
Printing the human genome on punched tape - mattbierner
https://blog.mattbierner.com/dna-print/
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mattbierner
If you have questions about the technical details of the project, I'd be happy
to try answering them. It's been fun to use this retro tech in a really
impractical way, and being able to see individual bits of data is neat.

I'll also be live streaming the printing off and on:
[http://twitch.tv/mattbierner](http://twitch.tv/mattbierner)

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amingilani
I'm really interested in the amount of paper this art project will use, and
how much it'll weigh. He says " a cumulative length of some 5000 miles" but
doesn't specify the paper so I can't calculate how many trees went into this.
I'm not an extreme ecological conservationist, but this does come across as a
huge waste for no real purpose.

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Tomminn
I don't understand why he's not encoding information into the odd labelled
columns. It really takes away from the project.

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enriquto
And using 8 bits to encode 2 is also a very strange choice.

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Tomminn
That's not entirely true. There are also bits associated with ambiguous
combinations of single base pairs, so there is actually 4 bits of information
if all ambiguous combinations are possible. But it'd be much closer to 2 if
you took into account how rare these are. Still, had he done exactly the same
encoding without those column gaps between I wouldn't have criticized.

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kyberias
This is unbelievably wasteful and uninteresting.

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mavhc
Well, it is wasteful, everyone needs to be cutting down to 2kW of energy, from
4 in EU and 6 in N.America. Even then we'll need 70 times more nuclear power
stations than we have today, and that's only for 50% of our energy needs,
other 50% from renewables.

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curtis
Seeing the piles of accumulated paper tape does actually illustrate an
interesting question: How exactly is 3.2 billion base pairs of DNA folded up
in a human cell?

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curtis
From
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromatin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromatin):

> _Chromatin is a complex of DNA, RNA, and protein found in eukaryotic cells.
> Its primary function is packaging very long DNA molecules into a more
> compact, denser shape, which prevents the strands from becoming tangled and
> plays important roles in reinforcing the DNA during cell division,
> preventing DNA damage, and regulating gene expression and DNA replication._

I wonder if it's possible to visualize how Chromatin works from the DNA paper
tape?

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benj111
"For the past week, I’ve been holed up"

I see what you did there :)

