“You gotta know when to hold ‘em. Know when to fold ‘em.” It’s an old adage that every experienced poker player knows. The main goal is to play the game successfully and maximize your profits.
            But what if that game is life, and cruel, impersonal genetics is the dealer? There is no luxury of folding your hand and waiting for the next one. People with genetic diseases need to find a way to play the hand that they’re dealt. Fortunately, new scientific research is helping explain the rules of the game, especially for the genetic disease called Huntington’s Disease (HD).

We have ten fingers and ten toes (or, most of us do. Exceptions include the noted alpinist Reinhold Messner, who has only three toes and seven fingers. Luckily, this leaves him with ten total digits and thus Messner presumably has little inherent, morphological difficulties with the decimal system). Because of our built-in base-10 bias and the fascism of our system of mathematics education, we humans have come to view the decimal system as the only logical way to count. We count to nine and then as we raise our second thumb, we stick a placeholder in the next column to the left.

But computers don’t conform to the evolution of human bone structure. They can only count to two. (Technically, they can only count to one, starting at zero.)

This is binary.