I didn't want my genome to be sequenced by any of the companies that were out there doing the partial sequences just from the point of view of commercialisation.
Since my own genome was sequenced, my software has been broadcast into space in the form of electromagnetic waves, carrying my genetic information far beyond Earth. Whether there is any creature out there capable of making sense of the instructions in my genome, well, that's another question.
The question is, are there useful things that we can do with the results of a genome sequence that would bring benefit? And the answer is, today, should the majority of people go and have their genome sequenced? Probably not. But are there particular circumstances in which genome sequencing is really helpful? Yes, there are.
Any virus that's been sequenced today - that genome can be made.
To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.
Something that 'Game of Thrones' always does successfully is that action sequences are never just action sequences. There's always a point of view, and you're always identifying with one person or one group of people.
I never dreamed that in my lifetime my own genome would be sequenced.
Most fight sequences on a television show, probably any action adventure show that you know of, if you asked them how long they probably spend, [it's] one or two days doing the fight. Where we were spending eight days concurrently with an episode doing our fight sequences.
You will always have partial points of view, and you'll always have the story behind the story that hasn't come out yet. And any form of journalism you're involved with is going to be up against a biased viewpoint and partial knowledge.
I always want to be a member in the audience, and I want to hear it from their point of view and see it from their point of view so I can know if it's good. But that's just my issues, not a real problem.
There's always a question when you invest. Are you too early, are you too late, or are you just right? And there was a lot of hype about life sciences, around the sequencing of the human genome and a lot of people concluded that's not really there. But by the way, there was a lot of hype around the digital revolution just about the time of 2000 and the human genome, and it turns out that some of the world's biggest, most powerful companies are the survivors post that crash.
Partial repetitions is another technique that I used -- sparingly. I was always a fan of doing full repetitions on every set. However, at the very end of a set where you cannot do any more, and especially if you don't have a training partner, the partial repetitions are good for eking out a little bit more out of the exercise.
When we first started our internet company, 'China Pages', in 1995, and we were just making home pages for a lot of Chinese companies. We went to the big owners, the big companies, and they didn't want to do it. We go to state-owned companies, and they didn't want to do it. Only the small and medium companies really want to do it.
If you think about companies that were built in Silicon Valley, a lot of them early on were chip companies. And now the companies that are there, like Apple, are much more successful than any of the chip companies were.
One of the big challenges now is to figure out just how many viruses there really are in the human genome. So far the estimate is 8.3% of our genome is virus, but it actually could be a lot higher.
Everybody you work with sees what you're doing from a different point of view, a very specific point of view. So, if someone is lighting, they're seeing it from that point of view. A production designer is seeing it from the placement of furniture that tells you about the character. Everything that goes into the room should tell you about the person who lives in that room.
The last thing you want to do is preach to the converted. What you want to do is talk about issues from a non-political point of view, from a human point of view.