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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • It’s a common misconception that DNA is exactly the same across the body. Skin, for example is heavily mutated due to it’s constant exposure to the sun, which means the DNA you can scrape off your right hand will be slightly different to the DNA you scrape off your left hand. The way DNA matching works in the real world is not infallible. Instead of matching the base pairs of the DNA sequences, several common markers are picked out and tested against markers from other people. For this reason, it may not be necessary to hash the data at all. You just need to send & receive snippets of the DNA. Furthermore, some large percentage of DNA is just junk data, which is identifiable but tells you nothing about the person who is being DNA tested. In short, hashing is not needed for security purposes.



  • Just from a quick Google search, it looks like it's similar to tape memory, except the data moves along the tape, instead of the tape moving over the reading head. According to this diagram by TI, it looks like the bubbles are on some iron wafer and forcibly moved around by two coils. Then, on a second substrate there are some type of read & write head.

    So here's how I would go about this: first, I'd wrap some small metal plates in insulated magnet wire, place two permanent magnets on the top and bottom (sandwich style) and stick a read head on the edge of the plate. Then you push AC current through the two coils offset by 90 degrees. This should push the bubble in a circle, and that can be read by the tape head.

    Keep in mind though, this is a complete guess based on a simplified diagram from the 70s. I don't actually know if this is how they work.