Author Archives: theusernamewhichismine

Why is deflation bad?

This topic is probably well known to people with an understanding of economics, but that isn’t most people so I decided I wanted to write about it. With most of the Western world experiencing sky-high inflation these days, people are wondering when prices will ever come down. A reduction in prices would be an example of deflation, and the Fed has for years been working tirelessly against that, which might make some people wonder “why wouldn’t it be a good thing if prices went down?”

To begin with, technology is supposed to be deflationary and in this case it’s seen as a good thing as it allows the economy to grow faster and people to afford more things. However while deflation is expected in certain sectors, the economy as a whole should not be deflationary as it can pervert the market forces which lead to growth. In a deflationary environment, money gains value as time goes on and this means the rich get richer just by holding money, they don’t even have to invest it. Not only that but loans are very expensive because the value of money keeps going up. Both of these facts discourage investment and encourage sitting on wealth instead, which decreases economic growth and productivity.

This is often cited as to why despite its use throughout human history, a gold standard is not appropriate for a modern economy. A gold standard would ensure that money can only be created through mining more gold, and since the economy is expected to continue growing as more people join the workforce and more technology is rolled out, this would by necessity induce deflation. Deflation would then discourage investment and encourage hording, hindering economic growth and ossifying social mobility as old money becomes unassailable by new money.

For all these reasons most central banks have an inflation target of around 2%, let’s all hope they manage to get inflation in line.

My favorite mystery trope: the untwist

Before I begin, WordPress tells me this will be my 100th post, yay! Also, here there be spoilers for Deadly Premonition.

I’d like to talk about my favorite mystery trope, I don’t know if it has a real name but I’ve come to calling it “the untwist.” An untwist is when a plotline that you thought was resolved turns out not to be resolved after all, making its true solution all the more unexpected. The plotline that got me first thinking about the untwist was Deadly Premonition, a game with an incomprehensible budget allocation but a strangely alluring story.

The player takes the role of Francis York Morgan (please, just call him York, that’s what everyone calls him). Throughout the game, York will turn to himself and talk to an unseen character “Zach.” York’s conversations with Zach always appear to give Zach total agency over the situation: Zach is asked what he wants to do, or what he thinks, or what the proper course of action for York is. In many ways Zach appears to be guiding and leading York through his entire adventure, but whenever anyone asks about Zach, York dodges the question and refuses to give a straight answer.

At this point in the story I and a couple of other people I know concluded that Zach was a stand-in for the player. Games have occasionally had a habit of addressing the player directly, and having York ask for guidance from the player (who is directly controlling York’s actions through the controller) seemed like an eccentric way to continue in this tradition. Even when York sort of gives an answer on “who is Zach” to Emily (his apparent love interest), he doesn’t say much more than that Zach has “always been with him” and “helps him in every way.” This just seemed to some of us as more confirmation that Zach was a player stand-in since the answers were still vague enough to justify that conclusion.

Speaking of York’s non-answer to Emily, he tells her a story about how when he was little his father killed his mother, cryptically saying “at times we must purge things from this world because they should not exist, even if it means losing someone we love.” Yeah it’s that kind of game. This “why did York’s father kill him mother” mystery appears to take center-stage now that the “who is Zach” mystery has been “solved.” After this point Zach is rarely mentioned and the focus seems to have shifted, again lending credence to the idea that the the mystery is solved and the player was supposed to believe that Zach is just a stand-in for the player but that the game just can’t come out and say it because it doesn’t want to totally destroy the 4th wall. But that the simple answer isn’t the true story.

In the very last moments of the game’s story, York sees a vision of his father killing his mother again. This time he sees the whole scene, in which another character is shown to have “infected” his mother with a tree-like eldritch horror which is growing inside her. This causes his father to utter the line “at times we must purge things from this world because they should not exist, even if it means losing the one we love.” But now he adds another line: “I couldn’t do it, but you have to, you have to be stronger, OK Zach?”

Those two words “OK Zach?” had me staring agape at my screen, suddenly a plotline I thought was solved had been unsolved, then resolved in front of me while a separate plotline also got solved. The story continues with York realizing he is the alter-ego of Zach. Zach couldn’t handle seeing what his father did and so allowed a different personality (York) to take over while he went dormant inside of York. York asks Zach for guidance not because Zach is the player, but because Zach is the personality that is guiding York while York is taking over. This revelation causes Zach to re-take his place as the primary personality, complete with a new scar, a new hair-color, and a new voice just to complete the picture.

