Monday, April 30, 2007

It is finished...

... the transition to being a fully-fledged Victorian, that is.

(sigh)

A month or so ago, I transferred my drivers' licence from Tas to Vic, and today, the final stage of transition - converting my car to Victorian registration - is now complete.

So, no longer will people feel welcomed by the happy greeting of "HI-751" as they see my car coming towards them... they will now have to put on their science nerd hats to make sense of "UTP-254" (and of course the TRUE biochem geeks will appreciate that since UTP is much less common than ATP I feel that my car is still a bit special :-)

Translation: for the non-science geeks among you who are currently scratching your heads and asking: "what the?", let me explain: ATP is adenosine triphosphate, which is a chemical, based on one of the nucleic acid bases, which is very heavily involved in energy transfer in metabolic cycles. UTP is uridine triphosphate - a similar type of chemical, but much less common, (and probably also much less useful) than ATP.

So now the little stuffed Tassie Devil on my dashboard will have to start earning his keep, as the only current representation of my car's Taswegian heritage.

4 comments:

BB said...

uridine...are you taking the piss, Caro?

Caro said...

Nope. Uridine is a nucleoside which is formed when uracil is attached to a ribose ring, and its molecular formula is C9H12N2O6.(you have to imagine the numbers are subscripts)

It bears absolutely no resemblance to urea (with a molecular formula of (NH2)2CO).

So sorry to disappoint, but no piss here :-)

Anonymous said...

Caro, that was *very* nerdy!

Caro said...

*sigh* yes, you can take the girl out of scientific research, but you can't take the science out of the girl!
:-S