The question is pretty simple: in the not-too-distant future you and I will have had our entire genomes sequenced (except perhaps those of you in California) - so how much hard drive space will our genomes take up?

Andrew calculates that a genome will take up about two CDs worth of data, but that's only if it's stored in one possible format (a text file storing one copy of each and every DNA letter in your sequence). There are other ways you might want to keep your genome depending on what your purpose is.

The executive summary For those who don't want to read through the tedious details that follow, here's the take-home message: if you want to store the data in a raw format for later re-analysis, you're looking at between 2 and 30 terabytes (one terabyte = 1,000 gigabytes). A much more user-friendly format, though, would be as a file containing each and every DNA letter in your genome, which would take up around 1.5 gigabytes (small enough for three genomes to fit on a standard data

My mild-mannered English husband Adam lives quite a colorful existence in his dreams. Having benefited from hours of delight at his dead of night musings, I thought it was only fair to share them with the world.

The Wall Street Journal’s Terry Teachout thinks future generations will consider itunes, youtube, and Kindle a more important cultural development than anything it distributes. He’s right to point out the huge change these technologies have brought, but hosting services and art aren’t comparable. Flickr would not exist without users, or to put it the analogue way, museums are not more important than the painting. After all, the building’s very existence relies on the production of work.

Teachout cites Hip Hop as the last true artistic trend, a contentious statement for a number of reasons. I’d argue that while diverse, Internet mash-up culture, LOLcat memes, and youtube video responses and remakes, are distinct enough in form to label as a significant and distinct “artistic trend” of the twenty-first century. Interestingly, the rationale provided by Teachout for lack of trends — that nothing lasts — is also a defining characteristic of the web.

Information is exploding so furiously around us and information technology is changing at such bewildering speed that we face a fundamental problem: How to orient ourselves in the new landscape? What, for example, will become of research libraries in the

So, here it is, the final list that I am sending to Professor Dan Dennett, who will select the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prize winners: (in alphabetical order by blog name)

1. 3 Quarks Daily: Penne For Your Thought
2. Der Wille Zur Macht und Sprachspiele: Nietzsche's Causal Essentialism
3. Grundlegung: Philosophy as Bildung
4. Justin Erik Halldór Smith: The Fundamentals of Gelastics
5. PEA Soup: Scanlon on Moral Responsibility and Blame
6. The Immanent Frame: Immanent Spirituality
7. Tomkow: Blackburn, Truth and other Hot Topics
8. Underverse: Refuting "It," Thus
9. Wide Scope: Emotions and Moral Skepticism