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Proteins sometimes have very long names because each
amino acid residue is named and strung into a long
sequence of standard organic chemistry nomenclature. I
won't give an example.
In a sense numbers already have this simply by virtue of
the fact that one can just go "three point one four
one
five
nine...", but this is time-consuming and it can take a long
time to get very far.
One way of overcoming this would be to invent a
standard
nomenclature for numbers, which it would be
advantageous to have easily pronounced regardless of
native language. This probably doesn't quite get there
but
it's a start.
I suggest the following:
No consonant clusters or diphthongs. Each syllable is CV,
similar to Japanese. There are ten vowels: A, E, I, O, U,
AA, EE, II, OO, UU, short and long respectively. A
syllable
consisting of a vowel is seen as starting with a glottal
stop.
Within a number, it's pronounced as a separate syllable.
The consonants are: B, D, F, G, K, M, N, P, S, T, V, Z.
That
allows 130 possible syllables. The named number is
converted to base 128, ignoring ZU and ZUU for
convenience and the order of syllables corresponding to
the digits starts with A for 0, AA for 1 and continues in
alphabetical order through the consonants. This is going
to
be a little difficult for some people to pronounce but it's
a
compromise. It's not feasible to represent integers
above
127 with this system and there is no sign. The idea is
simply to represent real numbers with an assumed fixed
point in the second position.
The value pi therefore begins with the letter E, which is
quite neat. The first few letters of pi are
"Eboo'oovupife...", an equivalent of thirty-five bits
precision, which is six syllables and twelve phonemes
compared to the approximate decimal equivalent of
"three
point one four one five nine two six five...", which is ten
syllables and thirty-five phonemes, so it's more efficient
than English and gives an algorithm for forming an
infinitely long word, which pi surely should be.
Obviously it also makes it the longest word in the world.
Second link in list
Blatantly_20Idiotic...ctions_20for_202016
As described [8th of 7, Sep 15 2017]
Chrip
https://www.chirp.io/
Machine to machine audio transmission, like R2D2. [zen_tom, Sep 17 2017]
[link]
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//Obviously it also makes it the longest word in the world.// |
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Joint longest, along with infinitely many other words, surely? |
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(Next invention: the infinitely large Scrabble board. The scoring could be interesting.) |
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A word is ok, words are better. Can you add some spaces. To create regular sentence structure. In this way it wouldn't be as boring. Also very time a '32' is encountered, add an '!'. Everytime a '44' is encountered, add a comma. |
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I just feel like, it's a long word. Most people aren't going to read it. |
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Could you not also do this by mapping every possible
combination of 3 digits to 1,000 different,
pronounceable 3-letter strings (e.g. 001 = "bab", 002
= "bac" ... 999 = "zuz") and then replacing each 3-
digit chunk of pi with the right 3-letter
combination? |
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//Proteins sometimes have very long names because each amino acid residue is named and strung into a long sequence of standard organic chemistry nomenclature.// |
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That's not really true. What you describe is the protein's amino-acid sequence.
Proteins tend to be given very short names, although the standard form for these varies with the organism type. |
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I can't paste them here but there are plenty of protein
names with thousands of letters. They're out there with
formal ways of transforming chains of amino acids into
them. Clearly these names are not practical so there are
shorter names too. Even so, I like the idea of it becoming
phrases as
well, because with the right rules it could become an
infinitely long sacred text. |
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So this is what I'm going to say, a la Carl Sagan's 'Contact':
in addition to the infinite number of infinitely long words
for numbers, I propose that there be a means of deriving
a sacred text from the number and that a religion be
founded on it. |
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//Proteins tend to be given very short names// Yes. I wonder, though, if anyone has ever written out the name of a sizeable protein in standard chemical form (as in "Bis(3',4')-phenyl amino.................. amine"). A typical protein would probably have a name at least 10,000 characters long. |
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// with the right rules it could become an infinitely long sacred text..... a means of deriving a sacred text from the number and that a religion be founded on it. // |
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Second link in the list, "The Nine Billion Names Of God" |
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//I can't paste them here but there are plenty of protein names with thousands of letters. They're out there with formal ways of transforming chains of amino acids into them. Clearly these names are not practical so there are shorter names too.// |
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But they're not names, they're descriptions.
