Coding Quotes

I think part of why schizophrenia got linked to civil rights protest in the '60s was because mainstream society was coding threats against the smooth running of the state as insanity and treating it as such, and so as that happens you see the evolution of a process in which people with schizophrenia are increasingly feared and our hospitals, particularly the kind of hospital that I look at in the book become to look more and more like prisons, to the point where many of them including the one I talk about actually become prisons. ~ Jonathan Michel Metzl

When you learn to read and write, it opens up opportunities for you to learn so many other things. When you learn to read, you can then read to learn. And it's the same thing with coding. If you learn to code, you can code to learn. Now some of the things you can learn are sort of obvious. You learn more about how computers work. ~ Mitchel Resnick

When the superior programmer refrains from coding, his force is felt for a thousand miles. ~ Eric S. Raymond

The coding was anachronistic, kind of like bokeh in a renaissance painting. ~ Sorin Suciu

The word 'code' turns out to be a really important word for my book, 'The Information.' The genetic code is just one example. We talk now about coders, coding. Computer guys are coders. The stuff they write is code. ~ James Gleick

I want to encourage more young women to get involved in coding, because it's important for them to be able to help shape the future, and coding is the future. ~ Karlie Kloss

Coding is today's language of creativity. All our children deserve a chance to become creators instead consumers of computer science. ~ Maria Klawe

At X-Feer, we teach how to solve problems not how to write a code because that's the most important thing in coding. ~ Ahmed Abu Taha

Secrets are only secrets to those who can't see. There are many people who got 20-20 vision and can't see a secret right in front of them. ~ Linda Armstrong

Simple organisms like bacteria tend more to the Airfix way of life. Their genes are fairly set, coding for just one protein. The more complex an organism becomes, the more the genome begins to resemble LEGO, with a much greater degree of flexibility in how the components are used. And when we think how extraordinary we humans are, it seems reasonable to say, in a nod to certain movie, that at the genetic level 'everything is awesome'. ~ Nessa Carey

You should hire the best engineer you can find, regardless of her coding preference, because if she's the best she can down enough Java to C how to make the Python Go. ~ Eric Schmidt

The causal body is like DNA or RNA in that it is the coding that determines your level of evolution. ~ Frederick Lenz

Out of grad school, I worked as a tech writer for a while before going into computer coding for a living. ~ Richard Powers

But was chance necessary? Hubbard, too, thought about the parallels between the Mandelbrot set and the biological encoding of information, but he bristled at any suggestion that such processes might depend on probability. "There is no randomness in the Mandelbrot set," Hubbard said. "There is no randomness in anything that I do. Neither do I think that the possibility of randomness has any direct relevance to biology. In biology randomness is death, chaos is death. Everything is highly structured. When you clone plants, the order in which the branches come out is exactly the same. The Mandelbrot set obeys an extraordinarily precise scheme leaving nothing to chance whatsoever. I strongly suspect that the day somebody actually figures out how the brain is organized they will discover to their amazement that there is a coding scheme for building the brain which is of extraordinary precision. The idea of randomness in biology is just reflex. ~ James Gleick

I don't want to be in a situation where I have to leave some other commitment or worse I am rude and someone else has to support my stuff. I stopped coding for Facebook a while ago. ~ Mark Zuckerberg

A successful website does three things:
It attracts the right kinds of visitors.
Guides them to the main services or product you offer.
Collect Contact details for future ongoing relation. ~ Mohamed Saad

There are certainly lots of jobs in computer coding, but coding doesn't really require advanced mathematics. And engineering jobs, they vary widely in the amount of demand that we actually need. So, you know, the number of people for whom the job description includes Newton's calculus is not perhaps that high. ~ Anya Kamenetz

The full sequence of communication between neurons is thus usually electrical-chemical-electrical: electrical signals coming down axons get converted into chemical messages that help trigger electrical signals in the next cell. There are also synapses through which communication between presynaptic and postsynaptic sites is purely electrical, but chemical transmission is the more prevalent form. Thus, much of what the brain does involves electrical-to-chemical-to-electrical coding of experience. As hard as it may be to imagine, electrochemical conversations between neurons make possible all of the wondrous (and sometimes dreadful) accomplishments of human minds. Your very understanding that the brain works this way is itself an electrochemical event. ~ Joseph E. LeDoux

