toteraltermann.bsky.social
Property, biology & stuff. All opinions someone else's.
Out now: AT THE END OF PROPERTY @BrisUniPress.bsky.social
https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/at-the-end-of-property
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One of the big problems in research group is the division of labour between the writer of the project application and the team who will have to make good on the promises in the application. There is also a tendency to overly inflate project teams to cover more areas in order to get funding.
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Of course the AC needs at least an hour or so to pump all the heat back out and progress can hardly be felt at that rate. I think this might be an apt political analogy, I just haven't figured out what for yet.
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Lots of groaning. Some people moved downstairs. No discernable improvement until the final stop. No more possibility for at least a slight relief from the outside. In many ways, closing the windows made it worse for everyone on board.
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It wasn't he said, and promptly moved to closing the windows and locking them, explaining to the passengers who complained that a) the AC was working and b) it would ultimately break if the temperature kept on rising.
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journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
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Wish I could be there. Enjoy yourselves!
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In any case, big thanks to @alexdobeson.bsky.social @saralf.bsky.social @magnusz.bsky.social @afischercapote.bsky.social @actasociologica.bsky.social and everyone else who's not on here for helping me think this through.
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There's a plethora of different storage types out there (stockpiles, buffers, accumulators, RAM ...) all of which have different effects on time (speed, sequence, synchronisation, reversability ...) so they're really worth studying. Or that's what I would have done if I could do Cryosocieties again.
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So the "suspension" literature is really useful for spelling out the terms of storage and time although (like in much of assetisation studies) we should be careful not to think of these terms as constants but variables if we want to get a better grasp of how people make time with storage.
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That means that—within the bound of your fridge's capacity—you can shop as often as you want and eat as often as you like without having to worry about synchronisation. I'd argue this is also one of the main benefits of cryopreservation infrastructure in the life sciences, albeit on different scales
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The best example is your fridge at home: it buffers the rate of intake (weekly shopping) to match the rhythm of retrieval (several meals a day). Without such a buffer, you would have to eat as often as you shop (or the other way around). The fridge bridges that temporal gap.
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So what I try to do in my paper is to explain how better storage can lead to acceleration instead of stasis and deferral. These stores are best understood as buffers, not repositories or stockpiles. They mediate between two different rhythms of intake and retrieval.
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And this is what many people (such as Lorenzo Beltrame or @saralf.bsky.social) have found in their work: many biobanks are moving toward shorter storage terms for several reasons (practical, financial, institutional etc.)
journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
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But what if you can't hold on to things forever? Even if cells don't spoil in liquid nitrogen, their value diminished over time for various reasons (storage costs, stagnating medical progress, diverging future needs) so you can't just bank on time indefinitely.
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This has implications for the potential to act today and tomorrow, they argue, and thus for what you could call option value of frozen material like cells, tissues, DNA etc. Pierre Delvenne has very nicely captured this effect here:
www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...
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Recently however several people (eg. @wolffle.bsky.social) have written about biobanking and ultra-cold preservation of organic materials. In suspending vital processes, the argument goes, the present is stretched and the advent of the future is pushed back.
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So in a nutshell, there *is* what you could call a sociology of storage (Weber, Wittvogel ...) albeit a narrow concerned with the *spatial* effects of the introduction of large-scale storage facilities in ancient societies. But there hasn't really been one on storage and time until recently.
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More generally, it's a paper about how to think about storage and the flow of time and practice, so I hope it's of use beyond the small crowd that has engaged with biobanks and cryopreservation—for example people interested in assetization.
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This grew out of the Cryosocieties ERC project that ended in March and is my attempt to make sense of some if the things @saralf.bsky.social, Ruzana Liburkina and I (and several others) found while studying biobanks: why aren't they hoarding stuff for all eternity?
cryosocieties.uni-frankfurt.de