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From: dietz@gvax.cs.cornell.edu (Paul F. Dietz)
Newsgroups: sci.bio,sci.astro,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: DNA for interstellar messages
Message-ID: <18967@cornell.UUCP>
Date: 7 Jul 88 18:18:52 GMT
References: <2244@ur-tut.UUCP> <940@cfa183.cfa250.harvard.edu>
Sender: nobody@cornell.UUCP
Reply-To: dietz@gvax.cs.cornell.edu (Paul F. Dietz)
Organization: Cornell Univ. CS Dept, Ithaca NY
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From article <2244@ur-tut.UUCP>, by powi@ur-tut (Peter Owings):
> I was fortunate enough to have several conversations with Sir Fred
> Hoyle when he visited the University of Rochester.  If there is
> anyone who has written about stuff like "Bacteria From Space", Sir
> Fred has.  You might try looking at a book called
> _Grains_to_Bacteria_.  The only problem with this book is that it
> is very technical, going into spectral observations of interstellar
> particles.

You might want to read Shapiro's (I believe that's the name) description
of H&W's work in the book "Origins".  The description of H&W's
methodology is fascinating.  They apparently took some organic
spectra and ran them through a blurring procedure, then remarked
at how the resulting spectra resembled that of interstellar grains.

Shapiro gave an analogy to illustrate the validity of this procedure.
Suppose you have a picture of a man taken on a foggy night.  You claim
this is actually a picture of President Reagan.  To support your
claim, you take a picture of Reagan and blur it, then note the
similarities (for example, in both pictures the figures have two arms
and two legs).

Nature wised up after a while and stopped accepting their papers.

	Paul F. Dietz
	dietz@gvax.cs.cornell.edu