Recommended Links of the Week (No. 400)

A bot that watches porn and doesn't understand it, the slavery of manga artists, what a silicone doll brothel is like, and architectural dystopias of 2017. And that's just to warm up. We also have space conquest, people who can't leave their homes, and death by porn magazines. Oh yeah!

This bot spends its day trying to describe porn without knowing what it's talking about: "But what happens when we use an artificial intelligence endowed with 'visual capacity' to describe porn movies? That's what an engineer named Brian Moore proposes: he has created a bot that uses Microsoft's AI to watch and interpret Pornhub. The project, called Robot Porn Addict, is part of the so-called Stupid Hackathon, a one-day event in which participants present ideas that have 'no value at all', perhaps beyond being fun for their creators and attendees."

Windows and Mac, who copied whom? Bill Gates tells the truth 34 years later: "Bill Gates has spoken about the true origin of the graphical interface; though if you know anything about that era, his answer may not surprise you. Mac or Windows, who invented the graphical interface? Depending on which fan you ask, you'll get a different answer; not for nothing, as both systems have rivaled for decades to conquer the desktop market. Bill Gates answers the million-dollar question."

Why we need space conquest to advance: "Despite constantly living surrounded by space technology that has improved the lives of billions of people, there are still those who consider space exploration a waste of time and money. It's paradoxical that the same commentators who repeatedly question the usefulness of space exploration are unable to spend a single day without using some of the inventions and developments that came from it without knowing it."

Lemurs getting high on bugs

I haven't left home since 2016: The drama of those suffering from anxiety disorder: John depends on his mother's care, a 70-year-old pensioner, who has to pay him more and more attention because the mix of disorders he suffers doesn't allow him to predict when he'll have an attack. "My condition has been up and down in recent years," he explains. "The original diagnosis was in 2011 but I had a very bad relapse last year and during the last six months of the year I was very sick and very dizzy. My mother would take me out in the car for about half an hour, we could take a ride or go to the stores, but many times, upon entering the stores, I would have very intense vertigo attacks. So we did that less and less toward the end of the year." It's a serious issue, which shouldn't be joked about, but at least as a warning to John...

The slavery behind the manga we consume: "Through Mayu Shinjo's blog we find another experience, that of a professional mangaka who ended up retiring from the industry after being unable to deal with the extreme pressure and exploitation that she herself denounces. The Japanese woman tells how her relationship with her editor was, the person who in principle provides work to the illustrator and makes sure he meets a minimum quality. However, the editor ends up overstepping with the mangaka until demanding beyond his possibilities, without limits: 'a situation in which the mangaka, for six months, produces 120 pages per month, without being able to go out into the street or buy food and sleeping an average of three hours a night'."

So I spent an hour with a doll for 80 euros at the sex doll brothel: "Actually, the resemblance to a human being is astonishing. So much so that I think I see gangrene on her arms. 'Oh no, that's because the previous client asked to have her dressed in black and it seems the clothes have bled,' Gina apologizes (again). 'And the broken breast?' I ask her. She shows me: 'Nothing, good as new. It has a small scar. He was a very tall and big client. I think he beat her up.' I also notice that when they built her, they didn't calibrate her retinas well and she's cross-eyed." Erection cancelled.

Sweating fingertips

The best architectural dystopias of 2017, this is how we imagine our future: "Planning the development of our lives in the future is a recurring theme in the history of art. For example, we saw how at the end of the 19th century our present was being planned, in an exercise of retrofuturism that today seems as naive as it is funny. But how will humans a hundred years from now observe our thoughts about the future, about what the world will be like a hundred years from now? Hard to say. Maybe they should start with Fairy Tales, a contest organized by the National Building Museum, Blank Space, and the American Institute of Architecture Students, some of the most important architecture associations in the world, in which various students and promising architects design a dystopian future around the theme of architecture."

We were wrong about what the Apocalypse will be like when an asteroid hits us: "A study accepted for publication in Meteoritics and Planetary Science suggests that most of the deaths a sufficiently large asteroid would trigger would be caused by the air burst produced upon atmospheric entry, regardless of whether the asteroid disintegrates in the air or hits the surface. The slightly less terrible news is that the deadly asteroid's shock wave would have to occur near a highly populated urban area to have such an effect." Ah, I'm more at ease then.

Scientists discover 'footprints' that rewrite the history of life on Earth: "We have detected carbonates, apatite, and organic matter in the structures, and granules where the reduction of biological organic matter and microbes in sediments is evident," explains to Hipertextual Matthew Dodd, researcher at University College London and the London Center for Nanotechnology. The scientists used a laser technique to determine that the structures are truly the oldest evidence of life on Earth. The microfossils, which have a diameter similar to half the thickness of a human hair, are 300 million years older than the oldest known structures until now, some stromatolites found in Greenland a few months ago.

Robot cat

Never, ever, was there a city as filthy as London in 1858: "There was a time when the city of London smelled so bad that there was no place on earth more disgusting. The smell was so penetrating that it even stopped Parliament. The outcome was one of the greatest urban planning advances in history. It was what was called the Great Stink. It all began in the summer of 1858, an extremely hot summer. Add to that a great problem in the city of London: the odious stench given off by the human excrement that rose over the River Thames. A smell that seeped through the sacred halls of the Houses of Parliament, even stopping some sessions."

Brain waves: "Does your brain sometimes think about the beautiful machine that it is? Mine does. It thinks with electrical impulses between neurons. These impulses occur at a certain frequency according to what happens around me and in the rest of my organism, and that has repercussions on my mood and behavior. As an introduction to this very complex topic, let's talk a little about wave..."

The obsession with happiness and how it can embitter your existence: "Happiness can be bitter. Beyond an oxymoron, the phrase holds a truth that becomes more evident every day. We have gone from discreetly seeking happiness to proclaiming it from the rooftops on social media. Advertising has commodified it, and companies have turned it into a tool to achieve more productivity. The tyranny of the cute and positive has sneaked into our mugs, our clothes, and our lives. There is a social pressure to be happy, or to seem so, that did not exist before. And that doesn't make us happier. Quite the opposite."