DNA for data storage

Scientists were able to store 739 kB of data in DNA.

The study reported that the institute's team had stored all 154 Shakespeare sonnets, a photo, a PDF of a scientific paper, and a 26-second sound clip from US civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jnr's "I Have a Dream" speech in a barely visible bit of DNA in a test tube.

"We downloaded the files from the web and used them to synthesise hundreds of thousands of pieces of DNA. The result looks like a tiny piece of dust," said Emily Leproust of Agilent, a biotech company that took the digital data and used it to synthesise molecules of DNA in a laboratory in the United States.

Agilent then mailed the sample across the Atlantic to the EBI, where the researchers soaked it in water to reconstitute it and used standard sequencing machines to unravel the code. They recovered and read the files with 100 per cent accuracy. "It's also incredibly small, dense and does not need any power for storage, so shipping and keeping it is easy," Goldman added.

Not great for retrieval given the high cost of synthesizing DNA, but as long-term backup, really robust.

The data stored in the test amounted to only 739 kilobytes, but the technique could be scaled up to store the three zettabytes, or 3,000 billion billion bytes, of stored data estimated to exist on earth, and the only limitation to wide implementation is the high cost of synthesising DNA, the researchers said. The world's data would theoretically fit in one hand and could be stored safely for many centuries, they said.

It feels like there's a sci-fi novel in this somewhere.

What?!

Everyone is talking about Lebron James tackling a lucky guy who made a half-court shot to win $75,000, and it is indeed a great moment. If you play basketball, you'll understand how that is perhaps one of the single most difficult ways to make a half-court shot, with a skyhook.

But I'm more amazed by the way this guy made a half court shot. First of all, how is this physically possible? I've never seen a basketball behave that way. Has anyone else?

Also, technically, he was past the half-court line, but given what happened after he threw the basketball, I'd give him the prize money, which turned out to be only $1,000.

Only $1,000? If you're going to make a half-court shot, remember to do it in Miami and not Atlanta. I realize the cost of living in Miami is higher than in Atlanta, but not by 75X.

Creep

Hah!

I was at Sundance and missed this interview, but it's in my DVR. I'm going to go watch it now.

Federer and the paradox of skill

[CORRECTION: I originally titled this Federer and the paradox of luck, but it's actually more correctly termed the paradox of skill, so I've amended the title of this post. It's a term I first read in Michael Mauboussin's The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing, a book I highly recommend.]

I was curious about a moment in the Federer-Murray Australian Open semifinal when the commentators and cameras caught Federer saying something to Murray and giving him a brief menacing stare after a long rally at 6-5 in the fourth set.

Without microphones on court, the commentators weren't sure what he said or why, but they briefly showed Murray responding with a exaggerated nod and smirk. The commentators did detect and remark on that brief moment of tension, and given how rarely we see tennis antagonism manifest itself in a visible way on court, it stuck in my brain as curious mystery.

My buddy Ken sent me this article which clarifies the incident a bit.

Murray prevailed in 15-stroke rally with a forehand winner, with both players finishing the point near the net. But Federer, on the brink of defeat, appeared to have taken issue with a slight mid-rally [hesitation] by Murray, and shouted “you [expletive]-ing stopped!” across the net. Murray appeared at first surprised, then amused, twisting his face into an exaggeratedly satisfied smirk, laughing and nodding toward his player’s box.

Federer was known for being a hothead early in his career, but I never saw much of it firsthand. Since his ascension into tennis immortality, he's largely been seen as a very level-headed sportsman.

One thing I have noticed a few times that seems to bother Federer is that when he plays one of the other Big Four (Djokovic, Murray, Nadal), he is particularly sensitive to any points they win by luck. The article above mentions that BBC commentators had to apologize on air for audible obscenities from Federer during the semi against Murray.

Federer’s first clearly audible obscenity in his semifinal loss to Andy Murray came with Murray serving at 4-5, 15-30. Murray fired a body serve which Federer could just get his backhand in front of and sent him into mostly indistinguishable muttering, punctuated with a loud, hard expletive in the middle.

Federer’s second audible offense came with Murray serving at 3-4, 40-40, in the fourth set. Murray won a 17-shot rally, and Federer exclaimed that his opponent had been “lucky,” preceding that word with a choice adverb.

I suspect most of you are thinking of the same adverb I am, so if I don't write it out I hope you don't see it as "ducking" the question [rimshot].

But a more memorable example is that extraordinary forehand return Djokovic hit against Federer in the 2011 U.S. Open semifinal. Down match point and 5-3 in the fifth set, Djokovic crushed a sideline-grazing crosscourt winner off of a Federer first serve (you can see it at 8:12 of this video).

In the press conference after that match, which Federer eventually lost , he was unusually testy when asked about that Djokovic shot.

"It's awkward having to explain this loss," a tetchy Federer said, "because I feel like I should be doing the other press conference."

