Ugh. For work related purposes I follow a large number of twitter feeds, facebook accounts and blogs related to science, in particular academic physics. One of them (granted, this one is more humour based but still...) in the last 2 days has made me want to go out and start an eugenics programme. Yesterday it posted a picture of a symposium from 1927 which has everyone in it - all the great names from the dawn of the quantum world - Einstein, Bohr, Schrodinger, Dirac, Curie, Lorentz, Picard, you name it, they are in it. Most of the comments were nice to read - all awestruck and praise filled. Not the first one though. The first one simply stated "They were all geeks with Asbergers". The first reply to that was in agreeance, stating that "they all achieved nothing, and are all murderers thanks to nuclear bombs". These comments were ignored by subsequent posters seeing as most people following this particular feed are above such idiocy, but still, who bothers to make the effort to follow something simply to get negative about it? This was followed up by the same feed posting a spectrographic analysis of the first rock analyzed by Curiosity (published by NASA). The first 20 to 30 posts were all people bashing it as "there are no new elements there" and other such banal comments about how it clearly is a waste of money as it "handt found the aliens yet". I was aware that a large section of humanity was ignorant/stupid/childish, but my opinion of it was dragged to a new low, in part by some of the posts I had to read.