Monday, March 04, 2013

PacBio Back of the Envelope Numbers

Back-of-the-envelope calculations can be quite useful, but also quite dangerous.  They are meant to be quick estimates, but can't be taken too seriously.  Still, I try to get them right & deeply regret overestimating recently on Twitter the cost of a human genome on PacBio by 3X.  Twitter is particularly dangerous: tempting to fire off a note, but impossible to pack in the full calculation