Hopefully far enough to illustrate that "altering brain structure changes personality" isn't the same as "different personalities have to have a basis in brain structure."
I happen to be an evolutionary biologist and I said nothing about reproductive strategies. You would first need to establish a link between reproductive strategy and psychology (evolutionary psychology is a bit of a joke science, I'm afraid) and then between psychology and brain structure.
There are four copies of each part of the message so you can lose entire chunks and still be able to recover everything. As for subtitutions, unless you get the same error in 2 copies out of 4, there should be no problem.
The 739kb isn't a limit in any sense, the main limitation is that DNA synthesis is currently expensive.
You don't actually need to that much, as long as you can keep it dry and reasonably cool -- one idea we had kicking around was to use a cave of the sort that's used for long term seed storage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault)
In principle a few hours but currently you have to outsource synthesis (i.e. writing) to a company and its an expensive process. Sequencing (reading) can be done more easily and has been dropping in price faster than Moore's law predicts.
I wasn't directly involved but the research group I'm part of did some earlier work mentioned in this paper (ref. 10) and I would be happy to answer any questions people may have.
> Modern classification schemes are so arbitrary and error-prone as to be essentially just a painful way to satisfy scientists' compulsion to shove things into neat little cubbies and has the negative side-effect of scaring students away from an otherwise fascinating subject.
What do you mean by "modern classification schemes"? If anything, molecular phylogenetics helped clarify earlier attempts at classification which used common morphological features.
R core developers are notoriously resistant to change. A number of glaring inefficiencies have gone unfixed for years, despite people submitting patches etc.
Her going public about this has got a great potential to raise awareness and make other women more likely to consider this course of action. The sad reality is, however, most women won't be able to afford the reconstructive surgery (or to have it done to the standard Angelina Jolie has).
It has enjoyed relative political stability but it's not as safe as you think. My exes father lived there for many years. One night his compound was raided, his guard killed and he and his family were trapped in the house. In the morning the raiders left but he still shudders when he thinks about it.