TagliatelliMonster
Veteran Member
I tried to post the article on the thread about The Mysterious Alien Tablet. The reason I felt comfortable doing it was it had in it links to post on many social media sites with which to post the article. Sadly when I copied and pasted it. It copied another article and it posted multiple times both articles and pages out of order. When I erased all of that. Then it kept telling me it was too long to post despite I had erased the mess ups. I will try again here one page at a time. It is three pages. Hopefully it will work,. If not then I am not able to do it for some reason,
Page 40
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Position 2
Position 1
Position 3set of characters (or symbols) had tobe read from left to right to obtain oneinstruction and then from right to leftto obtain another instruction. That is,each character string appeared to havetwo meanings.
A few weeks later, another professor,an expert in cryptology, came rushinginto the staffroom, his face flushed withexcitement. He had discovered that someparts of the same instruction manualcould be read using different languages.He later explained to a news reporter thatit was a bit like having a book whereyou began by reading in English to getthe first half of the story, and then youstarted again at the first page and readthe same words in French to get thesecond half of the story.
In addition, in one of the languages all
the words had just three letters. But, by
starting with different letters, completely
different sentences with different mean-
ings were obtained. In one section, the
basic text was as follows3:
By forming the three-letter words
starting at position 1, (diagram above)
the sentence’s message turned out to be
a specification for a fuel mixture. By
forming the words starting at position
2, it was an instruction for dealing with
a potentially damaging engine vibra-
tion. By forming the words starting at
position 3, a warning was spelled out
against running the engines too fast
before they had reached their optimum
operating temperature. Reading this
same set of characters backwards
provided information needed to reboot
the engine’s computer.
As the project director remarked,
there was an astonishing level of ‘data
compression’, where a lot of information
was packed into a short string of charac-
ters. One set of characters appeared to
contain up to 12 different instructions,
dependent on how it was read.
Six months later, there was another
remarkable discovery. Needing a quiet
place to work, one of the researchers
took the tablet into what appeared to
be the spaceship’s kitchen. When she
opened a document, she noticed that
some of the characters had been ‘greyed
out’ and were hardly visible:
Reading the black characters only,
she found a recipe for an item on a
lunch menu. The document seemed to
be ‘context dependent’, meaning that it
altered itself to provide the information
needed to perform specific tasks in a
particular place. This was confirmed
when the researcher took the
tablet into what appeared
to be a navigation office. At
once, the text changed so that
different characters became
greyed out. The resulting
readable text was later discov-
ered to be part of a procedure
for plotting a course through a
distant solar system.
Information systemsin biological cells
Our story might seem fantas-
tical to the reader, but there
are real-world parallels, and the human
genome is like this. 4 DNA can be read
forwards and backwards, and different
instructions can often overlap, even in
reverse. As with the alien language, in
many places in the genome, different
‘sentences’ are formed by starting with
different letters. Moreover, just as the
text displayed by the aliens’ tablet altered
automatically according to which room
it was in, so genes (DNA instructions)
are automatically switched on or off,
causing plants and animals to change
or function in different ways, enabling
them to adapt to different environments.
More than that, human genes arecomposed of sets of DNA ‘letters’divided into sections known as ‘introns’and ‘exons’. After the DNA is copied,the introns have to be removed and theremaining exons joined together (seefig. 1). Different exons are combined indifferent ways to produce many differentinstructions. These, in turn, are used toproduce different proteins at differenttimes, and the proteins produced varyfrom one cell type to another. In fact, thehuman genome has a massive ‘splicingand dicing’ system that ‘cuts and pastes’DNA, swapping exons around in a verycomplex way. 5 A single exon might beincluded in many different genes, someof which code for (specify the form of)proteins that have little similarity. Infruit flies (Drosophila) the same ‘gene’can be used to specify thousands ofdifferent proteins. 6
Also, the same set of letters can havedifferent meanings depending on which‘language’ is used to read it. A section of
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Exons
Introns
Splicing
Fig. 1. To make a protein, DNA must first be copiedbefore it is ‘translated’ into the protein language.But before translation can happen, the introns mustbe removed. The remaining exons can be splicedtogether in many ways to produce differentinstructions and thereby code for different proteins.
.
Maybe respond to responses you received and address the points raised in those responses directly.
And use the quoting feature.
It's easy. When you want to reply to a post, just press the button "reply" and the forum site will include that post in your post as a quote.
Or aren't you interested in open and honest discussion?
If you aren't, just say so, then I will simply ignore your posts in the future.