In my opinion it's depressing to think that after all those years and all that litigation, expense, and distress, we still can’t be entirely sure that Bendectin is not harmful. In 2014 there was another surprise. A European company claimed that by using what it called 'deep computing' it could distinguish tiny differences in the DNA of identical twins. When I say 'tiny', I mean of the order of differences in thirteen base pairs among billions of base pairs. This, they claimed, would enable investigators to distinguish DNA from one versus another of a pair of monozygotic twins. Some prosecutors in the US thought this might be a really useful tool when they knew that one of a pair of identical twins was the perpetrator of a crime but they had no fingerprints from the crime scene, and so there would be reasonable doubt with respect to which twin. Unfortunately, prosecutors soon learned that it would cost in the order of $60,000 to do such a test, so the idea of using it in criminal prosecutions was dropped. I, meanwhile, was wondering how likely it was that the differences the firm claimed to have found were real, or merely apparent, the result of a glitch in the computing process. My first thought was to read the article in question. It turned out, however, to be completely unintelligible to a layperson - not because of biological complications, but because it was written in computer jargon, almost all of it acronyms. I did try asking a former student, professionally a computer scientist, what he thought the likelihood was that this result was robust - to which he replied that it would take simply years of running the program against different samples to decide this. In short, never forget there is no shame in saying, and meaning, and meaning, "I really don’t know." Indeed, there is no shame in saying, and meaning, "None of us really knows." I saw a guy on the bus who looked uncannily like me. Really exactly like me, in fact. I was kind of freaked out. What do you do in that situation? I think if I'd been in a better place mentally, or even just a bit more in the habit of talking to people, I would have approached the guy, remarked on the bizarre extent of our resemblance, maybe asked a few friendly questions. But I happened to be sitting at the back of the bus, and he was near the middle and hadn't noticed me, and it was easier to just stay put, keep my head down, and stare at him as he got off by the town hall. Then I saw a few more of them about - guys who looked exactly like me. One passed me in the street. I noticed him first because of his extraordinarily flamboyant clothing: purple bell bottoms and a tight, yellow V-neck, plus an orange, tie-dyed headband and a large dandelion behind one ear. He was on the phone and seemed irritated. Another doppelganger I found in the supermarket, looking through the ready meals section, this time dressed (mercifully) in a fairly standard suit. Then there were the two in the bar, deep in conversation over beers… I didn't even notice what they were wearing, I just quietly left. I did some research, and found there's a company in South Korea that's mass-producing me now. I won't deny I was a bit perturbed upon making this discovery; but, well, I'm a fairly chill guy, and I didn't have much get-up-and-go back then; and anyway, what can you do? Of course I felt differently after my on-again-off-again girlfriend started dating one of them – although, in her defence, we were very definitely off again at that point.