The twist worked so well for me because it solved a mystery I didn’t even realize was unsolved. As I said, I had assumed Zach was an eccentric way for York to refer to the player the whole time, so to see that he was actually a character in his own right was mind-blowing. I’ve talked with some others who didn’t have quite the same experience, they didn’t think the Zach mystery was actually solved so weren’t as dumbstruck when it was “unsolved.” But I feel like my interpretation is valid for the story, and it’s what makes the story so great in my mind. Anyway, all mystery stories depend a bit on how you take them yourself, some people get disappointed when they guess the right answer, or angry when they can’t guess the right answer. But for me, I will always hold this as my favorite way a story ever fooled me.

Will inflation become persistent?

Currently most of the western world is experiencing inflation of between 8% and 15% a year (although there are some stark outliers).  The question on everyone’s mind is “will this become persistent,” my question is “how will we know if it has?”  

The Federal Reserve’s view that inflation would be “transitory” didn’t seem so unreasonable when they made it in early 2021.  Inflation was caused in part by the sudden drop in supply due to the COVID19 pandemic.  That drop in supply had also caused a drop in demand, but as the economy opened up demand was rising and it was assumed supply would as well.  This could have meant that within a year or two supply and demand would restablize to somewhere around their 2019 levels, when the factories and supply chains were fully staffed and the consumers were fully consuming. But something went wrong, at some point it seems that demand got well ahead of supply and at that point supply couldn’t catch up as long as low rates and easy money remained a policy of the Fed. And so in 2022 the Fed quietly retired the “transitory” label and started raising rates in earnest.

To digress a little, Argentina experienced an inflation rate of around 300% on average from 1975 to 1990, and the results on consumer habits were amazing.  People generally spent all their money as soon as they had it, no saving in sight, because inflation erodes the value of saved money almost immediately.  People would buy cars as soon as they hit the market, drive the car for a few years, and then sell it used and were able to make a profit because with 300% inflation the price of their car had gone up tremendously even as they drove it.  The lack of any sort of savings, and the sky-high demand as people spent every peso they had, both became entrenched in the buying habits of Argentine consumers and those habits were difficult for the central bank to overcome.  Worse still, these habits created a “tragedy of the commons” among the Argentine consumers, if everyone would be willing to spend less pesos and save more, then demand could cool off and supply could increase to match it, taming the inflation.  But if only some of the consumers stopped spending and started saving, then inflation would persist at sky high levels and all those consumers would accomplish is the swift erosion of whatever money they put towards savings.  If you wanted to keep your wealth during hyperinflation, you had to spend it (or convert it to dollars, which also didn’t help the peso).

The persistence of Argentine inflation was what made it so impossible to cool, not just the constant sticker shock.  That’s part of why the Federal Reserve has been so deliberate and communicative, it wants to maintain the trust of the American consumers and producers.  As long as people trust that the central bank will cool inflation, they will continue to save and not just spend spend spend.  But if people don’t trust the institutions (as they did not in Argentina), then any attempts to maintain trust in the currency are futile.  I haven’t detected the sort of tell-tale signs that inflation is becoming ingrained in American’s buying habits, we’d know if it had when people start buying things today on the assumption the price will rise in the near future, and I haven’t seen a lot of that.  On the other hand I’m a scientist who doesn’t have much money for big purchases, so what do I know about spending habits?

You shouldn’t go too far down a scientific rabbit hole

Sometimes when you get scientific data that doesn’t make sense, the best use of your time is to say “well that’s weird,” and just redo the experiment. I’ve been in many labs where strange data, be it unknown proteins in a mass spectrometry sample or unknown shapes under an electron microscope, have gotten people’s minds aflutter as they try to figure out what it all means. Is it contamination, is it scientifically interesting, is it something that should be expected but we just don’t know about it? Humans are innately curious, scientists most of all, so when presented with a mystery it’s natural to want to solve it. And a scientific mystery should be easier to solve than most because not only are the experiments set up with numerous controls that can be checked against, but there is a wealth of data in the literature that might point to an answer. When you see something you don’t recognize, it’s easy to dive deep into the literature searching for some paper or clue which might tell you what you’re looking at.

