Just a few errant thoughts...number systems & DNA

 I was just thinking a bit about number systems, and while musing about what might be done with them, you know how far beyond hexadecimal we could go and to what possible advantage.

Well, we could go to any system for which we could find characters to hold places.  So, say a 20-based system, we'd need 20 symbols to fill the first column before moving to the second one, and so on. Going on, we could even move to a 100-based system, there are easily 100 symbols that could be used, and then I pushed on to 1000 or kilictric system where we'd use 1000 symbols to fill the first column. Fun thoughts, but what?

Obviously, a 1000-based system is much too unwieldy for a mere human brain to handle comfortably, so what would the advantage be, if any? Well, for one, it wouldn't be too difficult for computers to handle, and just imagine, a million could be written in just two digits 2|1, and there's your million, a billion? 3|2|1 and a trillion 4|3|2|1 pretty nifty eh?

But also pretty useless as well.  Then I remember another exercise I'd been thinking about for some time. About reducing DNA letter strings to numbers, like say a quaternary system 3|2|1|0 ATCG, it seems like it'd work, but unfortunately, DNA doesn't work that way. 

So I began to wonder why. And that's when I realized that DNA is a lot like a language.  A significant part of learning a language is learning how to parse the sounds you hear. And in DNA, there seems to be something very similar going on. Where a "word" in DNA means one thing, you find it can also mean something else entirely. Just as the phrase "Yeah, Right!" can have many different meanings depending on not just how it's used but also when.

While methylation performs start/stop operations, it is also a mechanism by which a species can pass information along to the next generation. So, between parsing, syntax, and synonym/homonym functions, as well as other as-yet-to-be-learned functions, the idea of converting DNA to a numbering system seems to fail.  But then... Eureka... Perhaps if we numeralized the words we learned, we could see the various uses and distinctions as they arise? 

That way we might move the needle along just a wee bit faster as we learn not just how to parse the "words", but read the "sentences" and grab a bit of the logic behind the "writing".