Johnny Mnemonic just got an upgrade:
Discussion
better not get a compression program added and put double the data in there or you will end up like Randy
also, 37mb? the human genome is about 750Mb of distinct code in the human 43 chromasomes, there's no way that sperm only contains 37.5Mb, should be at least 200-300Mb if you consider the Y
i guess maybe that's the thing, sperm cells probably just snip up the whole stack randomly and share it out to the wrigglers, but i can't believe that so little code is contributed by the male, that just doesn't make any sense, it should be half, or at least 1/8th less than half because XY vs XX
This measurment is more an "how information we can extract and understand from sperm cells" than "how information is contained in them".
It mesures us, not sperms (that are also us...)
yeah, DNA code is actually a kind of trinary hamming code
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_digital_data_storage#Encoding_arbitrary_data
you could say it's "base 3"
so to store 1Mb of data you need 1000000*8/3 = 2666667 segments of peptides chained, so 37.5Mb = 1000000000 segments of DNA, plus whatever sequence/error correction overhead you are gonna use (a clear case for a hamming code IMO, every 3 trits=2trits decoded with 50% redundancy, plus each segment you generate has to have a header and length prefix
haha, i'm totally nuts about data encoding schemes
anyhow, by those numbers, this must mean a single human's total DNA store is approximately 20 billion DNA segments minimum before any such redundancy and segmenting is added
how cool would it be to be able to back up your data with a DNA encoder also... i mean... 23 billion gives you a gigabyte, easily with ample redundancy storing all several copies of each segment, a dot the size of a cylinder of hair the same length as width, throw it in a PCR and decode to recover it
slow and expensive backup but i imagine you could embed it inside little lead balls and it would basically last forever even in deep space
I mean, aren’t we like 97,8% same genes as Bananas or something like that?
Preston recently did a podcast on information theory, super interesting.
The point that stuck out to me was the fact that information is “the surprises in a message”. Surprises meaning “unexpected changes”.