But this isn’t always the best use of your time. Sometimes stuff is just weird for dumb reasons and if you spend weeks trying to figure out why then that’s weeks you’re not spending working on your actual projects. Chasing false leads can also blind you to the more important (if less mysterious) true leads that you should be following. All this to say, my lab is currently in the midst of a mystery that I don’t think is very important and I wish we could all just agree it’s mysterious and get back to more mundane but solvable problems.

Teaching isn’t easy

I’m going to come right out and say that I don’t know if I’m a good teacher.  I’m a passionate teacher, I like to see students learning and growing, but I don’t know if I’m a good one.  And honestly, in my position I don’t know if I can be a good one.

I’m a researcher at a major research institution.  One of the first rungs of the “science-as-a-career” ladder is usually for students to join a lab as unpaid volunteers, either for course credit or just for fun.  They will get trained and learn to help out with some of the duties performed by the lab, they may even do some actual science.  Eventually they may move into a semi-paid position in which their work in the lab pays for some of their tuition, before finally moving to a paid position around their graduation.  From there, the scientific world is their oyster.  But this first rung, with untrained students, is to me the hardest.  Nobody really knows what work in a lab is like until they do it, I know when I was a kid I had a picture in my mind that scientists spent all their time sitting and thinking.  But it’s actually a job that requires moving, doing, skillful techniques, and a lot of hand-eye coordination.  These are all skills that a student needs to learn to progress as a researcher, and I don’t know if I’m doing good as a teacher.

When I work with these students, the biggest issue is imparting on them the necessary knowledge.  This starts with “what is the work we are doing and why,” student may have just learned about DNA replication for instance, but that doesn’t necessary give them the background necessary to understand why DNA-intercalating-molecules are known carcinogens.  And it definitely doesn’t give them the knowledge of all the previous research that has been done in this field that brought us to that conclusion.  So you need to get them up to speed on some of the facts of the field, “here’s what these molecules are, this is why they’re important, this is how we are studying them.”  

Furthermore, a lab is nothing like a classroom, there is no textbook filled with the One Holy Truth that they can study, textbooks only get written about the settled science that is decades old.  Instead there are papers and literature of all kinds that they need to read, scattered throughout many areas and each focusing on a different area.  These scattered papers don’t even make a coherent story unless you know how to read and understand them and draw your own conclusions.  So additionally we must teach them the skills necessary for them to gain knowledge on their own.

Finally, there’s teaching them the things we actually do in lab.  The techniques, the protocols, and even the proper methods for safety and cleaning, teaching them all there is to know about working and being in a lab is probably the most important part of keeping them safe, but it’s also difficult to teach this in any way but by rote.  You just tell them what to do and tell them to keep trying until they do it right, I don’t really have the skills necessary to teach physical activities in any way but that.

So with all that said, there’s a lot of teaching that needs to go on between senior lab members and junior lab members, and personally I don’t know if I’m up to the task.  I try to help them learn on their own, but I seem to always just give them the answer when they can’t figure it out.  I try to help them do things in lab, but only by doing it myself and letting them watch how I do it.  I just don’t know if what I’m doing is the best or most helpful way to teach them, but teaching is just such a small part of my job that I don’t have the headspace to “get good” at it either.  I hope I’m teaching them and I hope they can leave this lab with good memories of their time here, but I just don’t know.

What to do when you don’t know what to do

I’m reaching a point in my current project where I’m not entirely sure where to go next. I don’t want to get too specific or anything but I’m trying to extract and image a protein and so far it hasn’t been working. It’s led me to ask the question: what do I do when I don’t know what to do? So far I don’t have an answer for this one, the obvious answer is to “try something else” but that’s vague and isn’t an action plan, try what else. There are a near infinite number of “elses” that I could try to do and no reason to believe any of them would fix my problem. I’ve considered trying to approach the problem from a different angle: why do I think the protein is there to begin with and can I prove that? But nothing is without cost, I could do a big experiment to prove what I already suspected to be the case (the protein is there) without solving my underlying problem (I’m not able to extract and image it). Doing an experiment where the upside is a major setback and the downside is to remain stuck in a rut isn’t appealing.

So I’m still very busy with this project and that’s my excuse for not having a good post today 🙂

Biotech update: Vertex Pharmaceuticals and CTX001

I’ve said before that I don’t feel like I can reasonably invest in any biotech company since they all feel like a gamble, but for the gamblers out there I took a look at the science behind Vertex Pharmaceuticals (VRTX).

