Framework

A sentence on a sheet of paper may look like this...

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A termite walks into a pub and asks "Is the bar tender here?"

The letters are held from going astray by the ribbons enclosing

them. If either line were not around the words, things wouldn’t

change because the letters are bound to the paper. Pretend that

these are letters in an alphabet soup and the lines are toothpicks.

Now you have one requirement of a DNA letter – to bind to

a rigid framework in order to prevent going astray. The

flattened feet of each letter help position it with respect to the

lines around it. I’ll help you look closer…

FRAME     See how easy the bottoms of

these letters could be attached to the underline – DNA letters must

have similar structures to bind to a framework– A FIXED POINT

OF REFERENCE.

Fixed points of reference are needed for any navigation: They help up know where we began; then where we are headed. Surveyors call these benchmarks; your birth certificate details your "origin"; a highway has signs to remind you of your direction and distance; marine settings have channel markers, bouys and lighthouses. It all has to do with transportation.

Whether  a physical movement, such as a short journey, or a progression of ideas on a page such as this, the concepts of transportation are essentially the same - to go from point "A" to point "B". Without an invisible frame to guide my letters, punctuation or grammar to guide my meanings, a reader would be as lost as a driver on unmarked, unbordered roads. The borders prevent us from going astray, the direction one travels is as a one-way street - "predefined". If this were Hebrew, you'd be reading it backwards!

A fixed point of reference is essential to creating order.

But how do DNA letters get into the sentences in the first place ?

For this we would need something a typewriter does:

The Controlled Placement of Letters

Copyright J.D. Casnig; Permitted use only, please!