Today in “Things Which Cost A Lot When Greatly Enlarged And Put On Your Wall,” is this Scrabble board from Hammacher Schlemmer. Covering a whopping 49 square feet, the ad copy claims that there are only nine of these boards in existence, made by artist John Kahn, which perhaps justify the $12,000 price tag. The board itself is an exact replica of the smaller, table-top version and uses magnetic letters on a steel board for play. Oh, and it’s claimed to be the largest Scrabble board in the world, to boot. While certain to turn some heads, it’s probably best that you talk over the purchase of this colossal game board any loved ones you cohabitate with lest you find “I-M L-E-A-V-I-N-G Y-O-U” spelled out one morning. Triple word score.

While Scrabble has been around for years, the popularity of the Facebook-based game Words With Friends has sparked a new round of interest in the game. Though for most, either game functions solely as a means to make you feel like your four-year English degree was a waste, or to destroy friendships, Andrew C. Thomas was more interested in a statistical analysis of the game. Using millions of simulated games, his work sheds new light on strategies to play the game, and on how letter tiles can be more than they seem.

How Dangerous is Image File Metadata? (The Assurer)

Playboy’s Most Scandalous Fiction (Flavorwire)

12 Questions About the DC Move (The Comics Reporter)

Facebook’s Zuckerberg Gives 100 Mil to NJ Schools (Google News)

Scrabble on the Kindle. …Scrindle. Krabble? (Wired)

A Chemist and A 3-Year-Old (Science Creative Quarterly)

Reddit Quietly Booms (The Awl)

(pic via Reddit user Schizocat.)

Back when I was in AP Biology, we had a lab experiment that involved breeding Drosophila melanogaster for traits. After explaining the months-long fruit fly plague that had swept his classroom the last time he had tried doing the lab with real D. melanogaster, our teacher showed us the web-based simulation that we would be using this year.

So, I’ve never actually spent much time around fruit flies that didn’t involve swatting them. But that doesn’t mean I don’t know how important they are to geneticists! D. melanogaster are well suited to the study of hereditary traits for a great number of reasons, including their fecundity (18 points in Scrabble), short life cycle, and easily determined gender, not to mention that they are extremely easy and cheap to care for. They also have only four chromosomes (pictured above, because I wanted to find a relevant picture that didn’t give me the willies).

Drosophila researchers are in an uproar, however, over a taxonomic change that may rename the species.

I’m a fairly serious competitive Scrabble player (no, really), which is why I was seriously freaked out to read this morning that Mattel was changing the rules of the game for the first time in 62 years to allow proper nouns like “Jay-Z” and “Shakira” as playable words. The story has been enthusiastically picked up by British media outlets, including The Telegraph, the Daily Mail, and BBC News.

This would be a nightmare for a number of reasons, not least of which would be deciding which nouns are “proper”: Which brands, celebrities, and acronyms are “big” enough that they warrant dictionary entries? Does “TomKat,” for Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’ annoyingly portmanteaued relationship, work? Is “Bennifer” still valid even though Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez have since broken up? All of which raises another point: Scrabble as we know it would become really dumb.

Fortunately, we got in touch with a Mattel rep, and he confirmed that the rumors of a Scrabble rule change making the rounds in the British press are wildly overblown.