
Who Ever Said No Two Snowflakes Were Alike? - katiey
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/23/science/who-ever-said-no-two-snowflakes-were-alike.html
======
purplerabbit
I feel like snowflakes are memory structures -- the progression of shape
starting from the center would reflect humidity/air pressure/temperature over
time.

Does that make sense to anyone? Why couldn't you encode memory in this?

~~~
biot
It would certainly make for an interesting sci-fi story. Imagine if the large
snowfall on the east coast were a higher being providing us instructions on
how to fix our planet, if only we knew how to reassemble the information. And
the planet's glaciers contain massive amounts of information on how to create
a wormhole to visit other civilizations, but now they're melting and the
information is being lost forever...

~~~
TrevorJ
What if all that 'junk' DNA is actually the real valuable data and life is
just a big self replicating eventually consistent database?

~~~
InclinedPlane
Most "junk" DNA is not actually junk. There are several different parts of
DNA.

The most easily understandable parts are the gene coding bits, we know exactly
how that works (in isolation), the DNA gets transcribed to RNA which then gets
translated into an amino-acid chain that becomes a protein. If you label
everything that's not a protein encoding region of DNA as "junk" then you
really don't understand DNA at all.

Equally important are the regulation parts of DNA. These are sections of DNA
before and after genes which are there to help cells control the expression of
different genes.

Additionally, there are big chunks of DNA which exist solely to ensure the DNA
has the right chemical properties and is easily stored in a cell.

There's still plenty of "useless" parts of DNA once you account for all that,
but much less "junk" than previously believed.

~~~
TrevorJ
My previous comment was pretty tongue in cheek, but thank you for the
explanation, that's really quite interesting. I wonder if it is possible that
the 'useless' or 'junk' DNA is mostly stuff that becomes important under
different environmental conditions and becomes active based on certain
triggers with epigenetics?

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stcredzero
I still don't understand why snowflakes are symmetrical. There is symmetry
across 3 "planes of reflection." What is the mechanism that transmits
information from one side of each plane of reflection to the opposite side?

Pop science explanations never explain this:

[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-are-
snowflakes...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-are-snowflakes-
symmet/)

By analogy, one could say that Courier New zeros "arrange themselves in
predetermined spaces and in a specific arrangement." But this gives us any
number of patterns across a line of symmetry, including a few non-symmetrical
ones.

    
    
        00000
        0 0 0
          0
        -----
          0
        0 0 0
        00000
    
        000
        0 000
          0
        -----
          0
        0 0 0
        00000
    
    

So how does the communication happen? (I realize the communication is
happening from the inside going out, with additional information being
provided over time by the environment.)

~~~
thaumasiotes
From a vague memory of something I read about snowflake formation, the
mechanism that transmits information from one side of the snowflake to the
other is just the fact that snowflakes are very small. Their formation is
driven by the atmosphere around them, and the relevant properties of the
atmosphere (like temperature) are continuous, so the same on both sides of the
snowflake.

Similarly, we don't believe the cosmic background radiation is the same
everywhere because there is currently a massive faster-than-light
communication network linking every point in the universe with every other
point for purposes of temperature coordination; we believe that it's the same
everywhere because the universe was very small in the past, like a snowflake.

~~~
kazinator
> _Their formation is driven by the atmosphere around them, and the relevant
> properties of the atmosphere (like temperature) are continuous, so the same
> on both sides of the snowflake._

So what you're saying is that basically the ability to make twin snowflakes
(by manipulating the conditions) proceeds from exactly the same circumstances
which already makes their six branches identical?

Based on that hypothesis, you're likely to get twins if you simply grow them
in adjacent spaces: together, those spaces are still small and the atmospheric
properties are even across them. And that's what he seems to be doing.

------
kazinator
"Even snow flakes are repeatable now, yet ..." sighs the computer scientist.

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cowardlydragon
Um, the snowflakes were very similar in the photos, but pretty clearly not
perfectly identical.

~~~
TheTravCav
From the article, “I started calling them identical twins because they are
like identical people,” he said. “They are too similar to just happen by
chance, but not absolutely precisely identical to the last molecule.”

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lloyd-christmas
Huh, so this is what they do when they aren't discovering planets.

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nkrisc
If you extend this to the now-debunked notion's common usage as an metaphor
for the uniqueness of people, I'd say it's safe to say we're primarily
products of our unique environments and anyone brought up under the same
conditions as us has a good chance of turning out just like us.

No, I'm not completely serious. (We're not special)

~~~
chimeracoder
> If you extend this to the now-debunked notion's common usage as an metaphor
> for the uniqueness of people, I'd say it's safe to say we're primarily
> products of our unique environments and anyone brought up under the same
> conditions as us has a good chance of turning out just like us.

This is the old 'nature vs. nurture' debate, and while it's pretty much
impossible to decide perfectly due to the practical challenges to creating a
proper controlled experiment at scale, it's pretty much accepted by this point
that the answer is 'yes, both matter'.

~~~
thaumasiotes
>> I'd say it's safe to say we're primarily products of our unique
environments and anyone brought up under the same conditions as us has a good
chance of turning out just like us.

> it's pretty much accepted by this point that the answer is 'yes, both
> matter'.

No, "anyone brought up under the same conditions as us" seems more likely to
refer to shared environment than unique environment. It's pretty much accepted
by this point that while a lot of interpersonal variation can be attributed to
the catchall "unique environment", almost none of it can be attributed to
shared environment (or in other words, the effect of an environment on one
person has basically no predictive value for the effect of the same
environment on a different person).

