"Paul Levinson - The Copyright Notice Case" - читать интересную книгу автора (Levinson Paul)

this chromosomal material which Jenna Katen says Glen Chaleff
was able to read on his screen?"
Hertzberg sighed. "Not very easily, but I'll try to
explain. First, you have to understand that there's lots of
protein material associated with chromosomes that we have no
idea what the function is. Not everything there is just genes.
In fact, most isn't. Some material we've identified as seeming
to have a catalyst function for the genes themselves -- sort of
meta-catalysts -- some seem to control timing of genetic
instruction of other proteins in ways we're just beginning to
fathom. But most of this extra genetic material is still a
mystery to us."
Right, the so-called junk DNA, I thought. "And the, uh, the
linguistic material on the eight percent of X chromosomes is,
was, in the mystery area?"
"Yes."
"Has this material been found only on human chromosomes?"
"So far, yes," Hertzberg said. "Primate chromosomes were
the first other place we looked -- chimp and ape DNA is 99
percent the same as human -- and we found nothing like it."
"Nothing that could generate words on a screen?"
"Look, let me be honest with you," Hertzberg said. "I know
what Jenna told you, but we don't even know for sure that this
binary chromosomal material can be converted into readable
words. It seems transformable into a binary code, yes, but we
have no way of really testing the accuracy of that
transformation, since we have nothing precisely of this kind to
measure it against. And we certainly don't know for sure if
that code can support actual words. What we get from that code
at first is some sort of general proto-language, strongly
resembling Indo-European in its subject-predicate structure, and
therefore recognizable as a real language to some researchers, I
guess. And assuming that to be Indo-European, or
proto-Indo-European, we can make rough translations into
English, Sanskrit, what have you. But the results are
extraordinarily speculative to say the least -- I'd say the
noise to signal ratio must be well over 40 percent in the final
translation. Though that's conjecture too -- the actual
distortion could be far more, or less, for that matter. Bottom
line: We're dealing with a hell of a lot of conjecture here.
That's why we haven't published anything about this yet. It's
still in the very early stages of research. Most of our work
is."
"All right," I said. "Let's back up a little -- I'm very
much a layman when it comes to linguistics. What made you think
in the first place that the binary transformation of chromosomal
code yielded patterns that looked like Indo-European?"
"Ah," Hertzberg said. "That was the relatively easy part.
We already have ASCII table renderings of most known human
languages, including many long extinct. ASCII and binary