Reusability is key in reducing bugs and coding quickly. The more I use a piece of code, the more confident and familiar I become with it, which in turn significantly speeds up my development time. ~ Robert Duchnik

More long non-coding RNAs are expressed in the brain than any other tissue (with the possible exception of the testes).26 Some have been conserved from birds to humans, with expression patterns that occur in the same regions and at the same developmental stages. These ~ Nessa Carey

When you learn through coding, [you're] coding to learn. You're learning it in a meaningful context, and that's the best way of learning things. ~ Mitchel Resnick

To the one in the skies, this city must look like a scintillating pattern of speckled glows in all directions, like a firecracker going off amid thick darkness. Right now the urban pattern glowing here is in hues of orange, ginger, and ochre. It is a configuration of sparkles, each dot a light lit by someone awake at this hour. From where the Celestial Gaze is situated, from that high above, all these sporadically lit bulbs must seem in perfect harmony, constantly flickering, as if coding a cryptic message to God. ~ Elif Shafak

I've always had very strong feeling that computer programming is a godlike kind of job.
Similar to the Lord creating our material world and whole the Universe, based on molecular techniques such as DNA coding ― developers create the digital world based on IT technologies coding. ~ Sahara Sanders

Maybe it's not acting for you. Maybe it's baseball or coding or taking care of kids. But whatever path you choose, whatever career you decide to go after, the important thing is that you keep finding joy in what you're doing, especially when the joy isn't finding you. Treat every day like you're starring in it. Don't wait for permission or good reviews. If you can do that, you'll be surprised by how far you might end up sailing. ~ Lauren Graham

When fear overwhelms truth and love, we call it pain. Our spirit as women has all the knowledge and power we need to give birth and to nurture our babies. It is in our genetic coding. It has been there since the beginning of time. You can trust its wisdom. ~ Gurmukh Kaur Khalsa

There have always been and always will be people who want to help. They just don't know how. ~ Linda Armstrong

I have one very basic rule when it comes to "good ideas". A good idea is not an idea that solves a problem cleanly. A good idea is an idea that solves several things at the same time. The mark of good coding is not that the program does what you want, it's that it also does something that you didn't start out wanting. ~ Linus Torvalds

Rebellion and accidents have caused a majority of the advancements we enjoy on a daily basis. Thank goodness for defiance and randomness! ~ Linda Armstrong

Her parents didn't get it. Life was different now. The future, her future and that of everyone else her age, had blown up in slow motion. She lived the way she did because greed had sucked the juice out of the world and it was no longer possible to get one of those humble but promising jobs that led, with hard work and perseverance, to something that might be considered a career. Instead you competed with ambitious, underpaid people on the Indian subcontinent for the sucky customer service jobs, or you might choose to go the tech route and work as a coding slave, or sign noncompete and binding arbitration agreements with some major corporation that still required human bodies to do their dirty work for them. ~ Jean Thompson

Hiro and Y.T. have eaten a lot of junk food together in different joints all
over L.A. -- doughnuts, burritos, pizza, sushi, you name it -- and all Y.T. ever
talks about is her mother and the terrible job that she has with the Feds. The
regimentation. The lie-detector tests. The fact that for all the work she
does, she really has no idea what it is that the government is really working
on.
It's always been a mystery to Hiro, too, but then, that's how the government is.
It was invented to do stuff that private enterprise doesn't bother with, which
means that there's probably no reason for it; you never know what they're doing
or why. Hackers have traditionally looked upon the government's coding
sweatshops with horror and just tried to forget that all of that shit ever
existed.
But they have thousands of programmers. The programmers work twelve hours a day
out of some twisted sense of personal loyalty. Their software-engineering
techniques, while cruel and ugly, are very sophisticated. They must have been
up to something. ~ Neal Stephenson

What you've probably discovered, at least at some level, is that a calendar, though important, can really effectively manage only a small portion of what you need to organize. And daily to-do lists and simplified priority coding have proven inadequate to deal with the volume and variable nature of the average professional's workload. ~ David Allen

Even if we have a reliable criterion for detecting design, and even if that criterion tells us that biological systems are designed, it seems that determining a biological system to be designed is akin to shrugging our shoulders and saying God did it. The fear is that admitting design as an explanation will stifle scientific inquiry, that scientists will stop investigating difficult problems because they have a sufficient explanation already.

