Why we say "jerking off" when we masturbate, insubstantial pigs and "Brave New World", the first humanoid robot and 20 years of "El milagro de P. Tinto", and much more, with viral videos and super cool galleries, only in the Recommended Links of the Week. Don't miss them!
Why is the act of masturbation known as 'jerking off'?: "This is a somewhat disputed etymology but most experts point out that 'paja' (straw) is used for masturbation (initially male and then generally) because the movement of pulling the skin of the penis up and down reminded the gesture made in agriculture to separate the seed from the stalk (what we commonly know as straw)."
How do people who believe in aliens defend that they haven't contacted us yet?: "If we look at the sky we will see, at best, a couple thousand stars. That's the most we can observe from here. But in our galaxy alone, there are several hundreds of billions. And there are even more galaxies than stars in the Milky Way. And all this space, is it empty?"
"We will be 'happy pigs', life will be insubstantial, without value, but without suffering": "The future it describes is better, but unlike other texts it does not rely on a utopia to talk about the human who will compose the perfect society. Quite the opposite, a human lacking all those virtues that since the Enlightenment we have marked as human in the search for the new man: liberty, equality, and fraternity. A radical dehumanization, by abandonment and change of meaning of the human."
The story of Eric, the first humanoid robot, and how we got to him: "Eric had been a creation of journalist and World War I veteran William Richards and engineer Alan Reffell. Apparently, Richards was the secretary of the Society of Engineers, and decided that a good way to impress the public was to build a robot of such caliber. Eric measured like an average person, was made of aluminum, weighed half a ton, and the secret of its restricted mobility was in its feet, anchored to a box containing a twelve-volt electric motor." More robots from the past here.
The couple of artists who created some strange costumes before committing suicide in 1924: "From that moment on they led a radically austere existence in a strange apartment that lacked a bed and hot water. They slept on a pile of straw and dedicated themselves almost exclusively to creating strange mask dances. The couple became obsessed with recovering a kind of archaic Aryan-Nordic identity, free of Judeo-Christian contamination. According to H.H. Stuckenschmidt, who was their friend, Schulz longed for difficulties: 'Poverty, hunger, cold, Nordic landscape with snow, ice and catastrophes: that was his world, and with Holdt he found it.'"
The miracle of P. Tinto: twenty years living it up: "Two Martians who are adopted by a couple who want to start a family and a bricklayer who is a ufology fan with a hitchhiker who turns out to be an escaped lunatic from the asylum. This cast of characters is in the Fesser imagination thanks to the comics that Alberto, the father, brought home: 'He brought us the Tintin albums as soon as they came out: at the book fair came out Destination Moon and, when my father came with it, there were kicks to read it,' Javier, the eighth of nine siblings, recalled." Great movie!
The easily offended and science: "These and many other incidents, which reflect a growing intolerance towards the most hurtful and shameless humor, have popularized the phenomenon of the 'easily offended': extremely susceptible people, with a high predisposition to take offense and denounce the most trivial matters. Some have also called millennials the snowflake generation, due to their greater emotional vulnerability to other people's points of view that challenge their own compared to other generations. Others refer to them as 'the new Victorians'."
The hundred largest islands on the planet, sorted from largest to smallest in this beautiful chart: "Along the way the illustration travels the five continents. The main islands stand out at first glance. After Greenland we come across New Guinea, a gigantic territory divided into two countries and home to the greatest known linguistic diversity; Borneo and Sumatra, both fully owned by Indonesia; Madagascar; Baffin, Victoria, and Ellesmere in the uninhabited north of Canada; and Honshu (Japan) and the United Kingdom."
Finally, a clinical trial compares the effect of using or not using a parachute when jumping from a plane: "In 2003, two British researchers set out to gather all existing clinical trials in the medical literature that compared the effect of using a parachute when jumping from a plane with that of not using it. Their purpose was to carry out a meta-study, that is, a study of studies, in order to reach a statistically reliable conclusion on whether this device protected more from the damage of the fall than its absence. But to their surprise, the researchers did not find a single clinical study that had evaluated such an extreme."
Why Nietzsche didn't like Christmas: "The first answer is from Nietzsche. For him, Christianity inevitably leads to that point we have described, to an equality of everyone and everyone and all. Christianity arose, indeed, as a revolt of those below against those above: but all it has been able to do is lower us all to the low. Including God, who has lost all his divinity. No thing now possesses more importance than any other: it is nihilism. The conclusion to which this diagnosis leads us is evident: Nietzsche bet on abandoning that impoverishing egalitarianism (which is even killing the very Christianity that engendered it) to recover a noble, high, creative life, 'lustful and tropical'."
The value of being mediocre: "If you like to run, it's no longer enough to take a couple of laps around the block: now you have to train for marathons. If you like to paint, you no longer do it just to enjoy a pleasant afternoon alone with yourself, with your watercolors and some water lilies, but now you must seek to have your works exhibited in a gallery, or at least try to get a 'respectable' number of followers on social media. When your identity is tied to your form of entertainment—you're a yogi, a surfer, a climber—you'd better do it well because if not, then who are you?"
10 reasons why the Middle Ages were not dark: "We can safely say that the period of history from the year 476 to approximately the year 1000 is the most defamed of all. This period, known by historians as the Early Middle Ages, is still cited by most as the Dark Ages. In fact, the term 'dark ages' is already old; it was coined in the 1330s by Petrarch, the Italian scholar, to refer to the decline of Latin literature. Later it was taken up by Protestant reformers (16th century) and in later centuries as a pejorative term with much broader implications, because they considered that their own 'enlightenment' was absent in the earlier period of history."
VÍDEOS: Forging a sword with a coin, chinchilla enjoys massage, makes a secret room in a pool, dogs get scared of cat pillow, Yoda saying 'Hmmm', the return of Kevin McCallister, Castlevania ANIMATED, ABSOLUTE DISGUST AAAAAGHH, chemistry experiments, terrifying, terrible mistakes in football, scene from "The One" (2017), puppy concert, record in drinking beer (with a twist), "Los Caballeros del Zodíaco" in the flesh and a bunch of super cool shorts: "Scrambled", "The Brave Heart", "The Predator", "Hedgehog's Home", and the bloody "We Summoned A Demon".
GALERÍAS: The artist who paints with his mind, real locations of vinyl records, babies with teeth, the illustrated history of America, Kiyomi's miniature art, branch art, 195-gigapixel photo of Shanghai, street art, irresistible tattoos, Afrofuturism, the art of Roj Friberg, more of Bettie Page ♥, David Bowie's childhood, the retrofuturism of Arthur Radebaugh, the Vertedero Animado and the Tiradero Visual de la Semana. IMPECABLE.
