Whenever Ciro Santilli learns about molecular biology, he can't help but to feel that it feels like programming, and notably systems programming and computer hardware design.
In some sense, the comparison is obvious: DNA is clearly a programmable medium like any assembly language, but still, systems programming did give Ciro some further feelings.
- The most important analogy perhaps is observability, or more precisely the lack of it. For the computer, this is described at: The lower level you go into a computer, the harder it is to observe things.And then, when Ciro started learning a bit about biology techniques, he started to feel the exact same thing.For example when he played with E. Coli Whole Cell Model by Covert Lab, the main thing Ciro felt was: it is going to be hard to verify any of this data, because it is hard/impossible to know the concentration of each element in a cell as a function of time.More generally of course, this is exactly why making any biology discovery is so hard: we can't easily see what's going on inside the cell, and have to resort to indirect ways of doing so..This exact idea was highlighted by I should have loved biology by James Somers:
For a computer scientist, a biologist's methods can seem insane; the trouble comes from the fact that cells are too small, too numerous, too complex to analyze the way a programmer would, say in a step-by-step debugger.
And then just like in software, some of the methods biologists use to overcome the lack of visibility have direct software analogues:- add instrumentation to cells, e.g. GFP tagging comes to mind
- emulation, e.g. E. Coli Whole Cell Model by Covert Lab
- The boot process is another one. E.g. in x86 the way that you start in 16-bit mode, largely compatible into the 70's, then move to 32-bit and finally 64, does feel a lot the way a earlier stages of embryo development looks more and more like more ancient animals.
Ciro likes to think that maybe that is why a hardcore systems programmer like Bert Hubert got into molecular biology.
Some other people who mention similar things:
- I should have loved biology by James Somers highlights the computer abstraction layer analogy between the two:
WTF is a skew? "Antisymmetric" is just such a better name! And it also appears in other definitions such as antisymmetric multilinear map.
No, see: superconductor I-V curve.
Bibliography:
- physics.stackexchange.com/questions/62664/how-can-ohms-law-be-correct-if-superconductors-have-0-resistivity on Physics Stack Exchange
- physics.stackexchange.com/questions/69222/how-can-i-put-a-permanent-current-into-a-superconducting-loop
- www.quora.com/Do-superconductors-produce-infinite-current-I-V-R-R-0-How-do-they-fit-into-quantum-theory
- www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/dcgdf/does_superconductivity_imply_infinite_current/
- www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7xhb46/what_would_happen_if_a_voltage_was_applied_to_a/
Discovered in 1988, the first high-temperature superconductor which did not contain a rare-earth element.
Strangeness Minus Three (BBC Horizon 1964)
Source. Basically shows Richard Feynman 15 minutes on a blackboard explaining the experimental basis of the eightfold way really well, while at the same time hyperactively moving all over. The word symmetry gets tossed a few times. Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow suspension for vote fraud script 2019 by 
Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16After Ciro Santilli got a lot of attention on Hacker News news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19428700 his Stack Overflow account was suspended for 3 days web.archive.org/web/20190320163458/https://stackoverflow.com/users/895245/ciro-santilli-新疆改造中心-六四事件-法轮功 and he received a magic notification that led to a private message:
Hello,I've removed this from your profile github.com/cirosantilli/stack-overflow-vote-fraud-script and do not expect you to post it around the site.Regards,Stack Overflow Moderation TeamTo: Aaron Hall ♦;Andy ♦;Baum mit Augen ♦;Bhargav Rao ♦;Bohemian ♦;BoltClock ♦;Brad Larson ♦;ChrisF ♦;Cody Gray ♦;deceze ♦;Ed Cottrell ♦;Flexo ♦;George Stocker ♦;Jean-François Fabre ♦;Jon Clements ♦;josliber ♦;Madara Uchiha ♦;Martijn Pieters ♦;meagar ♦;Michael Myers ♦;Rob ♦;Robert Harvey ♦;Ry- ♦;Samuel Liew ♦;Undo ♦;Yvette Colomb ♦
Ciro's reply was:
Hi mods,
Reply and unsuspend quickly followed, with link still removed:
I suspended you to get your attention. Your attitude about going to Twitter about it does not bode well with me.Feel free to have whatever you want in your GitHub repo. Just don't advertise tools to make it easier for people to circumvent the rules. As easy or as hard as it may be to circumvent them, you're handing it to people who may not be capable of doing so. It doesn't help.Don't make threats to upload on an anonymous account. Accounts created to circumvent previous warnings are not welcomed on the site.We don't need a meta thread to discuss whether it's ok to post voting fraud links in your profile and we definitely don't need to give it anymore publicity.Regards,Stack Overflow Moderation Team
A meta thread was later created by Yvette, kudos, to which Ciro answered with the correct unpopular answer that will be downvoted to oblivion: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/381577/is-it-ok-to-have-links-on-how-to-create-sock-puppets-and-gain-rep-fraudulently-i/381635#381635
Yvette had also previously deleted one or two of Ciro's answers for being duplicates, which is a policy Ciro is against: if the questions are not dupes, a single answer might still directly reply to both of them.
Yvette later announced that she was leaving the website: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/399495/leaving-the-site-and-the-network-mid-election-is-not-the-best-but-theres-no. This is evil, but Ciro was happy. He does not mean harm to Yvette, but in their limited interaction, Ciro disagreed with her choices.
The matrix ring of degree n is the set of all n-by-n square matrices together with the usual vector space and matrix multiplication operations.
- moving magnet and conductor problem: the more experiments confirm Maxwell's equations, the more special relativity has to be correct
- aberration TODO more precisely how it is evidence.
Ciro Santilli claims to be one of them.
There are unlisted articles, also show them or only show them.