But design is not a science stopper. Indeed, design can foster inquiry where traditional evolutionary approaches obstruct it. Consider the term "junk DNA." Implicit in this term is the view that because the genome of an organism has been cobbled together through a long, undirected evolutionary process, the genome is a patchwork of which only limited portions are essential to the organism. Thus on an evolutionary view we expect a lot of useless DNA. If, on the other hand, organisms are designed, we expect DNA, as much as possible, to exhibit function. And indeed, the most recent findings suggest that designating DNA as "junk" merely cloaks our current lack of knowledge about function. For instance, in a recent issue of the Journal of Theoretical Biology, John Bodnar describes how "non-coding DNA in eukaryotic genomes encodes a language which programs organismal growth and development." Design encourages scientists to look for function where evolution discourages it.

Or consider vestigial organs that later are found t ~ William A. Dembski

The morning was already setting up to be hectic, and Jon thanked his lucky stars that Jessie was so good at his job and a constant spark-plug of activity.
Oh god, you did not just think Jessie was a spark-plug? You really are getting old. Next thing you know you'll being saying whipper-snappers and break a hip getting out of bed. He shook his head. I guess I had a good run.
Jessie quickly re-entered the office. "Alright. Elisabeth has her caffeine fix and said she'll be down to say goodbye in a few. So let's get this bad boy going for the week.
Travel plans are done for next month and meetings for the week are in you planner so I'm assuming they'll be no more complaining about flying coach class this time?" Jessie gave a sly wink and kept organizing his desk.
"Yes. And for that I thank you for that my color-coding, hyper computer organized planner. We have to make sure the next presentation for Chicago is ready in three weeks; the storyboards for the new campaign ideas have to be finished by Tuesday the 16th so we can get them shipped before I head out there."
"And let's not forget our important morning ritual."
Jon looked at Jessie with a question about to form before the realization hit him. His expression changed from confused to stern. "No cat videos Jessie. I swear. Enough of the cat videos."
"C'mon. You know you love them and they brighten your dour moods. Look at this one." Jessie turned his screen and Jon begrudgingly looked at th ~ Matthew Alan

When the words are fuzzy, the programmers reflexively retreat to the most precise method of articulation available: source code. Although there is nothing more precise than code, there is also nothing more permanent or resistant to change. So the situation frequently crops up where nomenclature confusion drives programmers to begin coding prematurely, and that code becomes the de facto design, regardless of its appropriateness or correctness. ~ Amari Cooper

Coding and technical chops are now an essential part of being a great marketer. Growth hackers are a hybrid of marketer and coder ... ~ Ryan Holiday

Content" ranges anywhere from the logo on a can of soup,
dogs dancing on youtube,
to the coding of an app:
it's confusing! ~ Natasha Tsakos

I'd support life extension by whatever means, from cryonic suspension to cyborgism to coding ourselves into our computers or whatever. There is nothing noble or beautiful or dignified about dying. Like poverty, it is ugly, nasty, brutal and primitive. ~ Robert Anton Wilson

Sometimes what-if fantasies are useful. Imagine that the entirety of Western civilisation's coding for computer systems or prints of all films ever made or all copies of Shakespeare and the Bible and the Qur'an were encrypted and held on one tablet device. And if that tablet was lost, stolen, burnt or corrupted, then our knowledge, use and understanding of that content, those words and ideas, would be gone for ever – only, perhaps, lingering in the minds of a very few men of memory whose job it had been to keep ideas alive. This little thought-experiment can help us to comprehend the totemic power of manuscripts. This is the great weight of responsibility for the past, the present and the future that the manuscripts of Constantinople carried. Much of our global cultural heritage – philosophies, dramas, epic poems – survive only because they were preserved in the city's libraries and scriptoria. Just as Alexandria and Pergamon too had amassed vast libraries, Constantinople understood that a physical accumulation of knowledge worked as a lode-stone – drawing in respect, talent and sheer awe. These texts contained both the possibilities and the fact of empire and had a quasi-magical status. This was a time when the written word was considered so potent – and so precious – that documents were thought to be objects with spiritual significance. (...)

