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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Dear The Internets, Please be advised that, although the Large Hadron Collider will be powered up on Wednesday, no high-​​​​energy colli­sions are scheduled until November. It really upsets me to see people, including the news media reporting tomorrow’s initial power-​​​​up as “the most complex scien­tific exper­iment ever under­taken” (from the first link) when in fact it is not. The claims that the LHC will destroy the world are pure lunacy. But please, all you crazies out there, if you’re going to get all het up about the end of the world, it is very important that you get your dates straight. [ . . . ]

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I have discovered the secret of high blog traffic! Since I posted about this week’s episode of House, M.D., my hits have quadrupled. Apparently, many people want to know about the phrase written on the chalk­board behind House in the classroom where he grilled his 40 or so candi­dates: Tesla was Robbed! The phrase appears alone on the board early in the episode. But later in the episode, House writes the following above it: SYNRBCTACHPANIC for synes­thesia, red blood count, tachy­cardia and panic attacks. These latter are part of House’s diag­nostic procedure. He’s using the chalk­board instead of the old white­board [ . . . ]

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