What’s In This Issue?
This Week’s Main Stories
Story 01How To Tell If You're An Asshole (And Why It's So Hard)
Story 02Why The Brazilian National Museum Fire MattersEven More Stories
- Sweden's Twitter Account Will No Longer Be Run By A Random Swede Every Week
- KFC Offers $11,000 To Parents Willing To Name Their Baby "Harland"
- Genetically Engineered Mosquitoes Will Soon Fly Free In Africa
- BBC Launches Slow Radio Program To Tingle Your Ears With ASMR
- American Apparel Rolls Out NUDES Bodysuits For All Skin Colors
- Denver Airport Fuels Conspiracy Theories With Clever Ads
How To Tell If You're An Asshole (And Why It's So Hard)
Last week a small army of cruise ship passengers disrupted a funeral in the tiny Norwegian city of Honningsvåg and took pictures of the mourners. According to The Guardian, Barcelona is crowded with careless tourists who overrun destinations and fail to respect the culture. A political story of a Supreme Court nominee seeming to ignore a handshake and walk away this week went viral. Each is a self awareness #fail. Do people really need help knowing when they are acting like assholes?
There are ways to make our "assholery" (yes, it's a word) more visible. Donut Candy is a game that helps illustrate when you are being an asshole. And Uber launched a pilot where you must have a minimum rating of 4 stars as a rider in order to book a ride (in AUS/NZ region).
Are we about to enter a new era where the negative effects of being an asshole finally become more visible, thanks to technology? I hope so.
Why The Brazilian National Museum Fire Matters
The story of the devastating fire this week at the National Museum of Brazil made me unexplainably sad. Yet on three different trips to Brazil, I never went there. So why am I so upset about it?
Experts estimate nearly 20 million artifacts may have been lost. Even though many museums have ways to protect their collections, this loss isn't really about the collection shown to the public. Instead, it is about the millions of artifacts which are studied by experts to learn from our history. Some have been digitized, but most simply sit on shelves. A recent study termed this material "dark data" - the information is there in the archives, but is still inaccessible.
What if this dark data held the key to understanding what happened to the dinosaurs (and how to prevent the same thing from happening to us)? What if a biological sample could have helped researchers find a cure for cancer? It's not the missed chance to see these lost artifacts on display which made me sad.
What made me sad was the undiscovered insights which could have made our lives better that we will now never know.
