Metaphysicalia

My grandmother was a woman of simple ideas and frugal habits.  She was a woman with much to do and a grandson to amuse and one of the amusements was ‘snap’.  Snap is played with a well shuffled deck of standard playing cards.  Each player holds half of the deck face down in their hand, and takes turns to lay their top card, face up, in front of them on their discard pile.  When the reveal results in two cards of the same face value being displayed, the first player to call ‘snap’ claims both discard piles and puts them in their hand.  Play continues until one player runs out of cards.  The suit of a card is irrelevant. I said at the outset that my grandmother was a frugal woman, and playing cards were “expensive”.  For this reason we played with a deck consisting of the remnants of several ancient decks.  Who knows how many cards there were in total, or indeed, how many cards were present of any given face value.  This was an irrelevance...

JCVI-syn   3.0 is the latest edition of the first self-repl i c a ting synthetic cell.  Designed with the objective of discovering the smallest possible viable genome, it has 482 genes encoded i n  a sequence of 582,970  of the four  nucleotides  A, T, G and C .  From this basis the researchers  postulate that as little as 256 genes may be sufficient for viability,  which  this author infers could  perhaps  be encoded in 309,627 nucleotide s .   There are various ways in which this volume of data can be visualised.  The data could be encoded in nucleotidesx2 number of binary digits, or binary digits/3.32 decimal digits i.e. approx 186k decimal digits.  This volume of information could also be used to encode 77,406 ascii characters if expressed as bytes. Ascii is inefficient in its use of data volume, using 256 possible permutations to express 52 letters, 14 punctuation marks, ten digits and one space ,  it...