reblog if you’d end a date if they said they voted for trump

“…last year this photograph of children looking at their smartphones by Rembrandt’s ‘The Night Watch’ in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam [went viral.] It was often accompanied by outraged, dispirited comments such as “a perfect metaphor for our age,” “the end of civilization” or “a sad picture of our society”.

…It turns out that the Rijksmuseum has an app that, among other things, contains guided tours and further information about the works on display. As part of their visit to the museum, the children, who minutes earlier had admired the art and listened attentively to explanations by expert adults, had been instructed to complete an assignment by their school teachers, using, among other things, the museum’s excellent smartphone app….

The tragic thing is that this — the truth — will never go viral. So, I wonder, what is more likely to bring about the death of civilization, children using smartphones to learn about art or the willful ignorance of adults who are too quick to make assumptions?” José Picardo, Medium

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#adults are fucking idiots#me included but i mean proper adults#like old adults

True leadership.

Every fucking President needs to take a page out of her book.

H.I.V. Is Reported Cured in a Second Patient, a Milestone in the Global AIDS Epidemic

AOC's debut speech on the Congressional floor: "It is not normal to shut down the government when we don’t get what we want."

“The truth of this shutdown is that it is not actually about a wall, it is not about the border, and it is certainly not about the well-being of everyday Americans. The truth is, this shutdown is about the erosion of American democracy and the subversion of our most basic governmental norms. It is not normal to hold 800,000 workers’ paychecks hostage. It is not normal to shut down the government when we don’t get what we want. It is not normal for public servants to run away and hide from the public that they serve. And it is certainly not normal to starve the people we serve for a proposal that is wildly unpopular among the American people.” (via DC Tribune)

https://boingboing.net/2019/01/17/aocs-debut-speech-on-the-con.html

Next come the death squads

Colorful Creations by Adam Hillman.

The full rotation of the Moon as seen by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

When I was a kid my mum had one of those great big oversized Reader’s Digest World Atlases you still see pop up in thrift stores from time to time, and, fun fact, at the time our edition had been published, a few years before my birth, we had not yet orbited the back of the moon, and so while the front of the moon was shown in great detail (humanity having studied it for tens of thousands of years), the far side, the dark side of the moon, the side that is permanently facing away from us, that side was mostly just blank, with a very few details around the edges that we are able to see from here due to the slight wobble.

Seeing the dark side of the moon is that recent to us, as a species. And here it is, just another thing to pause on for a moment, and smile at, and go, “Neat!” before we scroll on to something else.

The present blows my mind, sometimes. I kind of love it.

This is marvelous!

Blockchain helps refugees gain access to financial services

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Dolphins discovered ‘timesharing’ the sea for the first time

A 9-year study has uncovered some unusual behavior by common bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) living off the coast of Slovenia. Within one population of this species, the animals have divided into two groups that avoid contact by hunting at different times of day—a social strategy not known in marine mammals.

Evolution Design on an island in the Zhoushan archipelago

© JianPing Yang, Yong Zhang

Deep Space Missions

Awesome way of using data to visualize space missions by NASA.

Why Aren't Millennials Spending? They're Poorer Than Previous Generations, Fed Says

Since millennials first started entering the workforce, their spending habits have been blamed for killing off industries ranging from casual restaurant dining to starter houses. However, a new study by the Federal Reserve suggests it might be less about how they are spending their money and more about not having any to spend.

A study published this month by Christopher Kurz, Geng Li and Daniel J. Vine found millennials are less financially well-off than members of earlier generations when they were the same ages, with “lower earnings, fewer assets and less wealth.”

Their finances were compared with Generation X, baby boomers, the silent generation and the greatest generation.

The researchers examined spending, income, debt, net worth and demographic factors among the generations to determine “it primarily is the differences in average age and then differences in average income that explain a large and important portion of the consumption wedge between millennials and other cohorts.”

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i don’t mean to sound fake deep but the reason 2018 felt so long was because we’re being fed what’s trending at such a rapid rate that we literally can’t remember half of the shit that even happened anymore. “Black Panther came out in February!” Marvel releases so many movies a year that we completely forget about the last movie as soon as a new one comes out and it repeats in a vicious cycle. “Tide Pods/Ugandan Knuckles was in January!” The life span of memes have been rapidly declining for years and it’s gotten to the point where the average lifespan of a meme is about 2 weeks and then the next thing gets popular and then that lasts for 2 weeks and it just keeps going. We’re literally losing our sense of time because of our rapid consumption of media and pop culture.

CRISPR bombshell: Chinese researcher claims to have created gene-edited twins 

On the eve of an international summit here on genome editing, a Chinese researcher has shocked many by claiming to have altered the genomes of twin baby girls born this month in a way that will pass the modification on to future generations. The alteration is intended to make the children’s cells resistant to infection by HIV, says the scientist, He Jiankui of the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China.

The claim—yet to be reported in a scientific paper—initiated a firestorm of criticism today, with some scientists and bioethicists calling the work “premature,” “ethically problematic,” and even “monstrous.” The Chinese Society for Cell Biology issued a statement calling the research “a serious violation of the Chinese government’s laws and regulations and the consensus of the Chinese scientific community.” And He’s university issued a statement saying it has launched an investigation into the research, which it says may “seriously violate academic ethics and academic norms.”