Talking with Joe Davis on Saturday night at the Plough and Stars bar in Cambridge, he drew diagarams of DNA synthesis and his Microvenus code, trying to clarify for me how it all works.

This is Joe's sketch of how the double helix of DNA gets split by the "transcription bubble" into RNA, and then the RNA triplets get read and converted into amino acids in the "decoding" ribosome, with the help of tRNA.

The top napkin is a small example of how humans can read DNA using gel electrophoresis, and the bottom napkin is how Joe coded the Microvenus image into DNA.