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COMPUTER CODED INFORMATION can be compared to DNA, viruses, or prions. Most typically, the comparison is to DNA. However, it may be more interesting to compare it to viruses and prions, who live in the grey zone of living. View in LinkedIn

GENETIC CODE, in all its weird and wonderfully diverse forms, has occupied these pages for a long while. As entities that are many millions of years in the evolutionary hopper, they are hugely informative to the topic of computer code, relatively new on Planet Earth. And as strings of information, they have a great deal in common, and even more not in common. View in LinkedIn

VIRUSES AND PRIONS are good examples of biological conundrums where there is little consensus as to whether they are living creatures, or at best on a continuum. These are old debates. Now hold that thought while we ease into the subject of computer code, its evolution, self-replication, and viral forms. View in LinkedIn

BIOLOGY AS A TENDENCY. "As fuzzy logic theorist Bart Kosko has said: “biology is not destiny. It was never more than tendency. It was just nature’s first quick and dirty way to compute with meat. Chips are destiny.” https://lnkd.in/dTveM5M View in LinkedIn

HARD TO FIND. "Note that very few compilers will identify orphan code." https://lnkd.in/d9rVas9 View in LinkedIn

LIVING PROTEIN? https://lnkd.in/d7w5k54 View in LinkedIn

ORPHAN COMPUTER CODE. "Dead or unreachable code is code that will never be executed. It manifests itself as variables that are declared but never used, functions that are never called, or code that is skipped because of a branch. Since the dead code is not executed, it is an error, often a logic error. Dead code is created by cavalier programmers. An easy way to create dead code is by use of a goto statement and labels." https://lnkd.in/d9rVas9 View in LinkedIn

PRION PROTEIN FOLDING, or its 3D structure, conveys enough information to change a normal cellular protein into an infectious prion particle. As such, it is a protein gene, a rather controversial concept. https://lnkd.in/e3uKvuP View in LinkedIn

REMEMBER JUNK DNA? That hard-to-explain and rather significant chunk of non-coding DNA in humans and other creatures? Remember mutations, or genetic errors? All relevant to computer code. Remember jumping genes and imported DNA? View in LinkedIn

PROTO-LIFE. "Yet prions don’t reproduce the way living things do, using genetic material; they’re more like zombies in horror movies that turn their human victims into zombies as well. They’re not made up of cells, and they don’t have any kind of metabolism. Because they lack genetic material and a cellular structure, prions are less often grouped in with living things than viruses. https://lnkd.in/ddwhRte View in LinkedIn