Month: January 2020

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How I turned from a Jeep Wrangler enthusiast to a Wrangler-hater in just one day. All it took was renting the car.

Decided to drive from Atlanta to Chattanooga (the one from Glenn Miller’s “Chattanooga Choo Choo” and “Sun Valley Serenade”). That’s about 200 miles (300 km). And I took the beloved 2019 Jeep Wrangler Sahara. Brand new.

I’ll skip details about the discomfort of the interior (narrow), controls, and glasswork – that’s a matter of taste and style, and I didn’t like a lot there. But the worst thing about the Wrangler is the Death Wobble, and I experienced it all the way today. It would have been good to know about it beforehand.

Atlanta-Chattanooga: good roads, no traffic lights, and a speed limit of 70 miles per hour allow you to speed up to 120 km/h and drive like that for almost two hours without barely slowing down. A perfectly smooth road turns into sections with slight unevenness. And then it starts! At the speed of 120 km/h – shaking and harsh vibration of the entire car, which stops if you slow down to about 40-50 km/h.

Today, I had this issue about three times, each time requiring a combination of two factors: speed over 100 km/h and uneven road (or better, suddenly uneven). Learned to slow down in advance on uneven roads, and simply not to drive so fast at night.

Maybe that’s normal for a car that is supposed to be an off-roader, not for highways, but damn it, it’s the twenty-first century, others seem to manage. Do you know any other car that goes into death wobble at 120?

By the way, a day’s rental of the Wrangler at Routes cost only 24 bucks (I stupidly paid six more to the broker HolidayCars). Ridiculously cheap. Kept waiting for the catch, but so far so good, hopefully, it won’t happen.

In general, now I love my Toyota RAV4 even more 🙂

Happy Birthday! All the best!

Yesterday, in the Nature journal, British scientists (the real ones, from Cardiff) published an interesting article. They managed to assemble T-lymphocytes that can bind to almost all types of cancer.

The technology itself is not new. CAR-T therapy involves implanting specially engineered lymphocytes with chimeric receptors targeted at a specific type of cancer and individual.

In this case, it seems they created a “universal soldier” that works across a broad range of target molecules.

This has always been a rather expensive procedure, up to 1 million dollars, partly because it requires fine-tuning. The novelty—seemingly a discovery—is only the first swallow.

It will be interesting to observe.

I have always been amazed – why on earth should we know and remember when someone like the hypothetical Pushkin was born if the school years of all these luminaries went relatively unnoticed in history, and some even began writing closer to their life’s twilight.

For “practical” purposes, it’s sufficient to remember for about a decade when this or that author was in their prime, and who their contemporaries were (especially in the same location), and what significant events were happening around them (especially in the same location). It’s never and nowhere important whether Pushkin was born in 1799 or, say, five years later (unless you are a Pushkin scholar, of course). Yet, in school, we had to learn all these dates for some reason.

To me, it seems far more important to remember that Pushkin’s brightest works came within 15-17 years starting around the era of the Decembrists and Nicholas I, around which time there was also war with the Persians and Turks and the Caucasus in general, and that young Lermontov and Gogol were loitering somewhere nearby. That’s it, unforgettable. And no need to remember any dates.

I stayed at home and rooted for them 😉

To the left – a dead end, and to the right – a dead end. Behind – a large neighborhood. Very typical for America. By the way, there’s a park 50 meters away (with a parking lot). Apparently, it bothers no one, and everybody here drives rather than walks

A cyclist’s dream: a straight 70km bike track with hardly any slowdowns or hills. My average speed on a 14-km section was 28km/h, and that’s just because the dew hadn’t dried yet and it was scary to go any faster. Over the weekend, I covered 80 km on such tracks, 30 today and 50 yesterday. Someday, I need to ride a hundred in a day

It’s hard to believe, but this is our winter

I was wondering, isn’t it curious that one of the four nitrogenous bases that make up the DNA of any organism is named (in Russian translation) “gavnin” (guanine)? There’s something to it 🙂

(Julius Bodo Unger isolated it from bird droppings, which he studied to develop better fertilizer, hence it was named guanine)