Questions for GEB Unit XVI

Mårten Stenius URL: http://www.nada.kth.se/~d90-mst/courses/geb/q16.html

Page and figure references are from the English Penguin Books edition, unless otherwise noted.

Dialogue XVI: Edifying Thoughts of a Tobacco Smoker

What examples of self-ref and self-rep are there in the dialogue?
(Some obvious are of course the record which the Crab plays at p. 483, and the mention of the famous book by Egbert B. Gebstadter at p. 484.)

Chapter XVI: Self-Ref and Self-Rep

- (p. 497, Figure 85) Does soap generally float? Mine didn't, when I tried this morning :-)

- Is there any way to make any sense of the ATTACCA sequence, using Typogenetics? At a first look, it would generate:

  ATTACCA  --> AT  TA  CC  A
               swi rpy mvl

The tertiary structure reveals that the typoenzyme would prefer G:s - and so it wouldn't do anything with the strand. Any better approach?

- In Dialogue IX, Achilles spoke of feeling "so guilty about violating the Central Dogma" when making a koan out of a folded string (i e, reversing the translation). Are we to understand that the same holds for molecular miology - that in some way you may not (can't) derive a DNA from a particular protein?