The radioactive school, the physics of human avalanches, the grains of sand needed to fill the universe, the suicide plant, pain before anesthesia, Starship Troopers, and Dagon. That, and much more, in this painful edition of Recommended Links, with a blistering punch. Enjoy!
The case of a 'radioactive' school reminds us that nuclear waste is eternal, active, and dangerous: "Nuclear waste can last from 30 to 100,000 years. During that time it remains active and therefore must be buried, cooled, and secured under what amounts to a thousand locks, but this doesn't always happen. Is this a problem? The answer is yes. For example, in the United States it has just been confirmed that an elementary school in St. Louis is affected by significant levels of radioactive contamination, and that this is because the school is located near where nuclear weapons were manufactured during World War II."
The day two scrap metal collectors dismantled an abandoned medical machine and caused a radioactive disaster: "On September 13, 1987, Wagner Pereira and Roberto Alves, two scrap metal collectors from the Brazilian city of Goiânia, entered a private clinic that had been abandoned two years earlier in search of metal parts they could take to sell later. So they loaded their wheelbarrow with as many pieces as they could and left the place. (...) It was a radiotherapy unit that had been used for cancer treatments and contained 19 grams of cesium-137 inside."
A computer doing nuclear calculations on display in a New York shop window: "The punched paper tape with data fed the beast in full view of everyone in New York. Twenty-four hours a day, every day of the week, the machine calculated and calculated. They were weapons calculations related to nuclear bombs, done just a few meters from the street where tens of thousands of people passed every day. As someone said in some movie, I don't remember which, there's nothing better than hiding something in plain sight. In fact, it was already hidden because none of those who stopped to look at the computer could understand what it was doing or know anything about it."
The physics of human avalanches: "Basically, when people start moving in very high density crowds, each individual physically no longer has enough space around them to behave like a normal person acting on their decisions, but rather the entire crowd begins to move like a fluid, forced forward by the pressure of the people walking behind them. We're talking about densities of more than 5 people per square meter (at 4 people per square meter you're in a very crowded crowd but you can still move 360 degrees, just brushing against the people around you)."
You've got me cornered, bastards: "I resist as much as I can, but there's no way. With my old Nokia in my pocket, which only serves to make phone calls and has no internet, no apps, not even WhatsApp—'I'll send you a WhatsApp,' they say, and they get annoyed because I don't have one—I live happily and don't need to carry anything else. I have a computer, like everyone, and with that I thought I had my life sorted. But it turns out I don't. For some time now, the world has been conspiring to make things difficult for me. To force me to use a damn smartphone, or whatever it's called. To wreck my damn life."
When Archimedes calculated the number of grains of sand needed to fill the Universe: "According to Archimedes, the famous Greek mathematician who was born and lived in the Sicilian city of Syracuse between 287 and 212 BC, the number of grains of sand needed to fill the Universe is 10^63, or the same as: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 grains of sand. That is the exact number reflected by Archimedes in his work The Sand Reckoner (in Greek Psammites), a treatise written for Gelon II, king of Syracuse, which is considered one of the first known scientific publications."
A Thor's hammer amulet from the 10th century found in Sweden: "Archaeologists have discovered a lead amulet shaped like Thor's hammer dating from the end of the 10th century in Ysby, in the southwestern Swedish province of Halland. The hammer was unearthed at the site of a future housing construction. Previous investigations at the site revealed archaeological remains from the Neolithic and the Iron Age, but this is the first Viking-era artifact discovered there. It is also the first Thor's hammer amulet found in Halland. The amulet measures 3 centimeters and is cast in lead with the stylized shape that represents Thor's hammer, Mjölnir, made by the dwarves."
The plant that can drive some people to suicide: "When your profession is based on plants, you can fall into monotony and yearn to find new emotions. For that, you don't even need to leave the world of botany. Just look at the case of Daniel Emlyn-Jones, an English botanist who has become quite famous on social media for keeping, completely consciously and voluntarily, one of the most painful plants in the world in his home. It's the Dendrocnide moroides, better known as Gympie-Gympie or the suicide plant. This last name gives you a small idea of how painful this plant can be."
The desperate methods to relieve pain used before the discovery of anesthesia: "Faced with the prospect of having parts of their bodies cut off while fully conscious, patients endured any ailment, even to the brink of death, knowing that the pain of relieving it would be worse. Surgeons also went through such deeply distressing moments that, even for the most skilled with the scalpel, operations were the last resort. Burney recounts that Doctor Larrey "had tears in his eyes" while watching the procedure, and that the only time he spoke was to tell them how much he felt for them, because he had noticed their worry at seeing her suffer so much."
The 1971 New York street gang meeting that inspired the film 'The Warriors': "At the meeting, the most important gangs of the Bronx and New York City were present. (...) The Hoe Avenue street gang meeting was quite tense, especially at first, and lasted for hours. A circle of chairs was formed around the center, where the leaders of each gang gave their speech to the rest of the attendees. As the meeting progressed, the discussion went from who had been wronged to the root causes of gang activity, with several gang members complaining about the lack of social services in the South Bronx or other neighborhoods, the crumbling infrastructure, and the feeling of abandonment."
The epic of stupidity: "The original novel is a classic of political and military science fiction from the fifties, written with the crisp, direct, and tough-guy style that characterized the author. Besides being gloriously entertaining, Starship Troopers basically invented the cliché of the space marine with mechanized armor and jump jets. Hundreds of novels, films, and video games have copied Heinlein directly or indirectly, though almost no one has described the (hypothetical) life of an infantry soldier in an interstellar war better than he did. The book was required reading in the military academies of the American Army, Navy, and Marines for decades, which probably says more about the United States armed forces than about the novel, but it attests to the 'realism' of the story."
Dagón, Howard Phillips Lovecraft - Cosmic horror also in the ocean abyss: "Lovecraft himself acknowledged it in some of his letters. Dagon was inspired by a dream. A nightmare in which the ominous sea and the primordial, sucking mire rising from the ocean depths were the protagonists. But not only that. In this story we find some of the keys to the most extensively plowed Lovecraftian literature, which would be consolidated in the following decade. But above all, Lovecraft showed in this tale that his readings were beginning to forge something different in the landscape of fantasy and horror literature of that first half of the 20th century. It was the birth of cosmicism, cosmic horror."
Videos
Run DMC - Ghostbusters, DOOM "running" in MUGEN, sound of Earth's magnetic field, Lara Croft vs Indiana Jones, fear as entertainment, Apple lock broken in seconds, Through the Fire and Flames in 40 rhythm games, record in reverse speed, how did the Romans' Latin sound?, eagle POV over Disney castle, robot dogs to evaluate building problems, purifying clay to make pots, M.C. Escher in his studio (1971), dog that thinks it's a cat, which of the two is a deep fake?, Bohemian Rhapsody (on little flutes), and the shorts Larry - Episode 6, Order 66 (remastered in UE5), "This Is Our Home" (horror with mice), and a horror movie per year from 1922 onward.
Galleries
African Wildlife Photography Awards, Mangrove Photography Awards, retro object illustrations, photos of the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb, the art of Valentina Remenar, Galaxy of Horrors (NASA posters), this is not a spider, popular characters if they were human (by AI), artificial intelligence reinterprets horror movie posters, butterfly pupae, psychedelic paper games from 1960, art with old keys, photographs of magnets and metallic particles, pregnant dolls from retro Japan, the Weekly Animated Dump and the Visual Dump.
That's all the links. See you next time!
