When our kids were small, I'd set up an age-appropriate Treasure Hunt for Easter Sunday morning. Looking back on some of the clues, I marvel at my concept of age-appropriate because I seem to have had absurdly high expectations for what a 9 and 7 y.o. were able for. Then again, then again; it was usual for them to rattle through the puzzles quick enough to satisfy their chocolate acquisition drives, with only minimal supplementary clues from me. I suppose I was exercising my educational philosophy of pushing them a little bit more than they might have been initially comfortable with. I reckon a large part of it was that continued practice tuned them into my ways of seeing so it became steadily easier to read me like a book.
Q. What's DNA to me?
A. It must be a clue to a puzzle!
Because I refused to accept that an 8 y.o. would stick just random base-pairs in her double helix. As you shd know, DNA is read off in triplets = codons using a particular [almost] Universal Genetic Code, but it's not obvious from picture what is the direction of transcription and translation. So there are 4 different ways in which the DNA bases can read: blue up; blue down; red up; red down. There are also one or two points of ambiguity where the turns of the helical backbones obscure the base-pairs between them. But here's the data transliterated:
CG?TATAGCTA?TC
AT?GCGCTAGC?GA
CT?ATCGATAT?GC
AG?CGATCGCG?TA
It is obvious, with a bit of help from ExPaSy's translate tool which is the information-containing strand and its direction (the others are random noise):
CTaATCGATATcGC. where I have interpolated (a c) for the backbone-obscured bases
L I D I A
Lidia? It's a message! From one generation to its ancestor!! But what can it mean? there are a number of possibilities:
- A command to go forthwith to Kyrgyzstan to find an Asian dwarf spider.
- A suggestion that I should squeeze into my Traje des Luces [example R] <eeee but I do love some skin-tight sequins> to fight Un Toro de Lidia.
- I can't believe she advises such a dangerous escapade in my declining years . . . unless she hopes to inherit my Traje before I'm quite ready to let it go
- It is a heads up that the child has acquired a tat. Not my business but I'm cool with that, so long as it isn't on her forehead. I'm also okay with modest metallic appendages in children - ear-rings etc.
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