Todd G. Simpson

Your Connectome is a map of your brain.  Every neuron, every synapse. I am only a few pages into Connectome, but was intrigued by a sentence: "Human DNA....has three billion letters....would be a million pages long if printed as a book."  The companion question, "How many pages for the Connectome?" might be answered later in the book, but I thought I would take a shot at it here. Here is the punchline: Your Connectome book is 6.7 million times longer than your DNA book. That human DNA is about a million pages is not too surprising, although it probably is not optimized. According to quora there are between 1500 and 1800 letters per page.  I am going to use round numbers, namely 2000.  Then, the 3x10^9 DNA letters would actually be 1.5 million pages.  But this is very wasteful.  Even using just ASCII we can encode four DNA letters per character, so the book should really only be about 400K pages.  And, this book is much more interesting; in...

[ This is a thought experiment arising from speculation on if Facebook would give quarterly guidance once they are public; implementing this thought experiment is not realistic :-/ ]  I wrote a few weeks ago about " Fixing the Game ", by Roger Martin, which details how the public markets have become a game of Expectations versus Reality.  He argues that, unless this changes, the capital markets are in trouble. A lot of the Expectations Game is enabled by public companies giving quarterly and yearly guidance, leading to "gambling" behavior by investors.  One of Martin's recommendations is to repeal safe harbor regulations, which would strongly discourage companies and executives from giving forward guidance. Another (extreme) approach would be have companies post real time (unaudited) financial information. While very difficult for some types of business, doing so for an online advertising business is possible. Real time financials would not only make ...