Earlier quoted context omitted.
How did you get 38 kilobits?
18959 units of 4 possible values (nucleotides) is equal to 37918 units of 2 possible values aka bits.
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The Ebola Wars
121–129 of 129 posts
Re: The Ebola Wars
#122like do you even swag bruh??
Re: The Ebola Wars
#123do you swag
Re: The Ebola Wars
#124wrwerer
Re: The Ebola Wars
#125wrwerer
Re: The Ebola Wars
#126werw
Re: The Ebola Wars
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you for saying that! Its so often repeated that our DNA contains the entire program for a human being. That's patently false. The cellular machinery provides almost all of the OS; DNA is just a script. I liken DNA to a paper tape containing one of two punches: MAN or MOUSE. Feed it into a bio-replicator and get a man or a mouse. Does the paper tape define the man? Of course not.
And yet the paper tape of a plant or animal genome (as opposed to a virus) also contains the instructions for the OS and the bio-replicator, which is part of what's so fascinating about it.
I don't think that's accurate at all. The DNA has no effect on the cellular soup - the RNA etc - that are the bioreactor. That you got from some ancestral Eve. It changes perhaps over time, like anything else through random chance. But its independent of the DNA, which is a tiny part of the whole.
Re: The Ebola Wars
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then my point is even more important given the proportion of it actually spent on infectious diseases. If that's so allfired important than why were they doing anything else with that money? The answer, of course, is that it wasn't considered so important until a couple of months ago, and thus, it wouldn't matter how much money was thrown at them, it wouldn't have solved the fundamental priority problem. Contra to so…
I am not trying to be difficult, but I don't understand your point. Ebola is a vanishingly unimportant concern as far as infectious diseases go. This current "outbreak" has resulted in 2 transmissions in the US to date. The reason it appears that the system failed is that the system correctly reacted to a low value threat, but it was amplified into a hysteria because of dynamics in media economics and US political cy…
For someone talking about "Vanishingly unimportant concerns" to then go on about SARS, which has caused zero transmissions in years and never reached the point the current Ebola outbreak has reached is...curious.
Re: The Ebola Wars
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
38 kilobits = 4.7 kB, but yes. Here's the complete genome of the pandemic strain (scroll down a bit): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/KJ660346 Here's the paper sequencing it. ([edit]: I just realized the New Yorker article is largely about this exact paper -- I commented before reading, sorry). Note that five of the authors died before publication; there's a short tribute accompanying it. http://www.sciencemag.or…
Oops, thanks for the bits to bytes correction. It is simply incredible to me that it could be so small (in an information sense). This article (gzipped) is 22KB, more than 4 times as much information.
No, the article does not contain more information. It contains more data, but when dealing with genomics you must keep in mind the fact that various codons translate to various proteins, and each of the proteins serve various functions depending on their shape... and proteins can assume different shapes, which changes their effects. This is the importance of protein-folding research.
You hit near it when you gzipped the article -- consider a genome to be an incredibly compressed format, able to explode into a truly stunning amount of information, stored in a relative paucity of raw data.