Yet another turn to the left leads to a labyrinthic library.
"It's a good distance from here, but if you take the first
road on the left and then left again at each turning, you
can't go wrong."
I tossed them a coin (my last), made my way down some
stone steps, and set off along the lonely road. It descended
slowly, its surface unmade. Branches met overhead, and a low
full moon seemed to keep company with me.
For a moment, I thought that Richard Madden had somehow
fathomed my desperate plan, but soon I realized this was
impossible. It occurred to me that the advice to keep taking
a left turn was the normal way to reach the central point of
certain mazes. I know something about labyrinths. Not for
nothing am I the great-grandson of the famous Ts'ui Pên, who
was governor of Yunnan and who renounced office in order to
write a novel that teemed with more characters than the Hung
Lu Meng and to construct a maze in which all mankind might
lose its way.
"The Garden of Forking Paths"
The library consists of limitless hexagonal galleries, full of books.
First, ... To appreciate the distance between the divine and
the human, all we need do is compare the crude, spidery symbols
my fallible hand is scrawling on the endpapers of this book
with the organic letters on the inside, which are precise, fine,
deep black, and perfectly symmetrical.
Second, that the number of these symbols is twenty-five.
The discovery of this fact three hundred years ago led to the
formulation of a general theory of the Library and to a
satisfactory solution of a problem which, until then, no
hypothesis had addressed-namely, the formless and random nature
of almost all books. One, once seen by my father in a hexagon of
Circuit 1594, consisted of a relentless repetition, from
beginning to end, of the letters M C V. ...
four hundred and ten pages of unbroken lines of M C V can be
part of no language, however primitive or however much of a
dialect it may be. Some people suggested that each letter might
have a bearing on the one after it and that the meaning of M C V
in the third line of page 71 was not the same as that of these
letters in another position on another page, but this embryonic
theory came to nothing. Others believed that these letter
sequences were codes, a hypothesis that has been widely accepted,
although not in the sense intended by its originators.
"The Library of Babel"
In another, smaller library, the permutations of four letters hold
life's secrets.
Imagine owning a library of 22,000 books. We don't mean just any
books; this collection contains unimaginable knowledge, such as
solutions to diseases that have plagued humankind for centuries,
basic building instructions for just about every creature on
earth, and even the explanation of how thoughts are formed inside
your brain. This fabulous library has only one problem - it's
written in a mysterious language, a code made up of only four
letters that are repeated in arcane patterns. The very secrets of
life on earth have been contained within this library since the
dawn of time, but no one could read the books - until now.
The 22,000 books are the genes that carry the information
that make you. The library storing these books is the human genome.
Sequencing genomes (that is, all the DNA in one set of chromosomes
of an organism), both human genomes and those of other organisms,
means discovering the order of the four bases (C, G, A, and T)
that make up DNA.
_Genetics For Dummies_
Danke,
--
Don.......My cat's )\._.,--....,'``.
https://crcomp.net/reviews.php telltale tall tail /, _.. \ _\ (`._ ,. Walk humbly with thy God.
tells tall tales.. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.' Make 1984 fiction again.
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