“Chancellor Merkel met with
internationally acclaimed human rights
advocate Amal Clooney today to talk about the refugee crisis. Clooney was accompanied by her husband, an actor.”
German public broadcaster (Tagesschau is the most important news programme on German TV, this is their facebook page) giving no fucks about George Clooney.
This is how this meeting should be reported by literally all media but I know with depressing certainty what most news channels will have focused on
Amal Clooney’s husband is, in fact, an actor! It’s nice that they pointed this out so he doesn’t feel too vastly overshadowed by her immense accomplishments. I mean, not everyone can handle complex high-profile legal disputes that address core and fundamental issues the foundations of international civil rights are built upon.
I heard he played Batman once!
She may be an accomplished human rights lawyer with a brilliant intellect but her husband once punched a bright blue Arnold Shwarzenegger in the face and that needs to be recognised too
Sometimes I love German things.
US and UK news channels and newspapers could certainly take a lesson from this
Give your phone or tablet desktop-like capacity with the SanDisk Ultra 400GB MicroSD Card. It has a 100mbps speed rating that lets it write HD video as you capture it,...
their arms are similar to our tongues in that their muscle fibers are oriented in three different directions
octopuses are disconcertingly strong (anecdotal evidence says that a 15 inch wide octopus was as strong as the scientist handling it)
on that note that same scientist said that when her octopuses escaped she would have to run behind them, “like cats” (paraphrased from sy montgomery’s the soul of an octopus)
aquariums have “octopus enriching programs” so they don’t get bored and fuck shit up in their tanks
they are crazy smart like. really. really fucking smart
but we can’t compare their intelligence to ours because our evolution branched from the same common ancestor so long ago we cannot comprehend how they think
it’s believed that their intelligence evolved when they lost their shell, and had to adapt to predict how countless of different prey and predators would act, how to avoid them, distract them, lure them or trick them
they visualize how other creatures are going to act, which means they have have awareness that others are individuals which is a type of consciousness but i can’t remember what it’s called right now
like, they use tools
they have distinct personalities
aquarium octopuses are socialized from a very young age and even though in the wild they are solitary creatures they become extremely friendly with enough human exposure
sometimes they dislike people for no apparent reason and will shoot water at them
they have three hearts
each of their arms has a tiny brain that controls movement and sensory input on its own i shit you not
they are color blind and yet they can camouflage their color and nobody knows how
they can change the color and texture of their skin faster than human eyes can keep up with it
great pacific octopuses are white when they are peaceful, and red when they’re excited
aquarium octopus have escaped their tanks and slithered down pipes into the ocean
escaped their tanks to eat the fish in other tanks
escaped their tanks to go fight other octopuses cuz they were bored
octopus fight club
learned how to take photographs
cost thousands of dollars by flooding new floors
they can feel, taste, and smell with their suckers and all of their skin
they enjoy tasting their food by slowly moving it through their suckers instead of shoving it in their beaks
they can rewrite their rna. no, really
the only reason why they haven’t evolved to take over as the next dominant race is because they’re doing pretty well in the ocean so there’s no need for them to adapt further
there’s a ton more but i’m so overwhelmed by love i can’ think of any at the moment i’m going to cry
read the soul of an octopus by sy mongomery no she didn’t pay me i just love octopuses so much
Also:
learned to shoot out the annoying light over the tank
hid in floor drains when caught out of their tanks by researchers
hid the shells of crabs stolen from a tank under a third, unrelated tank
Sy is a wonderful human and a great researcher. NEAq actually named a GPO after her in honor of all her work on octopuses. (Or octopi, or octopodes - they’re all correct). Definitely read that book.
-liked being splashed. Figured out that spitting water would have keepers splash back in response
- learned to spray 45°F water everywhere to demand splashes
-likes taking brushes from divers. Knows the best way to do this was to sneak up from underneath or reach over the shoulder
-will wait until keepers are looking away/distracted to grab stuff and knows exactly how far to sink down to get out of reach
-seriously octos are huge thieves. If you have something in your hand, they want it. As soon as they grab it, it belongs to them. There’s no food and they have no use for it? Doesn’t matter it’s their thing now.
-we lost a magnet scrubber for three days because one stole it from the interns. Every time she let it go and we reached a net to get it, she would snatch it out of the net and drag it back into the den. By the time we got it back she had torn apart the scrub pad
-honestly it’s like keeping an aquatic possessive 8-legged cat
Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin is now under investigation from the Treasury Department’s inspector general for taking a taxpayer-funded flight down to Kentucky last month so he could watch the solar eclipse from the roof of Fort Knox. Treasury Department Inspector General counsel Rich Delmar...
