virus vs virus

I've been thinking about an old post on hacker Andrew "bunnie" Huang's blog, looking at the information density of human viruses. My favorite quote from it:

[on analyzing H1N1 in terms of bits of information] So it takes about 25 kilobits -- 3.2 kbytes -- of data to code for a virus that has a non-trivial chance of killing a human. This is more efficient than a computer virus, such as MyDoom, which rings in at around 22 kbytes.
It's humbling that I could be killed by 3.2kbytes of genetic data. Then again, with 850 Mbytes of data in my genome, there's bound to be an exploit or two.

That's just a neat way of thinking about it... it seems amazing that you can quantize information like that.