Recommended Links of the Week (#648)

Streets of Fire, heroic botanists, the Black Axe sect, the "YouTube tone" and children sent by mail. That and countless other things, to have a good time and not die trying. Only in this week's Recommended Links!

This Week’s Handpicked Articles

Streets of Fire – A Post-Industrial Fairy Tale: "It is possibly this decision to decontextualize and not determine exactly the location and moment of the film that makes it a fantastic story of contemporary materials, a true 'Rock and Roll Fable' (as it defines itself in the credits). This indeterminacy gives Walter Hill license to recombine disparate elements into a grand synthesis. The aesthetic of 50s street gangs, the electric energy of rock, the shrill frenzy of the Mad Max saga engines, the sordid obscurantism of film noir and the epic of the western come together in a conjunction that is not easy to execute and tremendously entertaining."

Games of Yore – The Weirdest Spanish Programs for 8-bit: "Over time the term 'Golden Age of Spanish software' was coined, mainly due to the work and success of these companies. With even more time, the debate even opened: was the quality of Spanish software really as much as to speak of a golden age? I won't give my opinion on that, but what also happened is that in the boom of both Spanish and foreign computing, titles were produced that already at that moment made me put a WTF face? (...) Today I'll talk about the national league. Surely many people would be surprised by others, but these are the ones I remembered. And some are even good."

History of Science Fiction Cinema – The Eighties: "The enormous success of George Lucas's megaproduction led not only to the implantation of blockbuster logic in the film industry, to which the enormous impact of Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) also helped, but also a glorious elevation of science fiction within this renewed commercial spirit, by demonstrating that the genre could not only offer twisted dystopias, camp B-movie deliriums or spectacular but dark and pessimistic fables about the atomic bomb and catastrophe. Suddenly, cinema was something eminently fun, colorful, childish in a good sense, a mass phenomenon that barely exhausted itself on the screen."

Women Are More Concerned About Their Looks and Men About Their Material Resources Because That’s What Attracts the Opposite Sex: "That both sexes seek the same thing, what happens is that they seek it through different routes. What both sexes seek is the most suitable partner to reproduce. Of course, this is an underlying drive and it doesn't always occur with the same intensity. But it's there and it conditions our relationships with the other sex, and even with ourselves. And this is so biological that even blind people value members of the opposite sex in the same way as sighted people, that is, men value women's physical attractiveness and women value a man's status and material resources. That's what this study by researchers at the University of Aberdeen suggests."

Black Axe, the Ultraviolent Sect That Has Become a Global Mafia: "At the local level, Black Axe is referred to as a \"sect\", due to its secret initiation rituals and the intense loyalty of its members. They are also famous for extreme violence. Images of those who cross their path, mutilated corpses or with signs of torture, regularly appear in Nigerian social networks. Stone admits that he participated in atrocities during his years as an axeman. At one point in our interview, recalling the most effective means of killing, he leaned forward, put his fingers in the shape of a gun and pointed at our producer's forehead. In the city of Benin, he was known as the \"butcher\"."

Welcome to the New Language: This Is the YouTube Tone: "It doesn't matter how old you are or whether you are a fan of a few YouTube stars: if you've entered the video network a couple of times and have seen —complete or not— a couple of youtuber contents, you will have detected a pattern. On YouTube you speak in a special way. You speak with a YouTube tone. One of the first analyses focused on determining what the YouTube voice consisted of was published in The Atlantic in 2015. Linguistics professor Naomi Baron explained then that a series of speech traits began to repeat among youtubers: the pronunciation of vowels was more marked, both vowels and consonants were made longer, and there was greater aspiration of certain sounds."

The Botanists Who Chose to Starve to Save Their Collection: "The winter of 1941-1942 was especially cold and cruel. All food supplies to the city were cut off. There were constant bombings. People were forced to eat anything: dogs, cats, rats, dirt and even human corpses. Because struck by hunger, thousands of people resorted to cannibalism, in the most terrifying scenario of that irrational battle that cost the lives of a million inhabitants of the city. The workers of the Vavilov Institute agreed to rotate guard shifts, protecting the seeds from threats ranging from intruders to rats and their own hunger. Paradoxically, the rats almost achieved what the Nazis had not."

