Recommended Links of the Week (No. 341)

A stellar message, a documentary about abandoned places and Lovecraft, a riddle, and the way ignorance spreads. More? Of course there's more! Urban legends about the microwave, free heating and nerd, and the direct stimulation of the brain's pleasure centers, among many other things. Pure amazement!

The stellar message: "Suppose that one night the stars begin to blink. While some dim their brightness to exactly half, others double it, but the change is simultaneous and very noticeable. It repeats at regular intervals of exactly one second and across the entire sky at once. The scientific community has corroborated it and there's no doubt: nobody is hallucinating; the sky is changing. What is the first thing you would think? (...) But there is something that imagination cannot provide, a piece of knowledge that is only accessible from a certain point in the evolutionary line of a civilization. A detail that changes everything, that distinguishes us from the rest of the planet's inhabitants. What can it be?" What will it be? What will it be?

Lovecraft and an abandoned town in Catalonia: "This is how 'Momentos en la luna' came about, a short documentary that covers the whole story of these ruins, in which Samit recalled H.P. Lovecraft's extensive tale 'At the Mountains of Madness'. Written in 1931 and published in 1936, it told the story of an expedition of archaeologists to Antarctica that discovered the remains of an alien civilization: "It reminded me of the situation Spain was in, and still is in. The real estate bubble, immigration, labor exploitation, places built as great leisure centers for a comfortable society that have been left empty and in ruins: there we have Terra Mítica or the City of Light, or large vacant lots in Madrid, etc. Lovecraft wrote this story in 1931. Clearly it was a redefinition of the first great economic crisis of '29, of the society of that time and what it was going to become. The story of Vallcarca seemed very similar to me and dealt with very similar themes, not to say the same ones." On the link, the documentary. Ah, and don't forget to watch my documentary about The Legend of the Cat Man!

The Japanese man who collected 2,000 tattoos ripped from corpses: "The world is full of people willing to do anything, and when it comes to tattoos, even more so. So, if there is already a company that helps you remove tattoos from your deceased relatives, years ago there were those who collected them. The Japanese Fukushi Masaichi (1878-1956) is the founder of what is considered the world's largest collection of tattoos ripped from corpses. A doctor by profession, he became interested in tattoos when he learned that the ink injected into the skin cured the dermal lesions caused by syphilis. Interestingly, he never dared to get a tattoo himself, but that didn't stop him from contacting people who, back in the early 20th century, had these drawings on their bodies." Gross!

Ferrofluids with sparkles

The scientist who studies how ignorance spreads: "In his latest campaign video, Donald Trump again reminds us that he wants to build a wall on the border with Mexico. To justify it, he uses night images showing a group of immigrants running toward a fence. The problem is that these images do not correspond to the southern border of the United States, but to the border between Spain and Morocco in Melilla. Trump's campaign manager has already admitted that, indeed, what is seen in the images is not the Mexican border. He also explained that they were used to demonstrate what could happen if the wall is not built. That is, it was not a mistake or an oversight. It is the result of a desire to generate confusion among potential American voters. They know that ignorance is not happiness, but power." Any reference to Idiocracy would be too cliché, wouldn't it?

Notice to time travelers, don't search for me on the Internet: "In the first experiment, he proposed running a search on various search engines (Google, Bing) and social network sites (Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter) between January 2006 and September 2013, looking for 'prescient' terms that would demonstrate knowledge of future events. The search topic should be something that develops or happens during those two dates, allowing a comparison of two periods (the 'prescient' and the 'post-scient', and I apologize in advance for the made-up words); the search concept must be unique and easy to identify; and the concept must be well understood and historically important in the future. This last condition is necessary so that time travelers know that concept." Excellent!

