File this one under, "Zomg, I Luv Teh Internets."

So today I was wandering about an internet news forum that I frequent (wait, it gets even more nerdy), and I started kvetching about my recent neuro qualifying exam. One of my fellow forum-goers tried to cheer me up by reminding me of the joys of science. The following discussion ensued:

"...Yeah, scientists sometimes do a pretty good job of naming things. Like Schwann cells, for instance. You can't tell me that's not a smooth name. Schwaaaaaannn. Though I also appreciate the increased action potential conduction velocity provided by the myelination of neuronal axons by the Schwann cells. (Let's hear it for showing off!)"

"Pfft! While the nodes de Ranvier are indeed cool, astrocytes rule supreme."

"I don't see how you can possibly assert that basic structural support and maintenance of homeostasis can compete with the rapid and exciting progress of saltatory conduction. I mean, astrocytes just lay about all day providing scaffolding for the real action."

"You dare knock the synaptic transmission modulators and their electrically-coupled syncytium? Philistine! Saltatory conduction is so base - neurotransmission is where it's at."

"You synapse-lovers, so fixated on flinging chemicals at each other from across the cleft. It's barbaric."

"Some of us are just about interaction, while you are nothing but a fan of self-release."

"It's always a popularity contest with you. 'Ooooh, look at me, I integrate excitatory input from three different afferent pathways!' 'My inhibitory impulses regulate the function of two feedback loops!'

Peer pressure, that's all it is. You depolarize your postsynaptic membranes every time some yahoo spits glutamate in your direction. Well, MY voltage-gated channel acitivity is regulated by summation at my own axon hillock, not by whatever the cool kids are releasing at the moment."

"And yet you remain in a refractory frigid state not due to someone else's premature gamma-aminobutyric acid burst, but by your own impotence."

"Look, not all of us can become maximally permiable to current flow every 2 miliseconds. So I inactivate from time to time. So what? I'm not a machine, dammit!

I always knew that's what this was really about for you. You're looking for some younger, more conductive membrane so you can run off and make a bunch of cute little low-resistance vesicles together. Why don't you just admit that it's because I'm fat?"

"It's not so much that you're fat, it's that you have layer upon layer of concentric lipid-bilayer deposits wound around your projections, the removal of which you see as a fate worse than apoptosis."

"I'll have you know that there are plenty of folks out there who like a little insulation on an axon. Not everybody is attracted to anorexic processes with their membrane hanging out for all the world to see. But I guess I shouldn't be surprised, considering the unmyelinated hussies you hung around with before we met."

"Unmyelinated is just an ugly word bitter glial-dependants such as yourself use for those whose potentials last longer and are slower to climax."

"As if I could ever be jealous of some puny little fibers that can hardly maintain an impulse across a dozen microns! Maybe some easily-impressed immature membranes can be driven to threshold by your weak EPSPs, but it takes a lot more to trigger conformational changes in my voltage-gated membrane proteins.

Oh, and you know that time I claimed to be firing repetatively? I was faking it."