Recommended Links of the Week #340 | Tech & Curiosity Picks

Yes, yes, it's been a while since we last read each other. But did you think I was going to work on Christmas? So religious I am! Much less on New Year's (though I couldn't care less). But excuses are excuses, and I used them to rest from all that web psychedelia that's frying my brain. That said, to make up for it, I've prepared a MONSTROUS edition of links, with more things than you can read in a day. Grab a coffee, unbutton your pants, and get comfortable, because this is more than a mind can handle!

Recommended Links of the Week (N°340) — Recommended Links

We're not ready for pandemics: "In December 2013, a two-year-old baby named Emile Ouamouno died in a small village in Guinea from high fevers, diarrhea and vomiting. A few days later, his mother, his sister and also his grandmother died showing the same symptoms. Little Emile was identified as patient zero of what would soon become known as the worst Ebola outbreak in history. More than 10,000 victims, 11 affected countries, repatriations throughout Europe and dozens of states on alert were only some of its most direct consequences. Barely two months after the last reported infection and with a total count of more than 25,000 cases, the big question inevitably arises: Are we prepared for a global-scale viral emergency?"

5 things you might not know about cheese: "If you have ever tried a spicy cheese, you may have asked yourself the previous question. The explanation in some cases is more or less simple: there are certain types of cheese in whose preparation spicy spices or condiments are used (for example, in some varieties of the Asturian cheese Afuega'l pitu, hot paprika is used). However, there are cheeses that are made exclusively from milk and are also spicy. Some examples are blue cheeses (like Cabrales or Roquefort) or certain very aged cheeses (like Zamorano or Manchego). What is the explanation in these cases?"

Why a Visa costs $1 on the deep web and a medical record $2,000: "Taken together, all that data is a precious treasure of juicy information. What for? To carry out all kinds of direct attacks based on social engineering or, directly, fraudulently take out other insurance or policies, obtain tax refunds in the victim's name, or even steal their identity in public health systems like Medicare, the US government's. And as if that were not enough, detecting all these frauds is, according to experts, a much more complicated task than noticing the illegal use of a bank card, so the shelf life of the information is much longer. These reasons are responsible for the eloquent fact that analyst Carl Leonard, from the security company Raytheon Websense, gave to the FT: on the black market, credit card data can be bought for 1 US dollar; a person's complete medical history for up to 2,000."

Girl plays orchestral version of Back To The Future

What would happen if there were no Moon?: "Let's imagine Earth as it is today. What would happen if we suddenly made the Moon disappear? How would life on Earth be affected? The most immediate effect we would notice is that the nights would be totally dark, the lunar phases would have disappeared, and every night would be a 'new moon' night, moonless nights. It would be every astronomer's dream, since we could enjoy, without being dazzled by the moonlight, the stars, the Milky Way and other wonders of the cosmos. Solar and lunar eclipses would also stop occurring. Furthermore, all the romanticism and mystery associated with our satellite, which has inspired so many songs, poems, stories, novels, and so many artists, would disappear, but... would only that happen if our satellite suddenly disappeared? Of course not!"

How much money would you make if you sold the chemicals that make up your body?: "Some time ago we tried to calculate how much money we would get if we could sell each part of our body. Today we are going to try to go a little further and calculate the price of each of the chemicals that make us up. The final result, as you will see, is not very high. Let's start from the fact that more than 60% of our body mass is just water. The rest, almost all of it, is hydrogen and oxygen, which also don't have a very high market value. Let's take a look at the more than sixty remaining substances that make us up."

This is how computers see porn ('spoiler': not as you imagine): "No human would have trouble recognizing a pornographic photograph or video. We don't need to stop and think to distinguish every part of the body we see (including the private parts); the brain does it automatically. We know what a nose, an ear, and a foot look like, even if there are no identifying labels like in Terminator. The same does not happen with computers: the algorithms of an image recognition program must be taught and trained to identify various characteristics of the snapshot and distinguish the elements that appear. Even so, they will never interpret the same as you when analyzing a photo of a person unbuttoning someone else's pants. To show us the particular vision that machines have of sex, German developer Samim Winiger (CEO of video game company 2Beats) has flipped the script in his research project Sensual Machines. In addition to using a tool to scrutinize a series of images, he has asked it to return the representations created by the 'software' in the interpretive process."

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Yuxmouv5_nM

X-men: Danger Room Protocols - Intro

How to create a brick from the air of Beijing: "That China's air is worse than any other corner of the world is not a new discovery. But often what we don't see or can't perceive seems not to affect us. So with the intention of showing the world what Beijing citizens are breathing, this artist rescued the vacuum cleaner from the back of the closet and sucked up for 100 days the air that more than two million people live with. Carrying a vacuum cleaner all day long, 34-year-old 'Nut Brother' decided to vacuum the streets of the Chinese capital for three months and ten days. With this nothing-special device constantly on, the results are quite frightening. In this city, the pollution level is twenty times higher than the recommended maximum, which means children can't play outdoors and it's normal to walk around with a mask."

