn though, I don't think I'm even close to what the current artists for FFG do on their bad days, so still a ways yet to go!

Hold on right there.

1 hour ago, Biophysical said:

That is objectively untrue.

This. ^

Also this: >

33 minutes ago, Odanan said:

Hold on right there.

This. ^

Also this: >

haha okay, point taken. Even despite the myriad of perspective problems with that image, the quality of the rendering is still very good. I think to better elaborate on what I was saying, I sometimes find difficulty knowing where to limit detail. The thing is, a really well done painting makes compromises in detail to enhance the parts of the painting the artist wants you to look at. And that balance is something that the FFG artists generally do very well.

I mean take for example what I would consider to be compositionally one of Darren's least interesting images, it's still an exceptionally well-rendered image. I would kill to watch him paint, to see his process, since it seems like every artist has a different approach. I just really struggle with getting my digital art to look this polished without an inordinate amount of work.

And I think he probably spends a long time on each image, sure, but, puts out art at a pretty fast clip so he's practiced enough that he is likely making the right stroke 8 times out of 10, whereas with me I feel like it averages closer to 3 or 4. So it means I have to spend a lot longer working an image to get it to look ok.
that's all I mean

14 minutes ago, citruscannon said:

And I think he probably spends a long time on each image, sure, but, puts out art at a pretty fast clip so he's practiced enough that he is likely making the right stroke 8 times out of 10, whereas with me I feel like it averages closer to 3 or 4. So it means I have to spend a lot longer working an image to get it to look ok.
that's all I mean

That may be the difference between a professional and a skilled hobbyist.