If you see what the guys in our Burbank office do, #1 is a big reason... Now that we have unisex bathrooms, the ladies threaten violence if they find the old women's room messed up.
She's lucky... Usually "contempt of cop" is an instant death sentence.
I know, the title is a sweeping generalization, and there are good cops and bad nurses. But think about the general reputations of the professions.
Nurses have a responsibility to help their patients. The whole principle of the health professions is to do no harm — they are literally working to serve people.
Cops have abandoned the whole “serve and protect” notion. Their operating principle is to punish the bad guys; their clients are assumed to be scumbags. If you find yourself in the back of a police car, “innocent until proven guilty” is thrown out the window…you’re not there for your safety, you’re there because a cop decided you were a bad guy.
It doesn’t have to be that way, but it is. We’ve been watching the police get increasingly militarized, SWAT teams turned into ideals, the ascendancy of broken windows policing, which makes every citizen a criminal. You don’t join the police because you want to help people, you join because you want to bust heads.
Who doesn’t love the cover of the women walking through the clouds (or is that whipped cream?) This book is full of scripture and inspiration to keep your head in the game as you diet to your ideal weight and spiritual goodness.
We have had more than a few Christian diet books. Remember Help Lord – The devil wants me fat? Or how about diet advice for the ladies with More of Jesus, Less of me? And of course, one of our personal favorites: Jogging for Jesus. Unlike those titles, Slim for Him doesn’t have any specific health advice and doesn’t claim any outrageous health cures, just scripture and inspiration which probably makes this the best of these books.
“In Nepal, 150 people have been killed and 90,000 homes have been destroyed in what the UN has called the worst flooding incident in the country in a decade.
According to the Red Cross, at least 7.1 million people have been affected in Bangladesh - more than the population of Scotland - and around 1.4 million people have been affected in Nepal.
International aid agencies said thousands of villages have been cut off by flooding with people being deprived of food and clean water for days.”
When I first heard about this idea for repairing damaged tracheas, I thought it was brilliant. Strip the cells from the cartilaginous framework of a cadaver’s trachea — or build your own immunologically inert framework from other materials — and then populate it with stem cells from the patient themself, so you end up with a new, living trachea with immunocompatible cells that you can transplant into the patient. No rejection issues! No scrabbling for compatible donors!
Oh, he’s a real doctor, so he’s not that kind of fraud. But he is prone to narcissistically inflating his importance. For instance, in his personal life, he was engaged and announced his wedding plans.
By the time the program aired, in mid-2014, the couple were planning their marriage. It would be a star-studded event. Macchiarini had often boasted to Alexander of his famous friends. Now they were on the wedding guest list: the Obamas, the Clintons, Vladimir Putin, Nicolas Sarkozy and other world leaders. Andrea Bocelli was to sing at the ceremony. None other than Pope Francis would officiate, and his papal palace in Castel Gandolfo would serve as the venue. That’s what Macchiarini told his fiancee.
Only none of that was true. He lied to his fiancee — even with her, he had to puff himself up. Also, it turned out that he was already married to someone else, and had been for 30 years.
That’s horrible enough. But then it also turned out that he’d been lying about his results.
…Macchiarini’s artificial windpipes were not the life-saving wonders we’d all been led to believe. On the contrary, they seemed to do more harm than good – something that Macchiarini had for years concealed or downplayed in his scientific articles, press releases and interviews.
That’s an understatement. His patients died agonizingly.
Beyene’s death two and a half years after the operation, caused by the failure of his artificial airway, was a grueling ordeal. According to Pierre Delaere, a professor of respiratory surgery at KU Leuven, Belgium, Macchiarini’s experiments were bound to end badly. As he said in Experimenten: “If I had the option of a synthetic trachea or a firing squad, I’d choose the last option because it would be the least painful form of execution.”
Then there were the ethical lapses. There are rules about experimentation, especially human experimentation, and he and his institution just ignored them.
He could do pretty much as he pleased. In the first couple of years at Karolinska, he put plastic airways into three patients. Since this was radically new, Macchiarini and his colleagues should have tested it on animals first. They didn’t.