7 cars that don't get along with overweight: "A few days ago a video went viral showing an obese man trying, with great difficulty, to get out of a BMW i8. It took almost a minute and many contortionist movements to get out of a car that, although when we tested it we already noted that it wasn't the most comfortable to get in and out of, it didn't seem the most critical in this regard either. This video made us think about those cars that don't get along with those of us who are a bit overweight. For that reason, taking advantage of the fact that it's the season for gaining a few pounds from Christmas feasts, we've compiled the seven cars that don't get along with overweight unless you want to stay living inside them."

I'm a troll, an anarchist clown, I'm the best mayor in the world: "His name is Jón Gnarr. As a child, with many learning difficulties, he ended up dropping out of school. He dreamed of being a garbage collector because they worked at night and in freedom. His father was a communist policeman. He discovered punk at 13, anarchism shortly after, and ended up working as a comedian on television. He admits that if he didn't have a sense of humor, he would be locked up in a psychiatric hospital. He defines himself as a walking contradiction with a strong tendency toward chaos. A small joke ended up taking him for 4 years to the mayor's office of Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland. Now, he tells us his story, also collected in How I Became Mayor and Changed the World, published by Capitán Swing."

The Simpsons in the style of Miami Vice

Farewell and closing: "After more than ten years of ingenious nonsense, we say goodbye. The reasons are several. First of all, we have reached a point where we have been suffocated by threats, lawsuits and complaints. The most famous case was probably our litigation with the SGAE; but throughout our journey, especially in recent years, we have suffered complaints and threats practically every week. All this to some guys who must, despite everything, continue with their lives and work. We are simple hard workers who strive to move forward, so we do not have the time or resources to face every legal battle that the last fool in Spain poses."

Can you run out of oxygen if you get into a small room with many people?: "When you spend many hours in a room with many people, and the room has the door and windows closed, the stale air (and occasionally the prevailing body odor) can make you feel claustrophobic, and even make it hard to breathe. But could you really run out of oxygen in this context, or is it impossible because enough always comes in through the cracks in the room? The short answer is no. But with nuances."

Fire? Hammer blows? How to destroy a hard drive without leaving recoverable information: "In one of the episodes of the series Mr. Robot, a paranoid Elliot Alderson, the 'hacker' who stars in it, decides to eliminate the compromising information stored on his hard drives. It doesn't occur to Alderson to format them; instead he opts for a more drastic method: drilling them (he also puts a couple of memory cards in the microwave). The idea is not at all far-fetched, because to guarantee that data on a hard drive disappears from the face of the Earth, something more than a reordering and computer cleaning is needed. Perhaps even the 'hacker' fell short. Would it have been better to throw them to the fish? Burn them? Throw them out the window of a fifth floor? Place a powerful magnet nearby? Although not all attacks are equally effective, each strategy has consequences that Lorenzo Martínez, computer security expert and technical director of Securízame, has explained to Teknautas."

Grandma tries virtual reality for the first time

Remember... the popular Sinclair ZX Spectrum: "The market release of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum marked a before and after in the history of consumer personal computing in Europe. From its arrival, homes across the continent were filled with this type of microcomputer, which would later be replaced by well-known PCs. Its origin dates back to 1980, when its creator, Clive Marles Sinclair, designed a kind of 'kit' with which he intended users to assemble their own computer. It was the predecessor of the Spectrum: the Sinclair ZX80, which later went on sale already assembled. Until then, computers were a luxury item surrounded by an aura of complexity, so this launch caught the attention of those most curious about this type of technology."

The Spanish video games that pixelated Hollywood hits: There was a time that we now call the Golden Age of Spanish software, when national video game companies flourished everywhere. In just a few years, the shelves of the country (and of Europe) were filled with games created by companies like Dinamic, Made in Spain, Opera Soft or Topo Soft, which are now remembered more than ever and to which books, reports and even fan conventions of retrocomputing are dedicated. The era in question spanned from the early years of the 80s to 1992, a period in which cinemas showed films – many of which had a second life on the computers of the time – that the creators of video games took "inspiration" from a bit too liberally. Besides the Spanish parody of Star Wars, there are other flagrant cases.

This is how the dictatorship of the music video washes our minds: "The music video industry, indeed, promotes values and desires like those ironically shown in the Cuban song, from wealth to a form of hedonism that involves the objectification and submission of women. Music videos, in the manner of dictatorships, impose a way of living and thinking, as rigorously and exhaustively analyzed in the book 'The Dictatorship of the Music Video'. Music Industry and Prefabricated Dreams by Jon E. Illescas, recently published by El Viejo Topo and illustrated by Miguel Brieva. An essay that is the result of seven years of research and analysis of the five hundred most-viewed music videos in YouTube history, and that analyzes mainstream music in a very enjoyable and even entertaining way, approaching a cultural phenomenon of which we all, to a greater or lesser extent, are active or passive consumers."