It was in Constantinople that the book review was invented. Scholars seem to have had access to books within a proto-lendi ~ Bettany Hughes

APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums. ~ Edsger Dijkstra

When she was in the middle of a hack, it tended to fill up her brain until her vision hummed with coding and mathematics, skipping ahead to each necessary task faster than she could complete them. It tended to leave her in a state of drained euphoria. ~ Marissa Meyer

We were sitting side by side, with our legs swinging on the wall of the tower, and the Clouds™ were all turning pink in front of us. We could see all these miles of filet mignon from where we were sitting, and some places where the genetic coding had gone wrong and there, in the middle of the beef, the tissue had formed a horn or an eye or a heart blinking up at the sunset, which was this brag red, and which hit on all these miles of muscle and made it flex and quiver, with all these shudders running across the top of it, and birds were flying over, crying kind of sad, maybe looking for garbage, and the whole thing, with the beef and the birds and the sky, it glowed like there was a light inside it, which it was time to show us now. ~ M.T. Anderson

The best user experiences are enchanting. They help the user enter an alternate reality, whether it's the world of making music, writing, sharing photos, coding, or managing a project. ~ Kathy Sierra

Beyond 100,000 lines of code, you should probably be coding in Ada. ~ P. J. Plauger

The happiest moment i felt; is that moment when i realized my ability to create. ~ Dr. Hazem Ali

Technology has the benefit of being easily scalable. A few weeks or months of coding can result in solutions that reap huge benefits. The global success of Facebook, Twitter, and Google are all triumphs of technology. ~ Shawn Amos

The thing about Web companies is there's always something severely fucked-up. There is always an outage, always lost data, always compromised customer information, always a server going offline. You work with these clugey internal tools and patch together work-arounds to compensate for the half-assed, rushed development, and after a while the fucked-upness of the whole enterprise becomes the status quo. VPs insecure that they're not as in touch as they need to be with conditions on the ground insert themselves into projects midstream and you get serious scope creep. You present to the world this image that you're a buttoned-down tech company with everything in its right place but once you're on the other side of the firewall it looks like triage time in an emergency room, 24/7. Systems break down, laptops go into the blue screen of death, developers miskey a line of code, error messages appear that mean absolutely nothing. The instantaneousness with which you can fix stuff creates a culture that works by the seat of its pants. I swear the whole Web was built by virtue of developers fixing one mistake after another, constantly forced to compensate for the bugginess of their code. ~ Ryan Boudinot

Science confirms that when an individual is asked to make a choice between two insignificant objects, the person's brain knows which he will choose up to six seconds before he ever vocally says a word. ~ Linda Armstrong

Building technical systems involves a lot of hard work and specialized knowledge: languages and protocols, coding and debugging, testing and refactoring. ~ Jesse James Garrett

I went to a Cal Tech party after the 'Facebook' movie came out, and there were kids in dark rooms coding because it was cool again. That movie made it cool to sit in a room at a party and write code. ~ Kerry Bishe

The complement is also true: Procedural code makes it hard to add new data structures because all the functions must change. OO code makes it hard to add new functions because all the classes must change. ~ Robert C. Martin

This shows that the ordinary person is wanting more for their lives. They want to be of help, they want to make things better. ~ Linda Armstrong

I wanted to make an explicitly educational comic that taught readers the concepts I covered in my introductory programming class. That's what 'Secret Coders' is. It's both a fun story about a group of tweens who discover a secret coding school, and an explanation of some foundational ideas in computer science. ~ Gene Luen Yang

Normal waking consciousness feels perfectly transparent, and yet it is less a window on reality than the product of our imaginations-a kind of controlled hallucination. ~ Michael Pollan

The causal body holds the structure. The causal body is the coding. So you are not just scattered all over the ten thousand states of mind. ~ Frederick Lenz

While learning to code may have once been an arduous or expensive process, the college dropouts who developed Codecademy have democratized coding as surely as Gutenberg democratized text. Anyone can go to Codecademy and start learning and creating code through their simple, fun, interactive window, for free. ~ Douglas Rushkoff

A limiting belief is practically invisible to us – it hides in habit and custom and mores. It is the way we live. To break out of the limiting belief would almost be like … (gasp) rebellion! ~ Linda Armstrong

We can't all be investigating non-coding DNA," I said, feeling an upsurge of gastric acid. "Some of us have to sell bullshit self-improvement courses ~ Russell Hoban

My eyes can scan the list of work in progress, and I know immediately what's happening in the current month. I even use custom icons on Windows and color-coding on Mac to get even more information at a glance when I open my go-to folder - see the sidebar. ~ Jill Duffy

The last six years have been a lot of coding and focus and hard work. But maybe it would be fun to remember it as partying and all this crazy drama. ~ Mark Zuckerberg

