Recommended Links of the Week #294: Deep Web, Dinosaurs on LSD, and More

Welcome back to our weekly roundup of great links! This time we've got an in-depth investigation of the Deep Web, dinosaurs on LSD, and the role of programmers in video game development. And that's not all: we've also got marijuana versus cancer and a wake-up call for anti-vaxxers, among many other gems.

Recommended Links of the Week (No. 294) — Colleen Townsend

The Deep Web

Our first stop: A week in the deep web: this is what I found. "I had never entered Tor and wanted to know if you can really hire hackers for money like you'd search for a plumber on Google. I downloaded TorBrowser and in a minute I was on the Hidden Wiki, a directory of pages you can't enter without a proxy. That's how my week of deep web immersion started, inspired by my hatred of Frank Underwood and the thrill of exploring this underworld of distracted morals that is the darknet. Anarchy, "unlimited fun", a PS4 at a suspiciously low price... Here begins a report on the only place in the world where, if your dealer fails you on a delivery, you can open an online dispute to get your money back." Extensive and juicy, especially if you don't know the deep web.

Science and Curiosities

Did dinosaurs get high on LSD? According to Quo: "We still have a lot to learn about dinosaurs, though you probably never imagined that a group of scientists would accuse them of getting high on lysergic acid diethylamide, better known as LSD. But it has happened. According to Pacific Standard, it all came about because a team of paleobiologists from the University of Oregon found a curious herb in a piece of amber that had been extracted from a mine in northern Burma. When they examined it, they noticed it was contaminated by a fungus, very popular in the lands of Castile as ergot, and that the fossil was around 110 million years old, enough to link it to the Cretaceous and to dinosaurs." Quite a psychedelic trip!

Roles in video game development (II): Programming. This article at DeVuEGO: "Programmers, within the video game world, are a rare and hard-to-find group, especially those who can understand more than one programming language and who can get down to a level low enough to make the idealized vision of the game a reality. Programming is like the chassis of a race car that integrates the various elements that will shape a vehicle capable of going from 0 to 100 km/h in 1 second, consuming one liter of gasoline per 100 km without any kind of failure, because if there is one, the whole system collapses." The hard-to-find piece.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/LNWjZcbv2uI

Bad cat

Convalesce: Hyperbole: "Sometimes we need to 'convalesce', to restore ourselves and start over, to give our body time to close the wounds that living and the years produce in its cells, in its sensations. Convalescing brings images of distant sanatoriums, of lounge chairs with checkered blankets in the first afternoon sun that look out at green mountain ranges with snowy peaks. When tuberculosis, to get better, seemed to require very long parentheses, postponed lives, suspended for a time in youth, on the very edge of death. Sometimes that experience created a sentimentalism, a way of longing, of creating, even of loving differently." We need to convalesce more.

The trade of waking others by tapping on their window: Yorokobu: "The nightmare of waking up. Even more so when it's still night, it's cold, and on top of that you have to go to work. Today, millions of homes have a mobile phone alarm. And soon a butler robot will be knocking on the door. But not even a century ago there were hardly any waking machines. That was for the rich. Waking up wasn't a very strict matter until the Industrial Revolution. That's when the hands of the clock sharpened. Being late for work could mean instant dismissal, and that was something the new slaves, the workers who worked up to 14 hours a day to bring a little bread home, couldn't afford. (...) Then a new trade was born: the knocker-up or knocker-upper. The individual-alarm-clock would walk the streets before dawn with a long stick that struck the windows of the bedrooms. He had a list of addresses and times when he would shatter your dreams." Relics of the past.

Scientifically proven: marijuana orders a programmed suicide on cancer cells. EcoPortal: "According to researcher Cristina Sánchez, molecular biochemist at the Complutense University and expert researcher on cannabinoids, in laboratory models any tumor responds to cannabinoids. First, and before continuing with the post, we have to say that the use of cannabinoids for medicinal purposes should not be confused with recreational use. The researcher has been working on this line of research for more than 10 years. In her laboratory they discovered that THC, the main psychoactive substance in marijuana, orders a programmed suicide to cancer cells. A clean suicide or apoptosis, which does not affect healthy cells, scientifically proven so far only in mice, although they have worked very well in cell culture models." It was being said, but now it's proven. All hail marijuana!

Google's robotic puppy

The Gravity Express, a train that would take you anywhere in the world in 42 minutes. Batanga: "According to Michio Kaku, there are two fundamental problems why a plausible way to carry out this project has not yet been discovered. On the one hand, the first obstacle would be the tunnel. While the technology to safely dig large underground tunnels exists, the main obstacle would be to generate the optimal conditions for the train to move without friction. To do this, they would need not only to dig billions of tons of earth, but also to remove all the air from the tunnel and leave it virtually in a vacuum, so that the train can accelerate to 29,000 kilometers per hour." Any article with Michio Kaku is worth reading.

The bag that Armstrong brought from the Moon and hid in his closet for 43 years. Elzo Meridianos: "After the death on August 25, 2012 of astronaut Neil Armstrong, his wife Carol discovered a white cloth bag hidden in a closet. What seemed like a woman's handbag was full of different objects that Armstrong's widow believed could be from a spacecraft. And to find out, the widow contacted via email Allan Needell, curator of the Department of Space History at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. In the email, she sent Allan several photographs of the bag and the objects it contained spread across the carpet of her room." The old man had his secrets...

Removing the brakes from your car is a personal choice. Divulgame: "Scientists may say that brakes save lives, but in virtually all car accidents you hit the brake out of panic — did you know that cars used to have no brakes? It's true: there was a time when using engine braking was the norm. And in those days, I've heard there were far fewer car accident victims (and none involved the use of brakes, because they didn't exist!). We pay mechanics to check our brakes; and what they do is make them sick (brakes can warp rotors) and then they charge us to fix them. Everyone knows mechanics are generally crooks — why wouldn't they be if they always get away with it?" For anti-vaxxers.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/E2lNz1LqYyQ

Zach King, editing genius

The importance of diet in the evolution of modern humans. Bitnavegante: "The difference between humans and their closest relatives is, in part, a matter of taste. Yams and squash are as bland as potatoes to today's palates, but to a chimpanzee and to our ancestors, their wild varieties were bitter and disgusting. Scientists have now identified a series of genetic changes that allowed our ancestors to diversify their palates, giving them the ability to expand their range of foods and conquer the world." As they say, we are what we eat.

What do they snort in movies? Playground: "Digital effects in cinema already make our skin crawl. We can't even tell whether certain scenes, landscapes, and characters are computer-generated or not. However, in today's films there are substances that are still made in the kitchen: blood, acid, cocaine. They are the organic materials of action and drama, those that we still need to splatter over us." Cinema is all lies.

We talked with the creator of the scariest video games. Vice: "As expected, the creator of one of the strangest and most terrifying games of all time (LSD: Dream Emulator from 1998 and Eastern Mind: The Souls of Tong-Noe from 1994) is a very enigmatic and inaccessible person. He has been in the industry for a long time just to create hundreds of questions in the minds of his fans, but he hasn't answered any. He doesn't even have a Wikipedia page, just a small profile on the Japanese version of the encyclopedia. If you contact him, it has to be in Japanese. That is, if you even get his email. In a time when it's very easy to contact developers and they can easily respond to their fans, Sato is an anomaly, one that his fans are desperate to understand." A creator as crazy as the games he makes.