learning about gene structure reminds me a lot of learning about the format of AppleDOS disks as a kid
— James Tauber (@jtauber) April 24, 2013

---- Think about it: * strings of bytes organized into tracks * non-sequential ordering of sectors within tracks (basically the disk spins until it picks up the right sequence identifying the start of a sector) * autosyncing bytes * the D5 AA 96 and D5 AA AD prologue marker and DE AA EB epilogue marker * data that can be ignored before the prologue and after the epilogue * transcribing the bytes on disk to data bytes (the 5-and-3 and 6-and-2 encodings) * those data bytes in many cases coding for particular BASIC tokens It's far from a perfect analogy, but some of it has the same flavour as genetic structure.