Likewise, they didn’t undertake a proper risk assessment of the procedure, nor did Macchiarini’s team seek government permits for the plastic windpipes, stem cells, and chemical “growth factors” they used. They didn’t even seek the approval of Stockholm’s ethical review board, which is based at Karolinska.
Though Macchiarini was in the public eye, he was able to sidestep the usual rules and regulations. Or rather, his celebrity status helped him do so. Karolinska’s leadership expected big things from their superstar, things that would bring prestige and funding to the institute.
This story is truly ripe for an in-depth analysis by philosophers and sociologists of science (oh, I forgot, science is always objective and non-ideological and independent of social influences, so maybe none of this happened).
Support for Macchiarini remained strong, even as his patients began to die. In part, this is because the field of windpipe repair is a niche area. Few people at Karolinska, especially among those in power, knew enough about it to appreciate Delaere’s claims. Also, in such a highly competitive environment, people are keen to show allegiance to their superiors and wary of criticising them. The official report into the matter dubbed this the “bandwagon effect”.
With Macchiarini’s exploits endorsed by management and breathlessly reported in the media, it was all too easy to jump on that bandwagon.
Yeah, and when whistleblowers tried to flag Macchiarini’s shortcuts and dishonest evaluations, they were the ones punished, not the superstar of regenerative medicine.
It’s an excellent article that finds critical problems at all levels — read the whole thing. The science isn’t there yet; it turns out that the stem cells were not repopulating and rebuilding functional windpipes. The press loved a charismatic surgeon, though. The institutions he worked in loved the money and good press he brought in. The patients flocked to him because he offered hope. His colleagues wanted a ride on that bandwagon. And it was all built on lies and wishful thinking.
i can’t stop fucking thinking about my english prof talking about the queer historical significance of the word “sweet” as a deliberate indicator of homosexual love and how that relates to both edward ii and gaveston, as well as hamlet and horatio. so, because shakespeare was likely totally knowledgeable about codes that queer men were using (cos like duh obvs), the inclusion of “sweet prince” at the end of hamlet is in all likelihood a completely deliberate indication that hamlet and horatio were in love
i’m???? so gay for literature and history lmao
my good sweet honey lord????
I WROTE A WHOLE PAPER ON THIS SHIT IN DOCTOR FAUSTUS HIT ME UP LITERALLY ANY TIME YO.
A political advocacy organization that’s calling for President Donald Trump’s impeachment has set up a billboard raising awareness of its cause right along the road that leads to Mar-a-Lago, the Trump-owned resort that his administration has dubbed the “Winter White House.” T...
I have friends and family who will be directly affected if DACA is rescinded, and you probably know someone who will be as well, this will be a catastrophic thing to happen not just to them but their dependents too. Please make even just ONE phone call to your member of congress today.
Cats that don’t bury their poop are
telling you they’re in charge. Dominant
felines leave their poo uncovered to
claim authority, while others will bury
theirs to avoid challenge. Most cats see
their owners as the ‘cat in charge,’ so, if
they leave out their waste or poop in
your shoe, they’re basically letting you
know that they own you. SourceSource 2Source 3
Meet the Mona Lisa of the Prado, the earliest known copy of Da Vinci’s best portrait. Similarity in the undersketch of the painting indicates that this was very likely painted concurrently with the original Mona Lisa, by a student of Da Vinci.
There is much controversy in the art world over the question of whether or not to clean the fragile Mona Lisa, but her sister has been restored and some fairly odd later alterations removed to show the original vibrant colors and lighting. Some details, such as the sheerness of her shawl and the pattern on the neckline of her dress, have become utterly obscured in the original, but in the restored copy they’re perfectly clear.
It blows my mind a little bit to look at these two sisters side-by-side and imagine how much vivid detail could be hiding in the Mona Lisa under 500 years of rotten varnish.
THE COPY HAS EYEBROWS
Your response to a beautiful piece of artwork done by Leonardo Da Vinci himself is “SHES GOT EYEBROWS”. Alright. All intelligent life has been lost.
Yo Snooty McSnotwhine, the Mona Lisa’s vanished eyebrows have been the subject of debate and analysis in the art expert community for hundreds of years, long before your parents squirted water at each other from across the clown car and then honked their bicycle horns to indicate they really wanted to make a smug, insufferable little clown baby together.
this continues to be the best reply to a criticizing comment on this site
Give your phone or tablet desktop-like capacity with the SanDisk Ultra 400GB MicroSD Card. It has a 100mbps speed rating that lets it write HD video as you capture it,...
