Our first production assignment in film school was to film and edit together a silent short, then give it a sound­track that completely altered the emotional response of the viewer. It was a demon­stration of the equally-​​​​matched emotional power of picture and sound. It was a chal­lenging exercise. Today, I present you with two videos, both of which use nearly the same sound­track, but with different pictures. This inverts the exercise. Watch them both, then tell me how each made you feel. Don’t think too much, and don’t try to limit yourself by thinking which is better. Just watch and observe your automatic response to each. [ . . . ]

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or Why I Stopped Watching Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader, Reason 227 I wanted to open this blog with the actual clip from Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader, episode 107 (S01E08), but I could not find a copy anywhere on the Internets. This was way back when that show was brand spanking new and I thought I’d watch a few episodes to see how it was. This was the last one I ever watched. Awful show. Anywho, I’ll have to describe it. The second contestant of the episode, a man, even­tually got asked the following question: In the Southern Hemisphere, the vernal equinox occurs in which month? [ . . . ]

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23andMe offers ridicu­lously low cost, private geno­typing to just about anyone. They take your spit and use it to test your DNA for hundreds of thousands of single nucleotide poly­mor­phisms (SNPs). Many of these SNPs are reliable predictors of gene sequence, and 23andMe can tell you tons of inter­esting stuff about tote traits, disease risk, heredity, and more! I’ve found out all sorts of really inter­esting stuff, like the fact that my father’s father’s mother, who was half Cherokee, could not have actually been my great-​​​​grandmother, or that I have a rela­tively rare inability to produce an enzyme called adenosine monophos­phate deaminase, [ . . . ]

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