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“If you read a book that was written with four letters, you’re not going to be able to tell many interesting stories,” Romesberg says. “If you’re given more
by kjhughes 12y ago
“If you read a book that was written with four letters, you’re not
going to be able to tell many interesting stories,” Romesberg
says. “If you’re given more letters, you can invent new words, you
can find new ways to use those words and you can probably tell more
interesting stories.”
He needs a better way to motivate his work to a lay audience without losing those whose immediate response will be dismissive because binary can tell interesting stories in two letters.
- kyberias 12y agoThat quote sounds rather silly, I agree, but if you think about it, these results don't have too many immediate applications or benefits that would resonate with a layman. Therefore it's challenging to try and explain the importance of this achievements to a wider audience. In this light, I kind of understand the book example.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- trhway 12y ago>> you can probably tell more interesting stories.” books aren't good example. For today's layman it should have been translated to "probably build Super- and X-men"
- toufka 12y agoHonestly, it actually is a pretty good example, but you need to be creative. If I tell you that your book can only have 26 characters, you'll say, 'great, who cares, that's the whole alphabet'. But imagine the books you cannot write: No punctuation, no foreign languages, no mathematics, no accents, etc. Give yourself an escape character, and all of a sudden, you have access to a LOT more creativity.
- sp332 12y agoI think the implication was being restricted to English words containing only 4 given letters.
- danbruc 12y agoBut you still have no real sense how big the effect is. Saying that now 216 instead of only 64 triplets are possible give you some vague sense (but may make you overestimate it because of redundancy, forbidden combinations and what not may be relevant).
- pcrh 12y agoQuite, and even without binary, it's those four letters that got him to write, made his laptop, etc.
- solarmist 12y agoWritten with "only the ten hundred words people use the most often". http://xkcd.com/1133/ http://xkcd.com/1133/
- marcosscriven 12y agoThat's such a cool idea
- samstave 12y agoAny idea how I can get a printed/framed version of that?
- solarmist 12y agohttp://store.xkcd.com/products/up-goer-five-poster http://store.xkcd.com/products/up-goer-five-poster
- XaspR8d 12y agoNot a biologist, but isn't he omitting the key fact that those 4 letters can't construct completely new meanings? As in the 4 base letters can only make 20 "words" (the fundamental amino acids), which each have some pre-defined "semantics" to them. Sure we still have tons and tons of protein "sentences", but the analogy fails because we can't (yet) build our own arbitrary syntax + lexicon using those words; they have specific chemical interactions that limit their usage.
- stcredzero 12y agoAs in the 4 base letters can only make 20 "words"...the analogy fails because we can't (yet) build our own arbitrary syntax + lexicon using those words Isn't that just the circumstance of the particular hardware we have? There's nothing fundamental preventing the construction of a different set of molecular machinery with its own "opcodes." It may be beyond us right now, but there's nothing fundamental preventing it.