Vertex has a drug called CTX001 which has been in the news as it seeks FDA approval to treat sickle cell anemia and beta thalassemia.  Sickle cell anemia happens when the hemoglobin in your blood has a mutation that makes it fold into the wrong shape, this makes red blood cells become sickle shaped instead of their usual donut shape, and these sickle-shaped red blood cells get caught in the tiny capillaries of your body.  This causes damage and a lack of energy as blood isn’t able to efficiently transfer nutrients and waste into and out of your cells.  Sickle cell anemia reduces one’s life expectancy to around 40-60 years.  Beta thalassemia is another hemoglobin disease this time caused by reduced production of hemoglobin itself.  Less hemoglobin means less nutrients and waste can be transferred by the blood, meaning the body can’t work as efficiently.  Beta thalassemia in its major form has a life expectancy of around 20-30 years.  

Despite the fact that both diseases are caused by mutations in hemoglobin, the mutations are very different from each other and so it surprised me that both were being treated by a single CRISPR drug.  How CRISPR works is that a protein uses a piece of DNA to very specifically target itself towards an area on a gene of interest.  The protein can then cut into that gene of interest and if another piece of DNA is on the protein, then that other piece of DNA can be incorporated into the gene by the cell’s DNA repair machinery.  This process is somewhat random in nature, it’s hard to ensure that your other piece of DNA gets incorporated and even harder to ensure that it is incorporated in just the right orientation, just the right position, and just the right way so as not to cause problems down the line.  Since sickle cell and beta thalassemia are caused by mutations in very different places within the hemoglobin gene, a CRISPR drug that is targeted towards the sickle cell mutation site should not be able to also hit the beta thalassemia mutation site.

But the trick is that CTX001 isn’t targeting hemoglobin, it’s targeting fetal hemoglobin.  When a baby is in the womb, it needs to take oxygen from its mother’s blood stream to survive.  If a baby’s hemoglobin were the same as its mother’s, this process would be inefficient because both the baby’s and mother’s hemoglobin would bind to the oxygen equally well and there would not be enough oxygen flowing from the mother’s blood into the baby’s.  It would be like a tug of war where both sides are of equal strength.  However, fetal hemoglobin binds to oxygen more strongly than adult hemoglobin, and this ensures that a baby can take the oxygen it needs from its mother’s blood stream.  Fetal hemoglobin usually stops being produced around the time the baby is born, and after the body switches over to purely adult hemoglobin by around 6-months after birth.  What CTX001 does is it tries to switch on the production of fetal hemoglobin in people suffering from sickle cell anemia and beta thalassemia.  If they can produce fetal hemoglobin instead then it can compensate for the fact that their normal hemoglobin isn’t working properly, and should reduce their symptoms and prolong their lives.

How CTX001 does this is by altering the promotion of the fetal hemoglobin gene.  The promoter regions of genes are the segments of a gene that help the gene get transcribed into new mRNA.  That mRNA will then get translated into a new protein.  The promoter of fetal hemoglobin does not usually allow the gene to get transcribed into adulthood, so no fetal hemoglobin gets made.  But altering the promotion of the gene would allow it to be transcribed, and thus translated, and so fetal hemoglobin would be produced in the body.  Now here’s where it gets a bit tricky: they aren’t actually altering the promoter region of fetal hemoglobin, but rather the promoter region of another gene called BCL11A.  I wanted to explain how promoters work, but there’s more to explain now because biology is complicated so bear with me:

The reason the promoter region of fetal hemoglobin doesn’t normally allow transcription (and thus production of the gene) is because of a repressor called BCL11A.  BCL11A is a protein that sits on the promoter of fetal hemoglobin and refuses to budge, this prevents any other protein from accessing the fetal hemoglobin gene and thus prevents fetal hemoglobin from being transcribed.  Now BCL11A is produced by its own gene, and CTX001 alters the promoter region of BCL11A in such a way that no BCL11A can be produced.  Without BCL11A, there is nothing to repress the promotion of fetal hemoglobin.  Without the repression of fetal hemoglobin, its promoter region is accessible and it can be transcribed.  With the transcription of fetal hemoglobin, the fetal hemoglobin protein will be produced in the body.  And with the production of fetal hemoglobin, the diseases caused by malformed adult hemoglobin (sickle cell anemia and beta thalassemia) should be reduced.

