Thinking about things that matter

[#1]

I am traveling this week and so it has been tight coming up with a post (you can look at my tweets on @cebess to find out more about where I’ve been).  I did see that HP will be hosting some commercials throughout the next few weeks on the “make it matter” theme.

There have been some other videos in this theme too:

While I was at a conference this week, we were talking about how it takes about a GB to store a person’s genome but only 20MB when stored with a high-quality reference genome. Based on my estimates for technology trends for 2017 that means that it would cost about $18M to store the genome for every human on the planet at that time (assuming there are no disruptive technologies that totally change the trend). With compression and a good reference genome that coudl be shared, that storage price could be taken down to $400K. Of course, gathering that data is another problem.

The point is that we could do some very interesting things with this information. $4M is large, but not out of reach for even a relatively small organization. Sometimes thinking about things differently can create things that really matter. We need to ask better questions and not dismiss the possibilities using our “common sense”.

The average person (in the developed world) has about 27,000 days on this earth – make it matter.

[#2]

I had to update this post, since my calculations were a bit off and a found a reference that drastically compressed the genomic storage requirements.

[#3]

I gave a presentation to some folks the other day and realized by costs were off by a bit. It costs $100 for 2TB today and I was using it cost $1. Arggg