What the *hell*?

[kickaha]

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/227013_toxics03.html

This is going to have to rattle around in my brain a bit before the dust clears.

Comments

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

I can't say I'm *surprised* there's something new to find out about (hell, I'd be extremely disappointed if there weren't), this just wasn't a mechanism I had any idea existed.

It's like meta-genetics. Mechanisms that control the mechanisms that alter the runtime of the code, of the...

Um.

Excuse me, I just had a thought on my own research, time to go scribble.

Hmm.

[jason0x21.livejournal.com]

Damnit, and you were almost through!

Anyway, it's not just the raw information, but how it's read, presented, stored, etc. There are so many non-biological examples of this (Didn't Stalin say something about the people counting the votes being more important than the people casting them? Or was that Jeb Bush?), that a biological one seems overdue.

And they just sold the Crusoe processor technology.

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

Heh, no, this will truly be under the Future Work chapter... which at this rate will be > 50% of the entire dissertation. (I've got a neat methodology for showing that design patterns are successful because they adhere to a minimum description length principle from information theory, and an approach to optimize an architecture automatically (with automated refactoring step generation) but on a global basis instead of a local minima... that alone is going to take a few pages.)

The detail I'm trying to wrap my brain around is the multiple generational effect.

Meta-control for genetic processes have been identified for years (protein folding, anyone?), but this is the first time I've heard of one propagating to subsequent generations that were never exposed to the original toxin, nor in utero at the time of exposure of the mother. That's just wacky. I can more easily understand cascading effects ala flinx's example, but the *same* effect propagating?? *twitch*