But it’s still not over!  How the hell would CTX001 find every red blood cell in the body and do its thing?  It doesn’t have to!  Hematopoietic stem cells are the stem cells which produce red blood cells (and it’s red blood cells which will carry the hemoglobin or fetal hemoglobin in the blood).  Hematopoietic stem cells can be extracted from the patient’s blood and then altered with CTX001 so that they will produce fetal hemoglobin.  The cells which are successfully altered can then be transferred back into the patient.  Before the altered cells are given back to the patient, the patient is given busulfan to kill off stem cells.  This is necessary to kill off some of the stem cells which are producing the malformed hemoglobin so that the new stem cells producing fetal hemoglobin can reproduce and become the majority.  The patient is then monitored for improvements in their sickle cell anemia or beta thalassemia condition.

So this process is long, involved and complicated.  Just to list all the things that could go wrong: when altering the promoter the DNA could accidentally be mutated towards being cancerous, killing of so many stem cells using busulfan could have harsh side effects, the infused hematopoietic stem cells might not reproduce and become the majority, and even then the DNA of the promoter might not be altered enough so that fetal hemoglobin becomes the majority of the hemoglobin in the body.  But I’m sure every step is heavily monitored by Vertex during the treatment process.  So is Vertex Pharmaceuticals a buy?  I have no idea, if you believe the Efficient Market Hypothesis then all their upside is already priced in, but they’re in phase 3 of clinical trials and if you’re a gambling man I see nothing wrong with their scientific thesis.  So idk, go ahead?

Biotech seems far more speculative than other tech

There’s a mantra that gets repeated by everyone around me: biotech is the next big thing.  I’m willing to believe that on average the biotech industry will probably grow faster than the market, maybe even faster than the tech industry over the next 20 or 30 years.  What I’m less enthused by is the prospect of trying to pick and invest in the winners of that market and not get stuck holding the losers.  I feel like biotech in general will have a much larger standard deviation on its returns, a small number of companies will make out like bandits and a very very large number of companies will make nothing.  This is generally true in most markets, but in biotech you have the added barrier of the government to think about.

When a tech company brings a new product to market, they will design it, test it, then try to sell it to consumers.  But when a biotech company brings a new product to market, they often have an added hurdle of the government.  They need to design a product, test it, ask the government for permission to sell it, and then sell it to consumers.  These consumers are usually healthcare patients because the product is usually a drug or medical device.  The government in this case is protecting us from bad products in healthcare, but in turn this puts up a barrier to entry that ensures that only a few products get through and get all the money in the market.  There’s a large market for crappy but cheap smartphones that retail for far less than an iPhone or an Android, there isn’t any market for crap drugs that only “sort of” cure your disease. 

50 years ago biotech’s second biggest area was agribusiness, but today all the biggest movers and shakers are all related to medical in some way.  Everyone is working in an industry where money only comes in if you can improve the health of a patient.  Even the non-medical companies, the “shovel salesmen” in the biotech gold rush, the products they sell will only get bought by companies which are themselves trying to make a drug or a device that will prolong the life of a patient.  So I feel like any biotech giant I wanted to invest in, be it Pfizer or Merck or Johnson and Johnson, investing in any one of them is like playing a crap shoot with the FDA.  If Pfizer’s next biggest drugs don’t get approval, Pfizer’s stock will go way down.  And if the FDA approves a “better Tylenol” for mass market, then Johnson and Johnson could drop.  So biotech feels like I’m investing in the future of the FDA more than I am the future of the market.

And then there’s Thermo Fisher, the biggest shovel salesman of the biotech gold rush.  They make the products used in labs all over the world,I know even my lab uses a lot of Thermo Fisher brand products.  Even here the future seems less certain than it is for say Amazon or Google because all the labs which buy Thermo Fisher products are still at the whims of the FDA.  Everyone buys polypropylene tubes from Thermo Fisher, but what if the FDA decides polypropylene leaves behind microplastics which harm patients and mandates that polypropylene never be used in medical devices or drug manufacturing?  Then Thermo and every company like them would be scrambling for a substitute, and there’s no way of predicting that Thermo would come out of that mess the victor.  So shovel salesmen make for safer but by no means safe bets.

And finally there’s the small players in biotech, the startups and mid-sized companies which hope to build the products of the future.  They are the most speculative companies of then all because they’re often pre-revenue companies which are hoping that whatever drug or device they own the IP for can get through the FDA’s hurdles and reach the mass market.  These hurdles are very high and there’s no money in only getting past the first few just to fall at the last one.  So when you invest in a company like that you’re investing in a business of hope and hype, and since even the greatest experts in biotechnology can’t predict which drug or device will work for patients there’s little chance of someone like me making all the right predictions.

