Sequencing your DNA with a USB dongle and open source code

"Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy." --Dale Carnegie

"You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do." --Eleanor Roosevelt

"Fear is the path to the Dark Side. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering." --Yoda

"The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear." --Nelson Mandela

"Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.' --Marie Curie

"The key to change... is to let go of fear." --Roseanne Cash

"He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life." --Ralph Waldo Emerson

"We should all start to live before we get too old. Fear is stupid. So are regrets." --Marilyn Monroe

"Fear keeps us focused on the past or worried about the future. If we can acknowledge our fear, we can realize that right now we are okay. Right now, today, we are still alive, and our bodies are working marvelously. Our eyes can still see the beautiful sky. Our ears can still hear the voices of our loved ones." --Thich Nhat Hanh

In the movie, either the genetic augmentation didn't work (as well) as expected, or their advantage caused the augmented people to become lazy because they got covered in undeserved status no matter how little or much they worked, as everything depended on which genes they have been "bred" for. Then someone with supposedly bad genes could run circles around them just by working hard.

Maybe some mixture, e.g. in order to protect those kids who fail at the task they have been "bred" for from considering themselves failed humans, gattaca's society adopted this model where they shower all kids in status who have the right genes. Maybe it's not the kids who are being protected but the companies selling the augmentations.

The BWT sees strings as integer sequences. Either "ABC" and "abc" are two unrelated strings, or you normalize before building the index and lose the ability to distinguish between the two.

Search proceeds character-by-character backwards, jumping arbitrarily around the BWT using the same LF-mapping function as when inverting the BWT. You get cache misses for every character.

BWT construction is expensive, because you want a single BWT for the entire string collection. There is a ridiculous number of papers on BWT construction, as well as on updating and merging existing BWTs, but the problem has still not been solved adequately. If your data is measured in gigabytes, you can just pay the price and build the index, but a few terabytes seems to be the practical upper limit for the current approaches.

You can of course partition the data and build multiple indexes, but then you have to search for each pattern in each index. There is no way to partition the data in a way that different indexes would be responsible for different queries.