Untranslatable words, the near nuclear war of 1983, Bitcoin’s energy waste, and unrolling Egyptian mummies are the bait to lure you into checking out the rest of the Recommended Links. Are you up for it?
The charm of untranslatable words: “Imagine you have arranged to meet someone at your house and, while waiting, you feel the urge to go out and check if that person is arriving. Only if you speak an Inuit language will you have a word – iktsuarpok – to express that feeling between anticipation and impatience. Writer and illustrator Ella Frances Sanders collects this voice in her book Lost in Translation, along with other “untranslatable” words, many of them linked to affections.”
Background music doesn’t help you be more productive, here’s how the science of concentration works: “Background music is a sensory stimulus that influences people’s cognitive performance. For decades it has been claimed that background music improves creativity for tasks that involve spatial skills such as drawing or designing. (...) But the truth is that the effect it creates in us is precisely the opposite. Listening to background music reduces our abilities, according to several scientific studies.”
The 1983 day the world was on the brink of nuclear war (and how we just found out): “Documents recently released by the Office of the Historian of the U.S. State Department provide new evidence about how this episode, known as the “War Scare 1983” (the war scare of 1983), was much closer to unleashing a real atomic conflict than was previously known.”
Here are more swollen capacitors.
They create a hamburger that tastes like human flesh: “This hamburger imitates the flavors described by those who came to eat human flesh. Thus, James Thomlinson came up with a recipe that satisfied cannibals. Instead of keeping his recipe to himself, this British chef decided to share it with the world through his social media accounts. Do you want to know how it’s made? This recipe makes six hamburgers.” The article is terrible, and at times wrong, but it’s the only one in Spanish I found and there you have the recipe.
A prison changes 600 locks after an intern shared a photo of the master key on WhatsApp: “We all want to make a good impression when starting a new job, don’t we? Unfortunately, an intern doing his internship for prison staff in Germany did exactly the opposite when he sent photos of the institution’s keys to his friends on WhatsApp.”
The absurd (and ever-growing) energy waste of Bitcoin: “That is, an encyclopedic compendium of information that also grows with each transaction and is copied in many places on the network that must be connected to each other at all times, so that it can be quickly detected if someone modifies the information on their own, falsifies a bitcoin, or if it is used in two transactions at once.” I already told you, years ago, the reason I’m not a millionaire.
The extraordinary poetic capacity of mathematics: “In my view, first, mathematics is a writing of precision, and so must be theater: a writing without a gram of fat. Second, because mathematics and theater coincide in their search for significant synthesis: just as for a mathematician a formula defines a whole class of objects, for a playwright a phrase can define a character or even an era, just as an object can define a space, for example, a bench can be an entire park.”
What happens in the Arctic affects us all: “The Arctic is warming about twice the global average due to a phenomenon known as “Arctic amplification.” There are several mechanisms at play, one of which is albedo, a measure of a material’s reflectivity. Snow and ice have a high albedo, absorbing little or no sunlight.”
The absurd Victorian fashion of unrolling Egyptian mummies: “Fascination with Egyptian culture is nothing new. Since Roman times, the generals and leaders of Rome who traveled to Egypt were fascinated by glimpsing the constructions and monuments that adorned the Egyptian landscapes (many of which, as in the case of the pyramids, were already millennia-old structures even then). That fascination, however, led to archaeological atrocities without parallel.”
“Honjok”, the South Korean movement that vindicates solitude (and what we can learn from it): “Many young people, especially women, decided to create their own “tribe,” rejecting the collectivist values of South Korean society and embracing the emerging individualism to form single-person households, opting for a solitary life. The honjok is an invitation to reflect on who we really are, beyond established social and cultural norms, and to enjoy solitude.”
They were different times: Warner Bros drawings with Soviet antifascist gremlins: “The seven-minute episode in which gremlins destroy a Nazi plane flying to Moscow was a show of solidarity by the workers of the famous animation studio with the Soviet-American collaboration during World War II.”
When the sky fell on our heads: A True Crime from the Arctic: “During the course of it, a distressed Inuit kept repeating to Riddell: “I am a bad person” without specifying the reasons, while they endured perennial snowstorms, temperatures well below freezing, and traversed such a hostile environment that one could not discern where the ice ended or the sky began.”
Videos
Videos: Mac sound effects acapella, how the hell..., Blue Angels from the air, drones playing volleyball, cuddly capybara, unloading Soviet T-34 tanks, explaining to insurance that Santa Claus hit you, geese vs boat, agricultural aircraft, industrial bacon slicer, how fire sprinklers work, doesn’t give light to plants and gets unexpected results, automatic bread slicer, CD players in zero gravity, where the crew sleeps on a plane, punching a hole in solid steel, pro-level sack race, 90s montage, a 175-year-old fan, Sakura vs Redbull, an extra knuckle in the thumb, problem = opportunity, the Techno Viking you never saw, Chef Avatar, electricity in Plexiglass, making a ceramic tile, GIANT mountain goat, the effects of a Komodo dragon bite, wind-powered mine detonator, solving a $30,000 puzzle and a slightly NSFW gift but straight from YouTube: An experiment for science.
Galleries
Galleries: Animal sculptures by Meetissai, little-known photos of Marilyn Monroe, winning images from the Tokyo International Foto Awards 2020, animals under UV light, photos from the bird feeder, children with beautiful hair, familiar faces animated by Deep Nostalgia, the embroidery of Brande Risquez, how ugly pigeon chicks are, the monsters of Teofil Ociepka (1891–1978), photorealistic package photos, the fat lady of the circus, more photos of Molly Ringwald, the Animated Dump and the Visual Dump of the Week.
