Day 9

They have discovered a jellyfish that lives forever. You can read about it here. While I was at first intrigued by the misleading title that it is showing promise for humans to achieve immortality, I continued to read the article due to my fascination at how poorly it was written. It turned into some meandering piece that talked about the life style of the researcher and interspersed pseudo-science comments. One such comment read, "Jellyfish collect food and eject waste through the same orifice. In essence, it eats through its anus." Really? Did you try "poops out of its mouth" and it just didn't look right in the final edit?

So while I thought I was going to say that the next sign of the apocalypse is our brush with the discovery of a real "fountain of youth", my sign today is the degradation of the use of the English language. This was in the NY Times for Pete's sake! We are definitely not only getting dumber, but we are becoming more accepting of poor work. We see it now in the lazy antics of the media, reporting unresearched fact or sometimes just making things up on the fly. The lines between news and opinion have been blurred also, and most of us have become too brainwashed to even know the difference. I almost feel bad for yelling at my former students that Wikipedia is not a real source for research. If we stop caring about the things people say and the way they say it, is there really any hope for our society? Next post: Zombie Apocalypse!