飛天Tobi

Tobi: 好期待跟隨山人空運到港啊

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Your Need for External Validation - Are you aware of it?

Ever since the dawn of the Facebook Era in 2007, I have always pondered why are social networking sites so popular. The urge to open a Facebook account has never occurred to me, nor do I see the necessity. My friends have told me that they have one is because social networking sites are very useful and convenient tools to keep in touch with friends. I do agree with them but I believe this is only part of the reason for popularity.
From what I have seen, many have used Facebook to receive comments or feedbacks by posting from minute-to-minute status updates to summaries of their day.
For example:
A: My poop floats today.
B: That's nice, I didn't poop today.
(This sounds like a retard to me.)
To totally avoid this kind of nonsense, I refuse to open a Facebook or other major social networking service account.
I question this need. Sharing ideas, thoughts and feelings with friends is one thing (which is what I am doing here), but what I am trying to discuss here is totally different, I am talking about the "comment junkies" (their 3 most frequently used letters: CM me).
Before the uprise of social networking sites, this phenomenon was virtually nonexistent, probably because they simply couldn't. This wasn't too long ago and I miss those days. Comment junkies are everywhere on the internet nowadays. Services such as Facebook have enabled them, providing them with an easy way to feed on other's attention, social networking sites are their feeding grounds. They have made up the majority of social networking site users.
These people who post extremely frequent and detailed status updates have weak egos and thus have a constant urge to seek other's approval (i.e. external validation) through other people's comment. They live a lowly life and need stroking each other's weak ego to make themselves feel better. They are weak. They feed on other's attention. Without other's attention, they starve to death. They are indeed parasites.

Are you aware of your need for external validation?

The History of Catholic Church Sex Scandals

It appears that pedophilia has been a 2000-year-old problem in the Catholic Church, even older than the New Testament, as the following video demonstrates.

The First Successful Creation of Synthetic Life

With 15 years of work, Craig Venter and his team has successfully created the first self-replicating synthetic bacterial cell. The bacterial cell, Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0 contains 1.08 million base pair and it is full functioning. This is truly a historical human achievement and a giant breakthrough in molecular biology.

Figure 1: Dividing M. mycoides JCVI-syn1.0 under electron microscope. (Source)

Figure 2: Creating bacteria from prokaryotic genomes engineering in yeast. (Source)

Figure 3: The assembly of a synthetic M. mycoides genome in yeast. (Source)



Further Information

1. http://www.jcvi.org/cms/research/projects/first-self-replicating-synthetic-bacterial-cell/overview/
2. Full text pdf of the research article "Creation of a Bacterial Cell Controlled by a Chemically Synthesized Genome": 
   http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/rapidpdf/science.1190719v1.pdf