Current state of the art on genomics projects and technology - Dec 2018

Gene sequencing has its own kind of Moore's Law, but with more cliffs and plateaus.

Technology: The $1,000 genome (2014), Nature News

This was plotted in 2014, back then a human genome costed \$5000. In 2015 it dropped suddenly to $1000 and that's where it's at now, according to NIH.

Conjoined twins, how boundless is nature's depravity!

This post is about all kinds of ways humans are born wrong. It's very disgusting and scary. Personally I powered through the study by listening Depressive Suicidal Death Metal. Here's the playlist I used. I won't show gory pictures but I would link them. Please don't click them unless you eat Cupcakes for breakfast at the Rainbow Factory. They really put the "gross" in "gross pathology".

But first, why do I bother with this? There's a philosophical point to be had here. Usual humans move about fully formed and independent, it's easy to imagine them to be naturally individuals. They aren't and looking at how grotesquely their individuality can fail is a great way to shock one into realizing the mess of reality.

And there's an even higher way to look at this. The body is not a sacred ONE thing, it's just a sack of meat... Similarly, the mind is not a sacred ONE thing either, it's just... a messy collection of things that a brain does, like in Inside Out (2015). Once this is appreciated, one might see that an indivisible individual "self" is an illusion.