Want free heating? Nerdalize gives it to you: "What do you think of the idea of having free heating during the winter? If it would be attractive in the south, it will be even more so in northern European countries, for example. This is what is happening in the Netherlands with Nerdalize's eRadiators. How is it possible that someone can offer you something that could cost hundreds of euros a month for free? Nerdalize's proposal is quite simple and energy efficient; they take advantage of ideas that had already been suggested in several studies. There is a growing need for computing, and data centers have a very high maintenance cost, partly because they must maintain the temperature within the desired parameters for optimal performance, which weighs heavily on the monthly bill. Dissipating the heat produced by servers can be a very costly task. So what does Nerdalize propose? Simply harness the heat from those servers to heat individual homes." Toward a better use of energy.

Mini Google Maps

The incredible story of the KV-2, the lone Russian tank that stopped the Nazi army: "According to the narrated events, on that 23rd of June a KV (the KV-2 hereinafter) reached a bridge over the Dubissa River, stopped, and stayed there all night without anyone knowing the reason or the number of soldiers inside. The next day, a first German convoy with prisoners of war spotted the tank, at which point the KV-2 opened fire for the first time on the convoy. The Germans managed to flee and reported to the nearest base, which made the generals think it was a planned Soviet counterattack." Quite epic.

The pill riddle: "A blind man is on a desert island and has in a box two red pills and two blue ones, mixed together. Due to a rare medical condition, he must take one red and one blue pill at the same time. Otherwise, he will die in a few minutes. On the other hand, it would also be fatal to take two red or two blue pills together. Help will come in one hour, but he must do this right now. How will he, being blind, take one pill of each color?" Don't look at the solution without thinking!

How do we know when we are dreaming and when we are awake? How to tell if we are in a dream or in reality?: "Sleep is a functional state caused by certain neural circuits that generate the circadian rhythms - normally daily cycles - that our physiology follows. It generally has to do with the level of light perceived by the retina, which is perceived by a small nucleus of the hypothalamus, the suprachiasmatic nucleus, which in turn interprets it and sends a message to the pineal gland, which at night increases the secretion of the hormone melatonin. One of the affected brain structures is what we know as the reticular activation system, which is responsible, among other things, for regulating the state of wakefulness. It is an evolutionarily very old structure, as is easy to understand, and it is located at the base of the skull, shortly after the spinal cord enters the skull." Descartes is rolling in his grave.

100 drones simultaneously, in a light and music show

Urban legends about the microwave believed all over the world: "Thus, after numerous experiments, he came to the conclusion that microwaves, the electromagnetic waves around 2.45 GHz, were capable of heating and cooking food and that, by enclosing them in metal boxes, they concentrated their power. It was not something unknown, and in fact it was part of his research, but the specific heating effect of a high-power microwave beam was his discovery. A few years later the first commercial microwave oven came onto the market, and since then, but especially since its great popularization throughout the world decades later, it has been one of the appliances with the most urban legends surrounding it. Below we name some and talk about the truth or not hidden behind them."

Wireheading, direct stimulation of the brain's pleasure centers: "Proposals that until recently were the domain of science fiction writers like Larry Niven or Spider Robinson have already become reality, such as Wireheading, the direct stimulation of the brain's pleasure centers. In Larry Niven's Known Space stories, a wirehead is someone who has equipped themselves with an electronic brain implant (called a 'droud' in the stories) to stimulate the pleasure centers of their brain. On the internet we already find detailed instructions for achieving it." Robert Nozick's experience machine is coming.

How to stop time with a look (literally): "You probably won't believe me when I tell you, and you'll think I'm pulling your leg, but I think you should know something: you are blind. Although you think you have perfect vision, with which you are reading this text, in reality there are small instants of blindness, of blurry and confusing lines that your brain eliminates before you are conscious of it. Really what we see is a bunch of small instants, cut and pasted to create the illusion that we can see continuously, and that nothing escapes our vision. But not even this improvised visual montage is perfect. If we look at small details, we will find that our vision is full of errors, and that the cut and splice areas have flaws, small pauses in time like the ones we would see in an old video tape. I already told you you wouldn't believe me... I'll have to prove it to you." Blind, deaf, and crazy.