Sequence alignment by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Sequence alignment is trying to match a DNA or amino acid sequence, even though the sequences might not be exactly the same, otherwise it would be a straight up string-search algorithm.
This is fundamental in bioinformatics for two reasons:
Run output is placed under out/:
Some of the output data is stored as .cpickle files. To observe those files, you need the original Python classes, and therefore you have to be inside Docker, from the host it won't work.
We can list all the plots that have been produced under out/ with
find -name '*.png'
Plots are also available in SVG and PDF formats, e.g.:
  • PNG: ./out/manual/plotOut/low_res_plots/massFractionSummary.png
  • SVG: ./out/manual/plotOut/svg_plots/massFractionSummary.svg The SVGs write text as polygons, see also: SVG fonts.
  • PDF: ./out/manual/plotOut/massFractionSummary.pdf
The output directory has a hierarchical structure of type:
./out/manual/wildtype_000000/000000/generation_000000/000000/
where:
  • wildtype_000000: variant conditions. wildtype is a human readable label, and 000000 is an index amongst the possible wildtype conditions. For example, we can have different simulations with different nutrients, or different DNA sequences. An example of this is shown at run variants.
  • 000000: initial random seed for the initial cell, likely fed to NumPy's np.random.seed
  • genereation_000000: this will increase with generations if we simulate multiple cells, which is supported by the model
  • 000000: this will presumably contain the cell index within a generation
We also understand that some of the top level directories contain summaries over all cells, e.g. the massFractionSummary.pdf plot exists at several levels of the hierarchy:
./out/manual/plotOut/massFractionSummary.pdf
./out/manual/wildtype_000000/plotOut/massFractionSummary.pdf
./out/manual/wildtype_000000/000000/plotOut/massFractionSummary.pdf
./out/manual/wildtype_000000/000000/generation_000000/000000/plotOut/massFractionSummary.pdf
Each of thoes four levels of plotOut is generated by a different one of the analysis scripts:
  • ./out/manual/plotOut: generated by python runscripts/manual/analysisVariant.py. Contains comparisons of different variant conditions. We confirm this by looking at the results of run variants.
  • ./out/manual/wildtype_000000/plotOut: generated by python runscripts/manual/analysisCohort.py --variant_index 0. TODO not sure how to differentiate between two different labels e.g. wildtype_000000 and somethingElse_000000. If -v is not given, a it just picks the first one alphabetically. TODO not sure how to automatically generate all of those plots without inspecting the directories.
  • ./out/manual/wildtype_000000/000000/plotOut: generated by python runscripts/manual/analysisMultigen.py --variant_index 0 --seed 0
  • ./out/manual/wildtype_000000/000000/generation_000000/000000/plotOut: generated by python runscripts/manual/analysisSingle.py --variant_index 0 --seed 0 --generation 0 --daughter 0. Contains information about a single specific cell.
This website used to allow embedding text messages with OP_RETURN, here's an archive from 2015: web.archive.org/web/20150718052659/http://eternitywall.it/
As of January 2024, it seems to read-only mode, where it simply indexes matching transactions that were made via other means: web.archive.org/web/20230929075331/https://eternitywall.it/
There were 3191 hits for the search term:
git grep '\bEW '
in our data starting with tx a3b3af21514bd79a4cbcac9916a8514636a72d813539192214542fd85247082e (2015-06-24):
EW Eternity wall is live
up to the last entry on tx 28820bc14cf2cfda58ecbc9ac6df3f41a1cb90f4246543f01ba42a5e9dac3cf8 (2023-06-15)
EW May our friendship endure, signed by hg, kty, wjj, and xyz.
no doubt initials of 4 Chinesepeople. A blood brother oath comes to mind, akin to the Oath of the Peach Garden. Will these four be the ones to take down the evil dictator Xi Jinping?
The very first message gives away the name of what we assume is a web-based upload system, "EW" being its advertisement signature added to every message.
Running bitcoin-cli:
bitcoin-core.cli getrawtransaction a3b3af21514bd79a4cbcac9916a8514636a72d813539192214542fd85247082e true
shows that the messages are encoded with OP_RETURN:
  "vout": [
    {
      "value": 0.00000000,
      "n": 0,
      "scriptPubKey": {
        "asm": "OP_RETURN 455720457465726e6974792077616c6c206973206c697665
For now we are going to keep this site porn-free and only link to prevent bad things from happening, as it might violate GitHub porn policy depending on how it is hosted, and Google may dislike it. Video "What is more obscene: sex or war? scene from The People vs. Larry Flynt".
If illegal porn were to ever be found, we would be unable to acknowledge that, and would just have to silently remove it. Of course, the reproducible nature of Bitcoin Inscription Indexer means that anyone who regenerates the data would immediately see such entries in the diff.
Another issue is that it can be quite hard to determine if porn is legal or illegal, e.g. it can be hard to distinguish legal an illegal ages or revenge vs consensual porn, especially at the low resolutions that you may expect to find embedded in the blockchain. We are generally going to be quite strict about this, and in case of uncertainty on porn legality we will censor first.
OK the list:
  • bb41a757f405890fb0f5856228e23b715702d714d59bf2b1feb70d8b2b4e3e08 999,657 bytes. Joins a bunch of tiny inputs into a single output
  • 623463a2a8a949e0590ffe6b2fd3e4e1028b2b99c747e82e899da4485eb0b6be and 5143cf232576ae53e8991ca389334563f14ea7a7c507a3e081fbef2538c84f6e both have 3,075 outputs of 1 satoshi each and a single input. We were not able to identify any meaningful data in it, file just says data, and there aren't long ASCII strings. However, the outputs were unspent as of 2021, which suggests that they might actually be data.
Analysis of some of them follows.

Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project

Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
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    Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
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    Figure 2.
    You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either https://OurBigBook.com or as a static website
    .
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    Visual Studio Code extension installation
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    Figure 4.
    Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation
    .
    Figure 5.
    Web editor
    . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.
    Video 3.
    Edit locally and publish demo
    . Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.
    Video 4.
    OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo
    . Source.
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    Figure 6.
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    .
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All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
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