Totally agree on the price. 23andme.com periodically runs specials at $99, they've even done FREE+S&H, (with $9/month for a year commitment) and provides a ton of results on disease susceptibility, carrier status, traits, and continuing results as research comes in plus their ancestry and "cousins" angle, message boards, and informative blogs.

I don't know. They say I'm "CC" with two working copies of ACTN3 and I've never played "football, rugby, wrestling, or hockey" but I did finish three marathons in my early thirties. Seems like total reflex response time often has more practical value in sports than just "fast twitch muscle response" so it wouldn't surprise me if assessing the value of ACGN3 gets fuzzy.

War, pestilence, famine. The classics never get old.

The people who say we should "consume less" seem to discount people's pesky habit of eating and how we're gleaning the land and oceans bare.

Intelligent population control? He, he. That's a good one.

That stargate has to be around here somewhere.

Really? Assuming we actually can't go that close to the speed of light, much less faster, shouldn't we be looking at uploading our consciousnesses to quantum dots first so the payload is manageable?

Could be. The initial iteration of KDE4 sent me back to my Gnome past. There's much I like about Gnome 3 so I have to wonder whether this isn't just another v.1.0 scuffle. Surely, Gnome _will_ return desktop icons, or panel icons, or SOMETHING for removeable media, won't they? As for keyboard commands, I'm rather glad to be forced to _finally_ learn them and find it rather bumusing that "power users" hate the idea.

One of those with a "click" if you really want to know directive. They claim the genetic link is quite strong and APOE gene variants can be a predictor.

I worked for CTY for a few years in the late '80s. I never fully digested the history of the politics but CTY and TIP apparently agreed that CTY would get the coasts for talent search and TIP would get the interior. Didn't seem to me like that was a great deal for TIP. That was a long time ago. Wasn't TIP based on the ACT? CTY had kids from TIP's territory too. Fine if you heard about it. They just didn't promote in each other's territory.

Glad it worked out for you. Back then the internet wasn't common, dial-up like CompuServe was just getting into the home and I know the opportunity for kids to mingle with kids like themselves was a really intense experience. The RA's used to joke that the final dance was hell. They practically had to say, "Untangle yourself from that boy and go to the dorm. You're never going to see each other again for the rest of your lives. Until you die!"

I worked _for_ CTY in Baltimore and spent two summers on site at F&M in the '80s. It seemed like an extraordinary program. There was some institutional regimentation however, and I hear you about "Mandatory Fun." You understand that since you were hardly off campus, in class all day and study hall in the evening before being herded to your dorm "Mandatory Fun" was taken very seriously and intentionally planned to burn off youthful energy so you wouldn't go stir crazy?

True. True. True. But as someone who vaguely remembers the concern over Sputnik, I can't stop thinking that this is the first time America can't put a person into space since I was barely 10 and John F. Kennedy was starting his fourth full month in office. I too hope private industry doesn't kill off too many astronauts coming in under a profitable budget but I also wonder whether it's just another symptom of the advancing neo-Dark Ages where some guy in the 25th century will write poetry about the "giants" who jumped to the moon.

But I miss Lingua Franca magazine. It served the purpose of cross-discipline communication informally.

in some mag about 25 years ago. "Hit this key or that key." Algorithm just will have significant predictive success because people just don't do random.

Thanks.Wisconsin. Do your Governor stop to think that a fraction of travelers might actually stop off in Wisconsin on the way to Chicago?