Monday, July 15, 2013

What do structures look like when they're in lower-case?

Copyright: NASA
A couple of months ago, I was watching "The X-Files"* and I saw this image flash up on the screen -- turns out to be one of the pictures that's on "The Golden Record" that's on the Voyager spacecraft.

I thought there was something rather odd-looking about it, and what I note is both the unique font (with backwards serifs (is that the term?)) and lower-case structures.

I welcome our alien overlords, but if they're using lower-case letters in their structures, it will be cause for interstellar war.

*The excellent episode "Little Green Men". 
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4 comments:

  1. HapJuly 15, 2013 at 12:32 PM

    Why did they leave the DNA base pairs in caps, then? I've heard that lower-case letters are more readable (the letter forms) are more easily distinguished than for upper-case ones, but that's doesn't make sense if the artist left the base pairs in caps.

    Also, in the DNA, they seem to be using G-S base-pairing rather than G-C. Why?

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    Replies
    1. AndreJuly 15, 2013 at 2:15 PM

      I'm pretty sure S was used instead of C to not confuse it with carbon atoms. It's not easy to differentiate big C from little c. The base pairs in caps might be to distinguish groups of atoms from individual atoms (not that aliens will have a distinct notion of intricacies of the Latin alphabet).

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  2. qvxbJuly 15, 2013 at 3:38 PM

    See the comment by Andrew, posted 12/7/2012 at 3:50 AM here: http://nsaunders.wordpress.com/2012/12/06/the-voyager-golden-record-why-is-cytosine-s/

    Also note the Bohr depictions of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorus.

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  3. AnonymousJuly 15, 2013 at 10:17 PM

    Perhaps this was an attempt to misguide any Aliens who might want to duplicate our DNA

    ReplyDelete

looks like Blogger doesn't work with anonymous comments from Chrome browsers at the moment - works in Microsoft Edge, or from Chrome with a Blogger account - sorry! CJ 3/21/20

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