The granted is doing a lot of work there. In fact, if you imagine a computer being able to do similar tasks as human brain can in around 100 steps, it becomes clear that considering parallelism is absolutely critical.
This is partially why I like The Wire, which mirrors a Greek tragedy (1). The dysfunctional organizations play the role of the gods, against whose whims the mere mortals battle against and break. Another show that also competes for a spot as the best series of all time, Breaking Bad, is also a tragedy rather than hero's journey.
It makes me wonder to what extent this less usual narrative arch was the reason for their success & continuing appeal.
"According to Simon, the best way to understand “The Wire” is to think Greek — not the nefarious Greek characters who dominate the illicit trade in Baltimore’s ports, but the storytelling tradition of the ancient Greek tragedies, where the heroes and anti-heroes always face a dramatic downfall, usually as a result of their own hubris."
This (1) suggests that it can perform some metabolism in anaerobic conditions, but not all that it would need to grow/replicate:
"Deinococcus radiodurans is an exceptionally radiation-resistant microorganism capable of surviving acute exposures to ionizing radiation doses of 15,000 Gy and previously described as having a strictly aerobic respiratory metabolism. Under strict anaerobic conditions, D. radiodurans R1 reduced Fe(III)-nitrilotriacetic acid coupled to the oxidation of lactate to CO(2) and acetate but was unable to link this process to growth."
The abstract goes on to describe the metabolism in a bit more detail.
There is a bit more flexibility to this than 1:1 mappings, since there are more codons (64) than amino acids coded (20). You could have both CUU and CUC be different characters on the DNA side, that both map to same character on the protein side.
Plausible alternative would be to have the codons or amino acids still code the other half, but have pairs of nucleotides code a 1.5 times longer poem. This would restrict you to 16 different characters, vs. 64 possible codons (minus a few stop codons).
There are around 20-22 amino acids commonly used by known life, so that already restricts you to a bit smaller alphabet than 26 letters.
In this particular case you can consider codons coding for the same amino acid as synonymous, restricting, as you mentioned, the possible mappings to the ~20 proteinogenic amino acids.
Another possibility for expansion would be to take advantage of the genetic code’s degeneracy/redundancy and reprogram it to allow non-canonical amino acids in certain synonymous codons.
I think this is the result of 1) it being a moving target and 2) HTML and CSS being a de facto standard rather than de jure, where the (differing) implementations define at least part of the spec.
You also can't really embed fonts in a HTML file, you rely on linking instead -- and those can rot. Apparently there has been some work towards it (base64 encoded), but support may vary. And you need to embed the whole font, I don't think you can do character subsets easily.
Consuming content does not really make me happy or feel good. It is stimulating and addictive, but as of now I am still motivated to see friends, do sports, work towards goals etc. even if I often get sidetracked by my online material.
If you think about addiction simplistically and mechanically, drugs will always be more capable of releasing dopamine than what our bodies are capable of naturally. It would make sense to me that there is a limit to how addictive content can get, when consumed in the usual ways.
This is also a (health) education problem, and at least in Finland problematic social media use has been linked with "moderate/low school achievement, low health literacy, and low parental monitoring"[1] (though if there is causality, it probably goes both ways for some of those).
For what it is worth, for me personally there is a limit after which I get twitchy and need to do some hard or uncomfortable in the physical world to feel good again.
I think it only makes sense in a specific environment/context. And then you can also have a meaningful interpretation of "orient".
It seems many people want to take these sort of decision making frame works to new contexts or generalize them to a point they no longer make sense to market them.
This seems to be the case for most science: You poke around in the dark, illuminated by past discoveries, you might need to wait for new tools for observation to be developed, you come up with some theories that are partly correct but only the next generations will be able to prove/disprove them.
I've been enjoying listening to The Song of the Cell by Siddhartha Mukherjee, which details a lot how the discoveries of cellular biology only came when e.g. suitably high quality lenses, microscopes or microneedles could be manufactured. As such, many of the early cellular biologists were at least part craftsmen as well.
Similarly for genetics, there the speed of discovery has been limited by tools: For sequencing (esp. cheap enough and accurate enough to start from limited genetic material) as well as editing the genome.
