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How Many Bits Does It Take To Kill You?
pegr writes "Andrew 'bunnie' Huang, Reverse Engineer, XBox hacker, and generally smart guy, muses over the H1N1/swine flu virus as only a reverse engineer can: 'I now know how to modify the virus sequence to probably make it more deadly.' Not that he would, of course. bunnie has consistently made the esoteric available to us mere mortals, and his overview of the H1N1 virus is a fascinating read from a unique perspective." (Seen today also at the top of Schneier on Security.)
The Epstein-Barr virus, now there is a successful virus.
Liberty.
If only biologists had thought of the idea of treating DNA/RNA sequences as data, and then analyzing their properties statistically and computationally, with an eye towards what effects different modifications to the sequences might be predicted to have. We might call this field something fancy like "biological informatics".
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
How many bits does it take to kill a human? Bits of what is the real question?
Bits of information? Bits of bullets? Bits of concrete? Bits of glass? Bits of a virus?
They can all get the job done given the right, er wrong, context.
3.2KiB of data with the flu eh?
How about three bytes, 24 bits, uttered from the mouth of Bush? "War"! That killed a whole bunch of people with a lot less information. Ok, sure there was lots of supporting info.
Many people have died from a lot fewer bits than the flu needs.
I don't know, go ask Mr. Owl.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Sounds like we need a firewall.
That's not how it works. Viruses don't all-of-a-sudden start to mutate when they "need" to. They mutate all the time. If a virus could "jump ship" to another species, it is most likely to do that when its first host species is common, not when that species is going extinct.
Your post is an example of a bad analogy substituting for intelligence. That's a common mistake. It's sort of like when your car won't start...
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
http://ds9a.nl/amazing-dna/ is a wonderful comparison of DNA to code
Actually, they had a control group who were given a placebo who also died even though they had not even been given the vaccine. Also, the researchers died and through luck these two groups were each the exact same size as the group given the vaccine, thus the 300% mortality rate.
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
It would actually take less than that, though it wouldn't spread the same way. Remember that prions are proteins that can kill you rather than whole viruses. The protein that gets misfolded in Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (or mad cow) seems to be called just Prion protein and is only 253 amino acids. If bunnie is correct and one amino acid = 6 bits, then thats 1,518 bits. "Bit calculator" tells me that would be 0.185 kbytes.
Granted, this wouldn't be airborne death, would be extremely slow, and wouldn't cause a pandemic, but still, far less data.
Even if you were to go the viral route, at least one virus is tricky in that it produces multiple proteins from overlapping reading frames. That is, the same sections of RNA genome (sendai uses RNA instead of DNA) is read in multiple ways to make different functional proteins, one protein might be formed from reading AUG GAU GGG CAG, which would make the amino acid sequence MDGQ, but that could aso be read as A UGG *AUG* GGC AG where the starred AUG is the start, making a protein of MG. I find that pretty cool, because as Carl Sagan pointed out, try doing that with english. "Romancement to get her" can be spaced differently to produce "roman cement together" is the longest he could come up with and it doesn't even make sense. Viruses make whole proteins that work. Anyway, the point of all that was that viruses can in some cases double up, so it would take even fewer nucleotides to produce the same amount of protiens.
It's humblings that I could be killed by 3.2kbytes
3.2 kbytes should be enough to kill anyone.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Looking at the amino acid and codon table I noticed another interesting point: The triples which code for the same amino acid typically differ only in the last base. Indeed, this can be made stronger: Except for the STOP codon, in each set of codons with no more than four members, the first two bases are always the same (for those with more than four codons that's of course not possible). Moreover, quite a few amino acids have exactly four codons which differ only in the last base, i.e. the amino acid is completely and unambiguously determined by the first two bases alone. Indeed, one can rearrange this into the following 16-entry table:
Note how many lines only have one entry on the right hand side. Could this mean the genetic code evolved from a two-base version (with only 15 amino acids) to the current three-base version?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The protein that gets misfolded in Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (or mad cow) seems to be called just Prion protein and is only 253 amino acids. If bunnie is correct and one amino acid = 6 bits, then thats 1,518 bits.
So you're saying that it would take just 11 posts on Twitter to kill someone?
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.