Recommended Links of the Week #316

The folks who write subtitles for us, Romans in bikinis, the consequences of four days of darkness and much more, in a deluxe edition of recommended links. Want more? The lack of study is fatal, the attack of dangerous plants and the Asch experiment, among many other things, especially super-fun viral videos below...

Recommended Links of the Week (No. 316) — China and monster

Subtitlers and fans

Hooked on SRT: Who and why subtitles series and movies online: "The creators of subtitles have their origin in the Fansub movement (Fan Subtitled or fan-subtitled), dating back to the 1980s. At that time, Japanese animation series began to grow in popularity, but very few titles outside Japan were officially translated, so anime enthusiasts with knowledge of Japanese began copying original VHS tapes and translating them themselves. In the Spanish-speaking world, the pioneering fansub countries were Mexico, Argentina, and Chile. Spain would not receive them until a few years later." Thanks for everything, friends! We always read you!

Psychology experiments

The Mysterious Case of Stanford Prison: The experiment was questioned from the start. Banuazizi and Movahedi (1975) convincingly showed that the very presentation of the experiment predisposed participants to expect guards to be "oppressive and hostile." Moreover, with numerous cases of prison riots and guard brutality in the late 60s and early 70s, anyone selected with the premise of "participating in a psychological experiment about life in prisons" (as they were) could have a clear preconception of what was sought. Nor can we say the guards received no instructions; the arrest process was explicitly designed to "humiliate and castrate" the prisoners. I confess I went in like a lamb to the slaughter and believed everything about the "experiment."

The Asch Experiment: "Concentration is so important that even the Germans — the fathers of psychology — created fields dedicated to it. In their defense, I must say it was all a misunderstanding triggered by Hitler's frustration at not fulfilling his original plan. But the taxis didn't stop; everyone began to imitate him and we all know how the story ended. In more than one aspect, consciousness is barely the tenant of a mind with its own life. Being aware of our desires and decisions does not in any way imply that we participated in the making of those desires and decisions. Perhaps consciousness is only that which attests to the automatic or extraterrestrially remote-controlled processes that the brain executes. Although this does not describe 100% of reality, it is certainly true in many aspects. Few experiments demonstrate it as convincingly as this one, the Asch experiment..." What a strange word "extraterrestrially"!

LADYBABY「ニッポン饅頭」

History and culture

The Romans' Bikini: "We believe the bikini is a 20th-century invention, but historically, other ancient societies like the Greek or Roman had already beaten us to it. In ancient Greece, two-piece swimsuits were used, and Roman women, always under Greek influence, later wore this famous two-piece, although its function was probably different from the current one. The mosaics found at the Villa del Casale in Sicily, a late Roman villa from the 4th century owned by the high Roman aristocracy, whose remains are located in the Sicilian town of Piazza Armerina, are a magnificent example of this early use of the bikini." The Romans had their own version of Playboy.

The Difficult Road to Pluto: "It was 1964 when Gary Flandro, a scientist at NASA's JPL laboratory, realized that a probe launched between 1976 and 1978 could visit most of the outer planets using a series of successive gravitational assists, taking advantage of an unusual planetary alignment that occurs almost every two centuries. Shortly afterward, NASA conceived the ambitious Grand Tour project, featuring two twin TOPS probes (originally they were to be four). One of the probes would be launched in 1976 or 1977 to explore Jupiter, Saturn, and Pluto, while the other would pass by Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune. According to NASA's plans, the encounter with Pluto would occur in 1985 or 1986." The final frontier.

Satire

Hipster assures he was already an idiot before it became fashionable: "'I'm not saying that stupid things weren't done before, but I associated them with a certain aesthetic and helped spread them among other young people who already had a tendency to make fools of themselves but didn't have a canon,' he clarifies. 'When the village idiot steals a bike and stops shaving, people start calling him a hipster,' argues anthropologist Manuel Carrasco from the Complutense University of Madrid. 'But the figure itself is much older than the contemporary era,' he explains." LOL.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/vBkBS4O3yvY

Excellent science fiction short

Nature and health

And these are the most fearsome plants if you are human (including the potato): "But the fact that the largest known carnivorous plants, roughly the size of a rugby ball, can only aspire to take in a rat or a toad instead of a succulent Homo sapiens, does not mean the plant world is harmless to humans. Almost everyone has heard of poisonous plants; what may not be so well known is that they are closer at hand than many would suspect. And that, in some cases, having them so close can pose a serious risk." Day of the Triffids!

Lack of education, as deadly as smoking: "According to their research, higher education is a strong predictor of longevity due to factors such as higher income, healthy behaviors, and improved social and psychological well-being. The authors of the study, which included scientists from New York University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the United States, and whose results are published in the journal 'PLOS ONE,' analyzed population data since 1925 to determine how education levels affect mortality over time. Our results suggest that policies and interventions that improve education levels could substantially improve survival in the U.S. population, especially given growing educational disparities," says study co-author Patrick Krueger, professor in the Department of Health and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Colorado. I smoke but I study, so I balance.

Tech

Does safely removing hardware actually do anything?: "Who has never prematurely removed a USB drive from a computer because life is too short to safely remove hardware? The lingering question is: does it have any consequences? How useful is this feature after all? For a long time, operating systems have treated storage devices as reliable media that won't suddenly change their state. This means that when reading or writing information, the operating system expects that data to remain accessible and not disappear at a given moment, in the middle of a read/write." If you want to know how to set up automatically removing USB devices safely, click the link.

malfunction, strange psychedelia

Language and taboos

Sex oral and written - slang, euphemisms, and etymology: "When we talk about taboos, almost the first thing that comes to mind is sex. Perhaps in no other field is there as much jargon and as many euphemisms as in sex and eroticism; so many ways to name the unnameable. It is very difficult to think about sexual language without being aware of all the implications that exist, even at a personal level. For example, if a person uses very few sexual words or avoids them outright, they are labeled a prude or a puritan, but if they use them excessively, they are foul-mouthed, obscene, indecent, etc. As José Santaemilia affirms, sex is perhaps the discourse that most constructs us as ideological beings." Making whoopee.

Animals

The secret weapon of cats to hunt mice: "In the war of cats against mice, a new weapon has come to light in recent days. Cats, a new study claims, have a powerful weapon: the chemicals in their urine. According to researchers at the A.N. Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution in Moscow, Russia, when mice are exposed from an early age to cat urine, they are less likely to avoid this scent when they are older. The study was presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Experimental Biology held last week in Prague, Czech Republic." My little cat, just today, brought me a snake as a gift. This is the photo.

Science fiction and fear

What would happen if Earth spent 4 days in total darkness?: "There is a hoax that resurfaces from time to time on the internet claiming that NASA has announced that Earth will spend 4 days in darkness because... well, nobody can make up a reason that makes any sense. A while ago I wrote a post explaining why, despite what conspiracy-minded catastrophists say, Earth will not spend 4 days in darkness in August 2015 (or any other date), just as it didn't happen last Christmas, when the most mediocre digital media already announced it to the four winds. But many of you found it a very interesting scenario, and since I published that post, you have asked me several times by email: what would happen to life on our planet if Earth really stopped receiving sunlight for 4 consecutive days?" How scary!