Recommended Links of the Week (No. 409): From Escher to Open-Source Chips

Escher in video games, anti-piracy punishments, lost languages, and the graphical environment of the eighties. That's how we start warming up your neurons, but there's more! An open-source chip, deer hungry for human flesh, and creative anger, among much more. The recommended links, a guarantee of quality.

And Video Games Found Escher: "All of that was twice as meritorious in his person: Escher was a rube in mathematical arts and his method was based on the judicious technique of doing it by feel, intuitively. And the best part is that he did it well, to the millimeter. Sonic was the alternative to Nintendo's classicism: against the precise but grid-like template of Super Mario Bros and the formality of Sega's mustachioed mascot, he presented a fast universe of loops and chaos with a carefree and cocky protagonist. The connection with Escher was scant and merely aesthetic but striking: the bonus levels of the first Sonic The Hedgehog included a backdrop that alternated fish and birds that were distant cousins of those in Air and Water."

Best Anti-Piracy Punishments: "Illegal copies are a real nightmare for game developers and publishers. But some of them choose to consider it an inevitable evil and prefer to take it with a certain degree of humor, although that does not mean that followers of Jack Sparrow can get away with it so easily. To carry out these little moral revenges, programmers introduce certain codes into their games that prevent users of pirated copies from enjoying it as they are supposed to. Many of these strategies directly affect gameplay, such as making the program close automatically after a certain time, and others prevent using certain fundamental actions to complete the game."

Why Does Tetris Hook Us So Easily?: "Surely you remember those endless games on the Game Boy or the Brick Game machines that your parents played before going to bed. Yes, Tetris is a game that has united different generations over the years with a single purpose: to make the pieces that fall on the screen fit together. Since Nintendo included it in the launch of its famous handheld console in 1989, it continues to be a hit adapted to new formats. Even today it records millions of downloads on mobile phones, but why is a proposal, in theory so simple, so addictive? Why can't we stop placing brick figures of different sizes?"

https://www.youtube.com/embed/BmBh0NNEm00

Ink in motion

The Lost Languages – COBOL, Delphi, or FORTRAN Remain Critical, But Nobody Programs Them: "Surely many of you know about them from hearsay. They are programming languages with pedigree, more from our parents' (and even grandparents') generation than from ours. COBOL was created in 1959. Fortran in 1957. Delphi, much more modern, is from 1995. All of them were very popular in their day, but most importantly, they remain critical in various scenarios today. COBOL is the best example of a worrying situation: the banking industry continues to use COBOL-based systems that manage all kinds of operations, and in fact it is estimated that alone in the United States 3 trillion dollars are transferred through systems that fewer and fewer people understand."

GEM Desktop, the Graphical Environment of the Eighties: "Starting from the Xerox Star, companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Digital Research launched a race to conquer what they thought — and they were not wrong — would be the future: exploiting the novel 'bitmap' to create the graphical environment ('GUI'). In 1984 Apple included its 'GUI' in its Lisa computer model first, and later in the Macintosh. In February 1985 Digital Research — led by Gary Kildall — did the same with the GEM Desktop; in June 1985 Microsoft launched Windows 1.0. Today, the GEM Desktop graphical interface is the least known among computer enthusiasts who did not live through this science of computing in the 1980s, and perhaps the early 1990s."

The Open-Source Chip That Could Be the Linux of Processors: "Open source is in more places than you think; in your smartphone, in your computer, in your browser, in your favorite website... However, it is not in your processor, your memory, or your graphics card. The open-source concept has never been as successful in hardware as in software. There are many ways to explain this, but perhaps the easiest to understand is that anyone can copy, run, and create free software, but creating free hardware is much harder."

https://www.youtube.com/embed/MVHzfUWul2Y

Windmills Breaking Spectacularly

What Really Happens in Our Bodies When We Say Our Hand or Foot Has Fallen Asleep: "The popular belief is that when a foot or hand falls asleep (it can sometimes happen to the entire arm or leg) it is because the blood is not circulating properly because we have compressed an important artery. In reality that has nothing to do with it. When a foot or hand falls asleep, what we have blocked with a bad posture is not a vein or an artery, but a nerve. Although nerves have a lot of flexibility, if we crush one of these nerve pathways with enough force and for enough time, signals stop traveling through it."

The Dagger of Your 'Seen': "She writes, but the message never gets read on the phone. The two blue check marks indicate that she read the invitation but doesn't even return a polite decline. Her profile says she was online at four in the morning but that night she wasn't with you. She is online but doesn't deign to read you. The anxiety of hypercommunication undermines good sex and romance – let alone love –; we all knew that already. But now academia – through a Conicet investigation – provides concrete data that the anger that rises in your throat when you get left on read is not an isolated incident but part of a social fabric that builds the reign of WhatsApp."

Positivity Is a Scam and Anger Is Creative: "Let's be disillusioned. Employers do not want employees' happiness. If a coach or a young psychologist with prime-time minutes had concluded that workers' heartburn improved business, bosses would convince them to have toast with aioli and anchovies for breakfast, even supplying the concoction for free. However, some research speaks of the pernicious effects of the cool wonderful theater. Constantly faking emotions inclines us toward frustration, exhaustion, and even depression. Distorting our mood even has a name: emotional dissonance."

Creepy Girl Mask

Why These Blue Flashes Appear When You Crush a Mint Candy in the Dark: "Smarter Every Day has tried it with a Wint-O-Green Lifesavers candy. It is the ideal sweet because it is made with real sugar instead of artificial sweeteners. When the hammer crushes the candy, the atoms of the sugar's crystalline molecules lose electrons; those electrons collide with nitrogen molecules in the air we breathe; nitrogen absorbs the energy of the electrons, and part of that energy ends up being emitted as light; mainly ultraviolet light."

A Deer Is Caught for the First Time Eating Human Flesh: "Researchers left a human corpse in a forest to study how scavengers feed on our remains. In front of the body they set up a camera, hoping to record foxes, vultures, raccoons, and coyotes. What happened next will surprise you. Months later, the images caught an unexpected visitor: a young white-tailed deer caught in the act with a rib in its mouth." Don't kid yourself, Jimmy. If a deer could, it would eat you and all your loved ones.

Everything Netflix Knows About You (and Why It Wants to Know So Much): "The online television service is increasingly popular. In 2016 it broke its record for international subscribers and is now available in 190 countries, as explained on its website. In total, it has more than 100 million customers worldwide. And one of the keys to its success is, without a doubt, the depth with which it knows its audience: Netflix studies your consumption habits in detail to get to know you better and to get the most out of you as a user."