Just gettin’ my fix

Putting out a posting every day in Advent just about cured me. In January just four postings, and I haven’t posted a single thing in February. For a while I thought perhaps I’d actually kicked the habit entirely, but deep down inside I think I always knew this would happen. It starts innocently enough with thoughts just forming in my mind. Then words begin to gather and sort themselves into rows like strings of DNA. Then they commence replication and, like Mickey Mouse in The Sorcerers Apprentice, everything I do just makes the situation worse. If I chop them to pieces they just multiply and keep on coming. And if I close the door and hold it against them they simply pile up on the other side and force their way through. And worst of all, like DNA, they eventually become an undeniably living thing, and all my resistance morphs into nurture. Before you know it I’m sitting on an egg again, watching it hatch, and then sending it off to the net to try it’s wings. It’s an affliction I tell you, an addiction affliction. But, like most addicts, everything is about getting another fix. Even my cries for help become another post. O, retched man that I am.

And, speaking of DNA, did you know that:

- each length of human DNA comprises about 3.2 billion letters of coding?

- the number of possible unique combinations is so large that written in conventional form it would be a 1 followed by more than 3 billion zeros?

- it would take more than 5000 average sized books to print that number?

- your body contains about 10 thousand trillion cells, each containing about 1.8 meters of DNA?

- if you could join all these strands into a single strand it would be long enough to reach from the earth to the moon and back twenty-five times?

The other day someone told me that this is the sort of thing that convinces them there must be a God. I don’t actually see the logic in that, but then I don’t need convincing. It does, however, make me wonder about the evolutionary biologist who dismisses the idea of God as too far-fetched.