Recommended Links of the Week No. 306

Home alone. My wife at her parents'. It's raining and it's a holiday in this small town where I live. Tin roof. The street is dark and deserted, not a soul stirring. Complete, absolute stillness. No music, no radio, no TV. The cat purrs on my lap, and the room smells of farts and tobacco as I wonder: am I the last living human on Earth? I hope not, because otherwise I spent May 1st writing something nobody will read. And they're great!

An unfortunate photo: "Many wrote letters to the editor protesting the lack of tact of the protagonists and the newspaper that had published the image. In a world context very critical of the United States for the unfortunate events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the last thing the country should have done was to take them as a joke. Among the reproaches, the one from a Protestant minister stood out, the Reverend Arthur Powell Davies, who from the pulpit severely punished the ignominy and whose speech was published a few days later in Time magazine, part of which I transcribe."

An-2, the plane that can "fly" backwards: "In early April, North Korea revealed a new camouflage plan for one of its most important military aircraft: the Soviet biplane Antonov An-2. But in 2015 these planes seem more like they're from an Indiana Jones movie than from the front line of a country on border alert. However, this archaic-looking Soviet model, which first flew in 1947 after World War II, has unique abilities. Perhaps that's why thousands of these aircraft were built and exported all over the world, and now, after decades of production, they're still in operation. In addition to its remarkably short takeoff and landing, the An-2 has a capability that seems impossible: it can glide like a helicopter and even fly backwards." What madness!

See how the women of the Persian shah's harem were in the 19th century: "In the 1870s, Antón Sevruguin, a Russian specialist who would soon become the court photographer of the Iranian ruler Naser al-Din Shah Qajar, opened his photographic studio in Tehran. The monarch liked taking photos since he was a child, and when he came to power he established the first official photography studio in his Golestan Palace. The Russian photographer immortalized the shah himself, his male relatives, servants, and sometimes even the women of Naser al-Din's harem, which according to historians housed up to 100 concubines." I don't want to be miserable, but they're quite ugly.

Mortal Kombat a cappella by some cute nerds

10 funny programming anecdotes: "I admit this one surprised me; I didn't think it would go beyond the typical nonsense I sometimes write. A few months ago, I came across an image that caught my attention. I don't know the story behind it (does anyone know it?), but the photo showed a supposed religious member blessing what appeared to be several server cabinets with an aspergillum, probably some inauguration event. Apart from whether that's really what happened, I thought of taking advantage of the polysemy (pun) of 'daemon' (demon, the word used to describe services in GNU/Linux) with a supposed exorcism. In GNU/Linux you can stop a server (really, a service) by typing /etc/init.d/daemon stop, so the joke was perfect." Excellent!

Yi qi, the dinosaur with "bat wings": "Chinese paleontologists discover a small dinosaur with bone structures similar to those of bats and flying squirrels. The find suggests that bird ancestors tried some different solutions before developing feathered wings. The remains of the small Yi qi were found in a Jurassic deposit in China's Hebei province and are about 160 million years old. The dinosaur was the size of a pigeon, weighed about 380 grams, and had feathers, but it did not use these structures to fly, only as covering. The name Yi qi means in Mandarin Chinese "strange wing" and refers to the structure that the fossil presents in its upper limbs and which are what make it truly special." So scary!

When justice depends on the judge's hunger: "Judicial decisions should be based exclusively on laws and facts. Legal formalism holds that judges apply legal reasons to facts in a rational, mechanical, and deliberative manner. Decisions, in principle, should not depend on the judge. Is that really so? We all know it isn't. That shouldn't surprise us. What is more surprising is that the same judge can determine different sentences depending on external variables. In this case, the time of day. At least, that's the conclusion of a study." Full belly, happy judge's heart.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/PsH9wGB_Acs

The smartphone life

How appearing happy on Facebook can be used against you in court: "In 2006, a professor in the United States was taken to court for having a relationship and sleeping with one of his 15-year-old students. He was sentenced to 15 months in prison, but then the student sued him, the school itself, and the Department of Education, claiming that the affair with her teacher had caused her 'nightmares and lack of sleep', 'emotional distress', and 'loss of enjoyment of life'. The problem? That bad streak was not reflected on her Facebook." Damn Facebook!

An invention worth millions that changed its time: "Chester Carlson was a guy who worked for a law firm on patent issues. That is, ideas passed through his hands, and I suppose in many cases he said to himself: what a good idea, why didn't I think of that. And I make this assumption because Carlson kept lists of inventions that came from his head: toothbrushes with interchangeable bristles or new models of bottle caps. Registering a patent required copies of documents, often with complicated drawings, and involved considerable manual work. Carlson had to copy these drawings, and that was a problem because his arthritis worked against the final result." Thank you Carlson for all the study books you saved me from buying!

Argentine Myths and Legends: "On moonlit nights in January, a whistle is heard: yateré...yateré... each time closer, each time louder; then, mothers take care not to leave their young children alone for even a moment. It is a creature between 2 and 6 years old, with a pretty face, blonde, blue or yellow eyes, without ears. It has a very strong and unpleasant smell. It kidnaps children who are alone at noon or at nap time. It only takes the boys, Yasiyatere, erasing the baptism of the little girls, usually leaving them because they have hair as long as his. It licks their foreheads to remove their baptism. After playing with them for a while, it abandons them wrapped in vines and creepers, and the children become mute, dazed under its spell. Every year, on the anniversary of the kidnapping, the children suffer epileptic seizures; to cure them they must be baptized again, which doesn't always work." It's raining on my tin roof, a lonely holiday, so I'll share some scary legends from the north of my country.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/-rKER1YCRTY

Functional mini computer

How the first blogger in history showed his penis so we could all blog: "It doesn't matter who was first, but at what moment the seeds of that artifact, the blog, began to be glimpsed, which would later start to change the world in ways no one could have predicted. And if we talk about seeds, then we must look at a boy with shoulder-length blonde hair and a lanky body who lived in Chicago. Or more specifically, we must look at his penis with an inflamed foreskin." If I showed mine, you'd have to scroll up the mouse wheel while pressing CTRL.

30 years of laptops... and now what?: "On the occasion of the celebration – this very week – of the 30th anniversary of the birth of the first commercial laptop, the Toshiba T1100, we can't help but look back and be surprised. Yes, because three decades later – or maybe a few more, if we take into account the one IBM launched in '75 and Osborne's in '81 – laptops have far exceeded the expectations placed on them, and have transformed not only the world of computing but also that of business, leisure, and education." A nice review.

The 10 smallest countries in the world: "A list of the 10 smallest countries in the world for all those who didn't know they existed or are interested in knowing. This is a list where we can find which are the 10 smallest countries in the world by size. Most of these are small paradise islands in the middle of nowhere. Many of these tiny countries you may have never heard of, or maybe you have." Tiny states.