For me, coding is a form of self-expression. The company controls the most effective means of self-expression I have. This is unacceptable to me as an individual, therefore I must leave. ~ Justin Frankel

So, at a minimum, our educational systems must be retooled to maximize these needed skills and attributes: strong fundamentals in writing, reading, coding, and math; creativity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration; grit, self-motivation, and lifelong learning habits; and entrepreneurship and improvisation - at every level. The ~ Thomas L. Friedman

The cells of an organism are nodes in a richly interwoven communications network, transmitting and receiving, coding and decoding. Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment. ~ James Gleick

Girls, well, when God was coding their speech pattern, he deliberately left out the brevity parameter. He probably had a good laugh, and did the needful to the other kind to maintain the balance. ~ Rajat Mishra

These random accidents of kindness will teach us all something about what it means to be human on this planet. We must be the change we are expecting. It's up to us. ~ Linda Armstrong

I may have the genetic coding that Im inclined to be an alcoholic, but I have the desire not to do that, and I look at the homosexual issue the same way. ~ Rick Perry

But in a pinch, he was a capable coder too. He just wasn't especially fast. So when he was finally done coding and debugging his program and ran a successful test, it was past eleven on Tuesday night. He hadn't slept but for a few hours on Sunday night, and the lack of sleep had cooked him. ~ Matthew FitzSimmons

We have phosphate on our DNA. Aluminum attaches itself to it and messes up our genetic coding process. While the aluminum is inside a cell, some of its particles attach to adenosine triphosphate (ATP). The ATP is in charge of our cell's energy production. So, in this manner the aluminum can affect our energy level. We have enzymes (proteins) within our cells that depend on attaching themselves to calcium (Ca) or magnesium (Mg) to function properly. Once our enzymes have attached to the Ca and Mg, they can carry on with their functions. Because the aluminum has such a strong positive charge, it's able to break the bond between our enzymes and Ca or Mg. These enzymes are now no longer attached to Ca or Mg. They have become neutralized and are unable to carry out their responsibilities. We need these enzymes for efficient metabolism, but now the aluminum is attached to the enzymes instead. The protein molecules all look a little different because their shape reflects what they are designed to do. Aluminum disturbs their individual tasks and clumps them together so they are now misshapen and no longer functioning. Aluminum also messes with the cell surface, the membrane, the outer layer of the cell. With a dysfunctional cell membrane, everything inside the cell becomes compromised and it is no longer able to properly communicate with the environment surrounding the cell about what needs to be done[96]. ~ James Morcan

He has reverted, in other words, back into a pure balls-to-the-wall nerdism rivaled only by his early game-coding days back in Seattle. The sheer depth and involution of the current nerdism binge would be hard to convey to anyone. Intellectually, he is juggling half a dozen lit torches, Ming vases, live puppies, and running chainsaws. In this frame of mind he cannot bring himself to give a shit about the fact that this incredibly powerful billionaire has gone to a lot of trouble to come and F2F with him. ~ Neal Stephenson

No reference is truly direct - every reference depends on SOME kind of coding scheme. It's just a question of how implicit it is. ~ Douglas Hofstadter

When did things go wrong? Probably already at the kick-off meeting. Some of the project members didn't pay attention. Others didn't understand the point. Worse, some disagreed and were already planning their coding standard rebellion. Finally, some got the point and agreed but, when the pressure in the project got too high, they had to let something go. ~ Kevlin Henney

When I deal with smart IT programmers, I have a strong impression that their job has much in common with the phenomenon of how the Lord arranged the Universe and created genetics (cells, DNA, molecules, etc.). Both genetics and computer programming create their magic by performing highly intelligent coding work. ~ Sahara Sanders

for the average team, insisting on writing tests first, before functional coding, improves quality. ~ David J. Anderson

He went upstairs and opened the telegram; it was addressed to a department in the British Consulate, and the figures which followed had an ugly look like the lottery tickets that remained unsold on the last day of a draw. There was 2674 and then a string of five-figure numerals: 42811 79145 72312 59200 80947 62533 10605 and so on. It was his first telegram and he noticed that it was addressed from London. He was not even certain (so long ago his lesson seemed) that he could decode it, but he recognised a single group, 59200, which had an abrupt and monitory appearance as though Hawthorne that moment had come accusingly up the stairs. Gloomily he took down Lamb's 'Tales from Shakespeare' - how he had always detested Elia and the essay on Roast Pork. The first group of figures, he remembered, indicated the page, the line and the word with which the coding began. 'Dionysia, the wicked wife of Cleon,' he read, 'met with an end proportionable to her deserts'. He began to decode from 'deserts'. To his surprise something really did emerge. It was rather as though some strange inherited parrot had begun to speak. ~ Graham Greene

