I’ve always actually liked NASA as a US government agency. Thing is they take the kind of scientist whose skills are intensely useful to the military industrial complex and let them do goofy shit like this that doesn’t hurt anyone instead. Sure, sometimes some of their tech ends up useful to the military anyway and that’s terrible, but to the people who think this is a waste of resources that could have been better spent fixing infrastructure or helping the poor I want to ask:

If we consider labor as a resource, do you think the actual experts in autonamous robotics, rocketry and atmospheric dispersion involved in landing a little box on Venus would be fixing pot holes or running homeless shelters without NASA? I think they would be much more likely to be working on some project to have an army of drones defoliate all of central Asia or something like that. I think it is cool and heartwarming that they successfully landed a little robot on Mars and care so much about it, but also many of these people have skills that are only useful for exactly this and like 25 different crimes against humanity, and letting them do this is not a waste of resources.

Wait, that’s just 2.25 kg of dung per hippo. That sounds like way too little. I’m pretty sure a human being could produce 2.25 kg of dung in a day with the right team spirit and some elbow grease, but you’re telling me these dainty, bashful cowards can’t do better despite weighing so much more? Pathetic.

I’m not even American but I’ve already voted for Joe Biden several times. Just wrote the name down on pieces of paper and mailed them off. Adressed them to Joe Biden too, so that shit counts double. Put some extra stamps on them, and that’s exponential growth in the number of times I voted for him. I’m practically a swing state of my own, the way I’m swinging my massive votes around.

I’m voting Netscape Navigator. Lesser evil.

Look at Estonia and Latvia being on the right side of history! This is not a sentence you get to use very often, so make sure to use it now before they make any other decisions.

Is it too much to ask to have at least one great actor give a grand Shakespearian speech and give it his all because his children loved the game?

Yes. Yes, that is entirely too much to ask and Raul Julia didn’t have to do that in 1994 either.

Maybe I’m just being contrarian, but I don’t think the water or the beach are very good in this painting. The wheat, greenery, cliffs and clouds are great, but the water and beach are kind of monotonous blobs that frankly aren’t that great in this painting.

If you take anything away from this post, let it be that Claude Monet had no idea how to paint water and I dare anyone to prove me wrong! That should be a reasonable idea to defend.

Hedgehog. I know about all about youth culture and the “Sonic is a hedgehog” games.

Won’t the boulder roll back to the intersection anyway?

This is exactly what it was like. Before Brexit.

I did some math real quick and in order to make this fair you would have to sentence the CEO to 450 million years in prison. Or the homeless guy to below 1 second in prison. Or if you want to be a centrist about it lock them both up for 225 million years.

Me too! What’s your destination?

I’m not really up to date on the modern movies, but didn’t they spend several movies exploring who bad milk blood robot is? This synopsis really nailed the big unanswered question.

I am a bit bothered by how the modern borders of Croatia seem like they are designed just to prevent Bosnia and Hercegovina from having a coast. I get that you can have a thin country, but they are really pushing it. Give them one beach!

He looks like he discovered that his girlfriend was actually just a pile of lit dynamite sticks assembled into the rough shape of a woman.

Silent reading is actually a shockingly recent invention. Because the letters “make sounds”, the natural way to process a phonetic alphabet is to make the sounds of the letters as you read them and listen to yourself speaking the text. This goes on way later than many people realize. Being able to do silent reading at all was still a pretty remarkable skill in the time of Shakespeare. Being unable to read something without speaking the words was common probably well into the 19th century. Actually, as someone who works in education I can tell you that I will still recommend kids to read things out loud if they find something difficult. It’s what phonetic writing languages were designed for, and it increases accuracy and comprehension.

Click all the images containing something sweet.

Did they actually move him to the North Pole or are they having fun with the word “Arctic”?

The Toungue map.

The idea that different parts of the tongue are responsible for feeling different tastes. This blatantly false idea was made up in 1901 out of thin air and then made its way into biology classrooms somehow. It was taught to schoolchildren (including me) for about 100 years as a biological fact, even though every human being in that time proved it false by experiment thousands of times by eating things and tasting them with the “wrong” parts of the tongue. It doesn’t quite count as an example of this happening today, because we finally realized that it simply wasn’t true and have stopped teaching it, but still: 100 years is a long time to realize that something is false when every human being in the world is confronted with physical evidence several times every day.

…Wait, why did they bring the Swedish flags out for this? Denying that our schools have masturbation rooms makes sense, making it a point of national pride that they don’t is really, really weird.