these videos are better than most, but are still bad in one sense, they really fail to capture just how random walk the movements are. For example, in the first video the script says "a mediator protein complex arrives" as if it is directed there by some sort of orchestration agent. It's not. It's more like "a mediator protein complex drunkenly stumbles in and connects after a few thousand misses". Of course it's hard to make that into a captivating video.

As I said, the WEHI movies are pretty good in that at least they add some random walk into the motions. There was a harvard artist-professor (can't remember who) who literally made videos with exact parabolic and helical trajectories and then was crowing about how beautiful the biological system is.

▲

mongol 7 months ago | parent [-]

Thank you for clarifying what I have wondered. In most of these videos it appears as if the molecules have an intent and act on a plan. It makes me think "how do they know to do that".

	▲	throwawaymaths 7 months ago \| parent \| next [-]
		OK to extra clarify there are techniques to make the drunken walk more efficient. You might compartmentalize interacting bits into a smaller compartment which scales with the cube of the compartment ratio. You might anchor the participants in an interaction to a membrane, which turns a ~>6 dof search into a ~>3 dof (x, y, rotation) search. You might anchor the participants to a filament or DNA which makes the search a ~> 1 dof search.
	▲	jcims 7 months ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		If you just listen to the narrative of most of these videos, there is all sorts of agency referenced in the vocabulary. When in reality it's like a bunch of tiny magnets of indescribably complex geometry bashed around in a box until an eyeball pops out.