Software development is the process of creating a computer software.
It includes preparing a design, coding the program, and fixing the
bugs. The final goal of software development is to translate user
needs to software product, while continuously improving the team
and the process. ~ Paulo Caroli

I can see into your heart. You have good intentions. You can't go wrong when you start with good intentions. ~ Linda Armstrong

The big advancement in our BCM7445 home gateway chip is that it uses the next-generation compression technology called HEVC - High-Efficiency Video Coding. ~ Henry Samueli

Personal qualities today are increasingly marginalized in favor of technocratic, market-driven skills. Instead, finance is the new courage, branding is the new compassion, and coding is the new contemplation. ~ Andrew Yang

The mirror is where you find a reflection of your appearance. The heart is where you find a reflection of the soul. ~ Linda Armstrong

Coding is other type of magic! ~ Deyth Banger

Imagine a bunch of swashbuckling programmers pillaging and hoarding software gems from rich codebases around the seven software seas. Daring. But dangerous. It's coding with the bad hygiene of a salty seaman. ~ Anonymous

Have you ever had a weird and strong feeling that programming is a godlike kind of work? Just as the Lord created our world and the entire Universe based on molecular techniques such as DNA coding, software developers create a digital world based on IT coding. ~ Sahara Sanders

Please don't fall into the trap of believing that I am terribly dogmatical about [the goto statement]. I have the uncomfortable feeling that others are making a religion out of it, as if the conceptual problems of programming could be solved by a single trick, by a simple form of coding discipline! ~ Edsger Dijkstra

Many jobs at Google require math, computing, and coding skills, so if your good grades truly reflect skills in those areas that you can apply, it would be an advantage. But Google has its eyes on much more. ~ Thomas Friedman

The use of the high level language made each programmer a factor of 5 to 10 more productive in a coding sense and more concerned with the semantics than the syntax of modules. ~ Fernando J. Corbato

Listening, Testing, Coding, Designing. That's all there is to software. Anyone who tells you different is selling something. ~ Kent Beck

open coding; development of concepts; grouping concepts into categories; formation of a theory. In the open coding stage, we analyze the text and identify any interesting phenomena in the data. Normally each unique phenomenon is given a distinctive name or code. The procedure and methods for identifying coding items are discussed in section 11.5.2. In the second stage, collections of codes that describe similar contents are grouped together to form higher level "concepts." In the third stage, broader groups of similar concepts are identified to form "categories" and there is a detailed interpretation of each category. In this process, we are constantly searching for and refining the conceptual construct that may explain the relationship between the concepts and categories (Glaser, 1978). In the last stage, theory formulation, we aim at creating inferential and predictive statements about the phenomena recorded in the data. ~ Jonathan Lazar

How does the body push the comparatively tiny genome so far? Many researchers want to put the weight on learning and experience, apparently believing that the contribution of the genes is relatively unimportant. But though the ability to learn is clearly one of the genome's most important products, such views overemphasize learning and significantly underestimate the extent to which the genome can in fact guide the construction of enormous complexity. If the tools of biological self-assembly are powerful enough to build the intricacies of the circulatory system or the eye without requiring lessons from the outside world, they are also powerful enough to build the initial complexity of the nervous system without relying on external lessons.

The discrepancy melts away as we appreciate the true power of the genome. We could start by considering the fact that the currently accepted figure of 30,000 could well prove to be too low. Thirty thousand (or thereabouts) is, at press time, the best estimate for how many protein-coding genes are in the human genome. But not all genes code for proteins; some, not counted in the 30,000 estimate, code for small pieces of RNA that are not converted into proteins (called microRNA), of "pseudogenes," stretches of DNA, apparently relics of evolution, that do not properly encode proteins. Neither entity is fully understood, but recent reports (from 2002 and 2003) suggest that both may play some role in the all-important process of regul ~ Gary F. Marcus

Give a man a program, frustrate him for a day.
Teach a man to program, frustrate him for a lifetime. ~ Waseem Latif