I began the section on DNA replication today in my intro-level biology class. And I was talking about the idea of primers, and the short segments that get made and are later removed, and how the new DNA strand is "stitched together" by ligase.
And the whole time I was just DYING to say, "It's just like a provisional cast-on- you start the loops and work for a while, then you go back, take it out, and continue on from there" but I realized that exactly 0% of my class are knitters, and none of them would get what I was talking about, and it would just be confusing. I'm usually pretty good at finding analogies that work for things to help people visualize them but I get so stuck on 'provisional cast-on' being such an apt metaphor for that part of replication that I have a hard time coming up with something most folks would relate to.
Someday, I would love to teach biology to knitters, because then I could use all my crazy metaphors for stuff and have people get it. (Even better: knitters who also know how to sew and who are avid cooks/bakers - there's a lot of biochemistry stuff that can be related to cooking and baking. And there's some geological stuff - especially the behavior of lava - that is not unlike the behavior of hot sugar syrup in candymaking).
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