There is no sound in space, but there is music (and genomes)
contents
Here I show the decoding instructions that appear on the first disc. These took forever to make, were a lot of fun to make, and might require a full alien civilization to decode.
The instructions begin with an important announcement "Hello people read this!" followed by Huffman-encoded Nuremberg Code and Declaration of Helsinki. I explain how to decode the Huffman encoding.
There's lots of art and graphical notions on the discs. Here you see an amoeba and fairyfly — drawn at physical scale on the discs. Each pixel on the disc is 1.4 microns, so 100 microns is about 70 pixels. The images shown here are magnified for easier reading.
You also see a short space poem created out of an alphabetically ordered triplets of classification terms from the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies. “To unclassified wind!”
absorption adjacent amorphous and appearance arm associated attraction brightness chains close clumps companions concentric connected counter-tail detached diffuse disturbed double effects ejected ellipticals emanating filaments fission fragments from galaxies groups heavy high infall integral interacting interior irregular irregularities jets large long loops low material miscellaneous multiple narrow nearby nuclei objects of one one-armed or perturbing pōwehi repelling resolution rings segments sign small spiral split surface three-armed to unclassified wind
Once we have the EULA out of the way, let's get into it.
The first instruction panel begins with a piece of Alan Watts' It Starts Now, dedicated to our last universal common ancestor (LUCA). “You are this universe...”
We see the tree of life (I apologize for the millions of sparks of life that aren't listed) and you're taken along the branching all the way to us, into our cells and into the bases of our DNA that are on the discs. It's quite a trip.
The next panel shows how the data is organized on the discs and how it's encoded. All amidst a story of dinosaur struggle.
The pixel stream on the discs contain metadata codes (it was fun to find the shorted codes that didn't appear in the sequence). For example, SNPs of each class (e.g. A/T) are indicated by unique sequence of bits.
The genome is just a kind of recipe book for proteins. So the next panel explains how these are made up of amino acids. I mention that they fold but leave the details of the folding as an exercise to the audience. We can't be expected to figure out everything ourselves.
Next, to practise what you've learned, there is a little practical example of decoding a baby disc. Also the final panel of the dinosaur story appears here — many things are out of order on the discs and the reader is encouraged to piece them together. Yes, “death is very very long”.
Once you've decoded the discs, you can check your work against this table. The number of bits, bases and SNPs on each disc are shown.
The instruction panels end in a few "making of" scenes and a list of credits.
I took a photo of Steve Chand holding the flowcell before he loaded the sequencer. The map of the solar system answers the question “When did he load the sequencer?”
Our Center was founded by Michael Smith. The discs include a short dedication and a nostalgic photo of his office that I took shortly after he died.
We wouldn't be here without the seminal papers of Franklin and of Watson and Crick. Ok we would be here without them but we wouldn't know ourselves as well.
The Nature mansucripts are lovingly typeset here.
Happy 2026 π Day—
Art for the 5%
Celebrate π Day (March 14th) and enjoy the art — but only if you're part of the 5%.
Go ahead, see what you can't see.
Ishihara's Tests for Colour Deficiency
Authentic and accurate images of Ishihara's test plates photographed (and lovingly color-corrected) from the 38-plate Ishihara's Tests for Colour Deficiency.
I also provide the position, size, and color of each circle on each test plate.
Symmetric alternatives to the ordinary least squares regression
What immortal hand or eye, could frame thy fearful symmetry? — William Blake, "The Tyger"
This month, we look at symmetric regression, which, unlike simple linear regression, it is reversible — remaining unaltered when the variables are swapped.
Simple linear regression can summarize the linear relationship between two variables `X` and `Y` — for example, when `Y` is considered the response (dependent) and `X` the predictor (independent) variable.
However, there are times when we are not interested (or able) to distinguish between dependent and independent variables — either because they have the same importance or the same role. This is where symmetric regression can help.
Luca Greco, George Luta, Martin Krzywinski & Naomi Altman (2025) Points of significance: Symmetric alternatives to the ordinary least squares regression. Nat. Methods 22:1610–1612.
Beyond Belief Campaign BRCA Art
Fuelled by philanthropy, findings into the workings of BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes have led to groundbreaking research and lifesaving innovations to care for families facing cancer.
This set of 100 one-of-a-kind prints explore the structure of these genes. Each artwork is unique — if you put them all together, you get the full sequence of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 proteins.
Propensity score weighting
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. —Mr. Spock (Star Trek II)
This month, we explore a related and powerful technique to address bias: propensity score weighting (PSW), which applies weights to each subject instead of matching (or discarding) them.
Kurz, C.F., Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2025) Points of significance: Propensity score weighting. Nat. Methods 22:638–640.
Happy 2025 π Day—
TTCAGT: a sequence of digits
Celebrate π Day (March 14th) and sequence digits like its 1999. Let's call some peaks.