So I guess biotech might be the future, but the future is too murky to invest in.  I’d keep my money in biotech ETFs and hope for the best.

Technology is supposed to be deflationary

Elon Musk and Cathie Wood are complaining about deflation again.  For the most part they’re just sad that the Fed’s actions have cut off the flow of cheap money, reducing the price of stocks and thus reducing their total wealth.  But they both have a tiny kernel of truth within their whining, technology is deflationary by nature and our monetary policy should be prepared to deal with it.  But what does that even mean for technology to be deflationary?

I’d like to go back to a post I did on dividends for an example here.  Let’s look at the Oil Shock of the 70s for a good example of an inflationary period.  The rise in the price of oil led to inflation as companies and people who still needed it bid up the price in order to compete for what little oil was left to go around.  This in turn pushed inflation into other sectors, as the lack of oil meant there was a lack of goods that relied on oil, thus the price of those was bid up as well.  If we take the example of a company which uses oil to make certain goods, how do they deal with the oil shock?  

Most directly, they can continue to buy oil at a high price and raise the price of their goods to compensate.  As long as every other company in their sector is also forced to raise prices, the company will survive by pushing inflation onto their customers, but if the other companies making their good are not affected by the price of oil, then this strategy won’t work as the company will just bleed market share into bankruptcy.

Alternatively, they can look to find ways to reduce the amount of oil they use per unit product.  In this way they can try to keep their prices low while their competitors’ prices are forced to rise, thereby gaining market share.

In a very real way, reducing the amount of oil used to create products would require some sort of innovation in technology, the creation of things like electric cars and nuclear power plants so that less of some stuff (oil) is being demanded and more goods are being supplied. This decrease in demand and increase in supply will cause deflation as prices drop due to these factors.  Remember that this is why some neoliberals pushed back against price controls and rationing during the oil crisis, those things depress the market forces which would otherwise cause people to invest in innovation and trigger deflation.

So today we don’t have an oil crisis, but in Europe we have a gas crisis, and European countries have also declared their intentions to accelerate the gas crisis by subsidizing demand instead of reigning in supply.  The problem here is that the government will pay the cost of this gas inflation and so there’s no reason for market-actors like companies to change their behavior or invest in alternative technologies.  Perhaps the governments themselves will try to force investment in alternative technologies, but I’m skeptical they’ll do as well as the market would.

So what does all this mean? Well if you believe that we’re on the cusp of a technological revolution, then it’s true that the Fed could accidentally flip us into deflation without even trying. On the other hand one of the biggest drivers of inflation this year, energy, is being subsidized by the government with price caps or tax reductions so companies and individuals aren’t being forced to invest in new technology in order to limit their use. Technology is supposed to be deflationary, but that’s no guarantee.

Small coding update: what I’ve done with Unity

A while ago I said I wanted to get back into coding.  I’ve only been doing an hour a week or so but I do have some successes.  Here’s what I’ve got and here’s what I still want to do:

I’ve got a few dispensers that I have labeled “gunpowder,” “nitroglycerin” and “TNT”.   Each dispenser will dispense particles corresponding to their name.  Gunpowder is set to explode with low force, nitroglycerin explodes with medium force and TNT explodes with high force.  I have a button which dispenses particles from whichever dispenser I choose, then another button makes all the particles “explode.”  If only a little gunpowder is dispensed, the explosion is kind of small.  If a large amount of nitroglycerin and TNT is dispensed, it’s a big impressive explosion.  Then I have a button to erase all the particles and dispense new ones.

What I still want to do are some things I think are much harder.  I want a way for the player in-game to create entirely new explosive particles with more or less explosive force.  What if I want them to invent C4, which explodes even better?  I also want a way to “centralize” the explosion.  Currently every particle moves in an entirely random direction, but actually they should all explode outward from whatever point in space the explosion began at.  Once I can centralize the explosion I can make explosions that have multiple starting points, and from there I want parts of the game to allow the player to learn how to use explosive shape to perform certain tasks, and thereby gain the resources to build better explosives to perform new tasks.  Also eventually I’d like to be able to put in some amount of “control” by which certain explosives (like gunpowder) explode easily even when you don’t want them to while others (like C4) are very stable and don’t explode unless you really make them.

So all that’s to say I still have a long way to go.