How Many Bits Does It Take To Kill You? 300
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.)
It takes less bits (Score:1, Funny)
All depends on how you count, I guess...
It's humbling that I could be killed by 3.2kbytes (Score:2, Funny)
It's like evolution is the demo coder and humans are the Amigas.
fascinating! (Score:5, Funny)
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".
Andrew "Davros" Huang (Score:2, Funny)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7026801162637347552 [google.com]
How many bits does it take to kill you? (Score:5, Funny)
I don't know, go ask Mr. Owl.
Port H1 maps specifically to the windpipe region (Score:5, Funny)
Re:fascinating! (Score:5, Funny)
Why not just call it "programming"?
To avoid 90 hour work weeks and lousy pay.
Re:The best book is still the one not on the shelv (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, troll feeding is bad, but honestly,
that there was a Swine Flu vaccine back in the 1970's that caused a 300% mortality rate on all the "volunteers,"
This alleged vaccine killed the subject, revived them, killed them a second time, revived them again, and finally killed them off (for good) a third time?
Math is hard, clearly.
Re:The best book is still the one not on the shelv (Score:5, Funny)
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
Re:It's humbling that I could be killed by 3.2kbyt (Score:5, Funny)
It's humblings that I could be killed by 3.2kbytes
3.2 kbytes should be enough to kill anyone.
Re:It's humbling that I could be killed by 3.2kbyt (Score:5, Funny)
The protein that gets misfolded in Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (or mad cow) seems to be called just Prion protein [nih.gov] 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?
Re:Increasing mortality is bad for business (Score:5, Funny)
In the case of HIV, that means the host will have more sexual partners, giving that less deadly strain more hosts to infect.
So, wait...getting the HIV will guarantee you more sexual partners? No wonder it's so popular!
Re:Increasing mortality is bad for business (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Just one bit can be enough (Score:2, Funny)
If you can change the constants of the universe, you probably already killed everyone an infinite number of times, preemptively.
What is the sound of an infinite number of voices crying out and suddenly silenced?