Recommended Links of the Week (No. 295)

Why write a long and possibly tedious introduction, when what you're here for are the recommended links, viral videos, and crazy images. Straight to the point: fear the digital dark age!, a totalitarian city in Sim City, Rocky died at the end, the mystery of ant poop and why marijuana opens the appetite, among many other things. Let's read!

The father of the internet predicts a "digital dark age": "What if one day all the documents and images we've stored in computers for decades were to disappear? That is the fear of American Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the internet - he shares the title with his compatriot Bob Kahn - and current vice president of Google. Cerf believes that when current hardware and software become obsolete, we could enter what he calls 'the digital dark age', in which future generations would have no record of the 21st century." Hopefully what gets lost are all those ugly memes we once idolized.

This guy beat Sim City by building a totalitarian city: "That was the first time I played Sim City. Then my first computer arrived with Sim City 2000. I spent a week tinkering with it until I decided I preferred killing Nazis in Spear of Destiny to facing the thankless task of installing 10 square kilometers of sewage for a group of silent citizens. Vincent Ocasla doesn't feel the same way. Vincent spent four years between equations and graph paper to build a totalitarian urban hell called Magnasanti, where six million inhabitants lived. Ocasla claims to have managed to win in a game where it's practically impossible to achieve victory. Watch this and flip out." What a lovely word, 'flipa'! In Argentina you never hear it. I propose we adopt it. A genius.

In the original script, they died - Rocky, Han Solo and other film characters who were saved by the skin of their teeth: "We all know that from the original script of a movie to what we see on screen there can be many changes: actors' improvisations, scenes that are cut in the edit… From paper to film there can even be unexpected changes in the plot, as happens with characters who were destined to die and finally remain alive and kicking. Here we present ten characters who survived their stories in film and television, so you can marvel at the primordial evilness of screenwriters." Han Solo shot first, and that's why he didn't die.

Deskloop

The mystery of ant poop: "Knowing where and how ants excrete is not as simple a task as it seems and requires some ingenuity to tackle. Tomer Czaczkes's team from the University of Regensburg, in Germany, has systematically analyzed the problem for the first time through a simple experiment consisting of introducing a series of ants into prefabricated white nests and feeding them food dyed red and blue. Thanks to the dyes, and after several months of experimentation, the scientists have been able to observe the pattern that ants leave when defecating in the corners of each cubicle." Colorful poops, hehe.

Spilled paint art

Socrates was ugly, very ugly, but reason overcame all: "Cicero said that 'the face is the mirror of the soul' and many of us would agree with this sentence. Looking at a person's face we can intuit whether they are happy or sad, scared or relaxed, sick or healthy, and when we see someone for the first time and know nothing about them, we intuit many other aspects such as their character and way of being. It is innate, an evolutionary ability that we use to know whether we can trust them or not." Intelligence beats a handsome face.

Protocol posters in 1912 cinemas: "The Library of Congress of the United States has brought to light a collection of 'protocol posters' that could be seen in cinemas at the beginning of the 20th century, more specifically in 1912. These posters aimed to establish norms of good behavior among the public that went to see (silent) movies at that time. Among the 'advice' these placards offered, the most notable were taking off your hat during screenings, not smoking inside the venue, or applauding only with your hands…" Wow, what other things would our ancestors applaud with?

A historical ailment (baldness) and its historical 'remedies': "I think no one will be surprised by the figure I give below: annual spending on hair regeneration products and treatments, only in the United States, amounts to US$1,000,000,000 (one billion dollars), 80% of which goes to transplants. I haven't found reliable data for the rest of the world, but I wouldn't be surprised if they at least doubled this figure, after all, baldness is an evil that affects all human beings, huge, short, white, red, black, green, heterosexuals and homosexuals, even blue-blooded ones. What is clear to me is that humans don't like to have a bald head and we are capable of many things to remedy it, now, and throughout history. The only difference is the method and the recipes of our ancestors." I hope I never lose my beloved hair, please!

The butterfly that 'bullfights' bats with its tail: "Jesse Barber's team has focused on the characteristics of a nocturnal moth called Actias luna, known for its long tail. Scientists suspected that this characteristic provided some advantage over bats, but it hadn't been proven with experiments. For their work, published in the journal PNAS, the researchers followed this procedure: they hung a series of Luna moths with fishing line in an enclosure with brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus) and cut the tail of half of them. Then they checked the survival rates of the two groups." With video included!

JEAN-TROLL VAN DAMME

Good Living, an alternative to capitalism: "In this global context, more and more initiatives and proposals are emerging that seek a different model. One of them is the concept of Good Living, which some Latin American countries are including in their constitutions, recovering concepts and philosophies from indigenous communities. However, it is not culturally distant, since Good Living is nourished by and collects contributions from Western political philosophies such as Marxism, environmentalism or feminism. Good Living is another way of organizing and structuring society's objectives and resources so that people's rights are respected, a new economic regime is built, and the various sovereignties we have been yielding to economic powers are recovered." We need to recover the freedoms we've been giving away, but... how?

The Chinese Communist Party's propaganda in 5 recent videos: "The Chinese Communist Party has been governing the People's Republic of China for 65 years now, and everything suggests that its legitimacy has only increased with the economic successes of recent decades. However, part of its strength is also due to the benefits of that propaganda apparatus that any party requires to access and remain in power. That's why today I bring you a small selection of videos in which we can appreciate and analyze the way the CCP promotes its image inside and outside China. As you'll see, these productions can have very different styles, and the discourse can vary notably depending on the audiences they are directed at." Shampoo videos.

They discover why marijuana opens the appetite: "According to figures from the United Nations (UN), about 177 million people consume marijuana worldwide. And a good part of them will surely be familiar with the recurring hunger attacks that this substance produces, even when one is full. For many years, scientists have analyzed which ingredients produce this response, to the point of developing analog products that serve to awaken the appetite in people with anorexia, for example, but a study published this week in the journal Nature shows that the mechanism is more complex than previously thought." It's barely being legalized around the world and they already find amazing things. Can you imagine if all this had years of study, everything we could have learned?

https://www.youtube.com/embed/kYJgCp_9h48

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