We Are All Sisyphus: "The rock is nothing more than our daily obligations. Those that, at least for the most part, we cannot avoid; just as Sisyphus does with the boulder he carries over and over, immersed in an eternal and apparently meaningless loop. Working, paying bills, bending down to tie our shoelaces, brushing our teeth, eating, sleeping, going to the bathroom, breathing... almost everything we do is part of a routine, just as Sisyphus has his. But 'they are our obligations', we tell ourselves; without them we could not exist, just as it happens to him. However, there are two great differences between us and the aforementioned mythological character: one is that our existence is finite and the other is that we can choose what to do with it, apart from carrying our own rock."

When Package Delivery Began, Some Children Were Sent by Mail: "One of the most important innovations in mail at the beginning of the 20th century was the decision to allow sending large packages. The postal service meant a drastic expansion of the reach of delivery companies to the smallest and most isolated rural communities in the United States. When the Post Office's Parcel Post Service officially began on January 1, 1913, the new service allowed millions of Americans to access all kinds of goods and services. One of the most unusual, without a doubt, was the possibility of parents sending their children by mail."

Memorizing 500 Random Numbers in Under Five Minutes Is Possible. Here’s the Trick: "Memory is something wonderful. I know because I once won a snack thanks to it. Yes, I know that 'a snack' isn't much, but less is more: I was able to remember in order every single shop on a fairly commercial street. And no, I don't have a photographic memory. Actually, to remember the exact order of each card in a shuffled deck, remember the shops on a street or a bunch of randomly generated numbers, you don't need superhuman abilities. You simply have to train the ones that come standard. Let's start with a quick exercise: can you memorize this table in five minutes?"

Simply you have to train the ones that come standard. Let's start with a quick exercise: can you memorize this table in five minutes?: "This achievement has been carried out by two distinct groups: the DeepMind company and the team of David Baker, computational biochemist at the University of Washington. A triumph that only fifteen years ago seemed impossible to achieve, as Thorp himself recalls: 'When I left the lab in 2006, I thought the problem of protein folding would never be solved.' Many specialists in that field believed that, if achieved, they would not see it in their lifetime. A person outside the biomedical world can be surprised by the importance given to this technical question, that of the way proteins fold; it doesn't seem a popular desire like curing cancer or the malaria vaccine."

The Founder of Coca-Cola Was a Teetotaler and in Favor of Prohibition: "The inventor of Coca-Cola was John Stith Pemberton, an American pharmacist who in May 1886 created a first version of that drink. He created what we could call the truly original formula of Coca-Cola. He took that substance and brought it to a pharmacy in his city, Atlanta, where they mixed it with carbonated water and offered it to customers at 5 cents a glass. There began the successful career of Coca-Cola. It was Pemberton's accountant, Frank Robinson, who named the product. But none of them is our man. The founder of Coca-Cola was a teetotaler and in favor of Prohibition, but he was not the inventor of the drink nor the one who gave it a name."

Videos

How Imaginary Numbers Were Invented, a $16,000 mail-order house, a market lobster as a pet, recharging things like video games, bundling up a T-Rex, music of Ancient Greece, simulating ants and slugs, sound in cinema, a traumatologist analyzes the injuries in 'Home Alone', your brain on psilocybin, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Christmas, touching the sun for the first time, Home Alone (1990) vs. Home Alone (2018), tropical butterflies in slow motion, carnivorous plants in 8K, extreme close-up of a category 4 tornado, and the shorts: 2050 (science fiction), The Woman Who Steals Fingers (animated, horror) and the classic Pigs Is Pigs (1937). As a cherry on top: a busy simulator.

Galleries

Yugoslav Computer Magazine Cover Girls, bird photographs, historical figures and how they would look today, a chick doing yoga, RAM land, the kids of the 50s, Syd Mills' illustrations, Instagram vs reality, starfish butts, mind-blowing continuous line drawings, Irma Gruenholz's illustrations, nude surrealism of the 50s, space exploration in 2021, photos from the Wild West, the best aurora borealis photos, Malcolm Kirk's lens, the Animated Dump and the Visual Dump of the Week.

Thanks for stopping by, buddy!