Would you say a photograph of you is your name? What about the sequence of your genome? |
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OK, look. There's a plasmid called RK2 I used to work on. It has various genes, encoding proteins. The annotation for one of the shorter ones, taken directly from the EBI database is below: |
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FT CDS complement(59033..59338)
FT /transl_table=11
FT /gene="korA"
FT /product="KorA repressor protein"
FT /function="global repressor"
FT /db_xref="InterPro:IPR011991"
FT /db_xref="InterPro:IPR032428"
FT /db_xref= "UniProtKB/TrEMBL:A6H992"
FT /protein_id="CAJ85740.1"
FT /translation="MKKRLT ESQFQEAIQGLEVGQQTIEI ARGVLVDGKPQATFATSLG
FT LTRGAVSQAVHRVWAAFEDK NLPEGYARVTAVLPEHQAYI VRKWEADAKKKQETKR"
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(note - I had to insert some spaces into e.g. the translation for the halfbakery to accept this) |
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If one scientist were talking to another about the encoded protein, they'd call it "KorA", or "KorA repressor", or "KorA repressor protein", or "KorA protein", or something like that.
What you were talking about is labelled "translation", because it's the amino-acid sequence the DNA sequence is translated into. No-one who deals with proteins calls this sequence the "name".
You see those lines with "db_xref" in? Those are identifiers for it in various databases of proteins. You can go and look it up in for exampe UniProt using those, and the webpage will tell you that its name is "KorA repressor protein". |
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<Obligtory Blade Runner Ethyl Methane Sulphonate reference/> |
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I see what you're saying [Loris]. They are, however,
sequences of pronounceable letters without letters or
punctuation. Even so, a description of an object could be
a name, and what happens in molecular concerns (I can't
decide whether to call it chemistry or molecular biology,
or maybe it's something else) need not be a guide to what
happens elsewhere. |
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'The Nine Billion Names Of God' is currently sitting on this
device's desktop, coincidentally. I had in mind something
like the esoteric programming language Shakespeare, and
religious wars between factions on how to transform the
number into text. |
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[MB], I've wondered about that too. |
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Use A and O for one dimension and pitch for the other. |
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Actually, somebody should trawl the database and find the amino acid sequence with the longest word or phrase in it. Or the most rude words. |
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OK, a quick BLAST reveals that diacylglycerol kinase delta-like isoform X4 [Lingula anatina] contains the peptide SHITSHITSHIT. |
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Well they are filter-feeders so they probably need that, or
maybe God was just panicking. |
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Well, he was operating on a deadline. |
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Pi already has an infinitely long representation, it starts
"threepointonefouronefive"... and goes on for as long as
you care to
exhale sounds. |
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There's no reason we can't have an infinite (virtual) scrabble board. Take a standard touch-screen monitor the size of a game board. Lay it flat. Add per-user, one smart-phone sized device for displaying each person's letters. Each user can play with her letters on the personal display and when it's his turn select them to display and organize on the main board. The main board can auto-tally scores and be movable via touch. The game would be limited by the number of letters. |
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Also there's no reason Scrabble should still enjoy a monopoly on the standard layout. IP laws are laying a strangle-hold on our culture. |
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[Voice], I'm starting to get ideas about an infinite Scrabble
board but it won't impinge on your implementation, rest
assured. It's more about other aspects of how it might work
abstractly. |
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Yes pi already has an infinite representation, but it's
inefficient per digit and it's decimal. |
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OK, I think I'm getting this now, it's more an encoding
scheme for numerics that maximises utility for speech
transmission. Perhaps for inter-robot communication over
audio, like that chirp comms protocol, only one that humans
have a better chance of joining in with. |
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//there's no reason Scrabble should still enjoy a monopoly// |
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True. That would be like Colonel Sanders sneaking out for a Big Mac. |
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The fun thing is that pi is just as concrete a position
on the line as 0 or 1 or alephnull. |
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//concrete//
Concrete is something you wear a hard hat for. An abstraction is something you hit your mind against. |
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That might've been a good idea. Beating my head against
walls at the time did produce an enjoyable light-headedness
though as I learned to just ignore the pain... |
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