There followed a string of excuses and justifications which not only were barely sustainable given the evidence but seriously disrespected the winner.

Asked about the quite remarkable forehand winner Djokovic hit to save match point, Federer reckoned the Serb did not look at that point like someone "who believes much anymore in winning. To lose against someone like that, it's very disappointing, because you feel like he was mentally out of it already. Just gets the lucky shot at the end, and off you go."

Djokovic was honest enough to admit the shot was a gamble – but Federer was reluctant to give him credit even for that courage in a crisis, preferring to regard it as desperate.

"Confidence? Are you kidding me?" he said when it was put to him the cross-court forehand off his first serve – described by John McEnroe as "one of the all-time great shots" – was either a function of luck or confidence.

"I mean, please. Some players grow up and play like that – being down 5-2 in the third, and they all just start slapping shots. I never played that way. I believe hard work's going to pay off, because early on maybe I didn't always work at my hardest. For me, this is very hard to understand. How can you play a shot like that on match point? Maybe he's been doing it for 20 years, so for him it was very normal. You've got to ask him."

Translated, Federer hates that tennis might be decided in any way by luck rather than skill. It makes sense, that someone who might be the most skilled tennis player of all time might be disgusted that luck plays any part in outcomes of majors.

It will be fascinating to see if Federer alters his game in any way this next year or two given his age and the competition from his three chief rivals. I suspect deep down Federer has always believed he is more skilled than any of his opponents, and that might explain one of his chief weaknesses, an unwillingness to be more aggressive on service returns. If you believe you are better than your opponent in every aspect of the game, it's sufficient to put the ball back in play on the return because you believe you'll win the subsequent point more often than not.

But the paradox of skill is that the more evenly matched opponents are in skill, the more of a role luck plays in determining the final outcome. As beautiful as Federer's game remains (in a sense, the continued aesthetic beauty of his shots makes it hard to measure his decline), in today's power baseline game, his rivals are a close match to him in both movement and groundstrokes. You can make a strong case that one or more of them are superior to him in areas like serve, return, footspeed, and the backhand.

Given that he no longer has that discernible skills gap to his chief rivals, a healthier acceptance of the role of luck might shift his strategy in ways that help him capture that next major. For example, it wouldn't hurt him to be more aggressive on return, to take some chances to go for the big winner and shorten some points. Can someone who is still so good and who can still recall with vivid detail the time when he had no rival be self-aware enough to change?

Self help posits dual selves

if you, too, have reckoned with the size and scope of the self-help movement, you probably share my initial intuition about what it has to say about the self: lots. It turns out, though, that all that surface noise is deceptive. Underneath what appears to be umptebajillion ideas about who we are and how we work, the self-help movement has a startling paucity of theories about the self. To be precise: It has one.

Let us call it the master theory of self-help. It goes like this: Somewhere below or above or beyond the part of you that is struggling with weight loss or procrastination or whatever your particular problem might be, there is another part of you that is immune to that problem and capable of solving it for the rest of you. In other words, this master theory is fundamentally dualist. It posits, at a minimum, two selves: one that needs a kick in the ass and one that is capable of kicking.

This model of selfhood is intuitively appealing, not least because it describes an all-too-familiar experience. As I began by saying, all of us struggle to keep faith with our plans and goals, and all of us can envision better selves more readily than we can be them. Indeed, the reason we go to the self-help section in the first place is that some part of us wants to do something that some other part resists.

That's Kathryn Schulz in New York Magazine in one of the articles I've been catching up on from the holiday break. It's a thought-provoking read.

Schulz questions whether this idea of two selves, the metaphor at the heart of the self-help industry, is inherently flawed. Could that explain why the self-help industry continues to fail to solve so many of our problems, thus perpetuating its own existence? 

My personal survey of recent popular self-help books seems to indicate that the current predominant model of self is that we are fundamentally defective or prone to self-destructive behavior in ways we cannot overcome, and so the best way to help ourselves is to hack our environment. In essence, we must trick ourselves.

Take for example the Paleo diet, which says we can eat as much as we want, as long as its the right types of food. Or the book Nudge, which says we can get users to make better choices by making the default choices ones that are better for them. Or the book The Power of Habit, which says we are caught in almost subconscious habit loops that we can simply reprogram. Or the book What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love, and Marriage, which recommends training your husband like you would an circus animal.

On the one hand, this conception of the self removes some self-loathing as it is predicated on the belief that we are inherently defective in certain ways. On the other hand, thinking of ourselves as being unaware of our own self-destructive behavior and having to trick ourselves into breaking these dangerous loops is a fairly grim view of human nature.

Perhaps we can take solace in simply being smart enough to be aware of what we still don't understand. It may not make us skinnier or more productive, but consciousness of the limitations of our current understanding of self gives us some hope that we might someday decipher it.