Recommended Links of the Week (No. 463): Nazi Survival, Voyager Records, and More

Persecuted by the Nazis, understanding the Voyager records, five months on a wooden raft, a lethal prostitute and a movie that connects to your mind. It's the future today! Read on and find out about all these wonderful things and many more. If you miss it, you're a fool.

This Week’s Recommended Links

Frozen, blind and pursued by the Nazis: “The mission was carefully prepared, the objectives were precise, the troops had been trained and, as Norwegian expatriates returning to their country to sabotage their hated Nazi occupiers, their disposition could not have been better. The twelve men landed undetected on the frozen Scandinavian Arctic coast after a brief crossing from the English Shetland Islands on a fishing boat but, despite such meticulous preparation, a day later the plan had been thwarted and all the soldiers were dead. All but one. His name was Jan Baalsrud.”

Revisiting the 'confusing' Voyager records 42 years later: “To go further than anyone had ever gone before. That was the explicit goal of the Voyager probes when they were launched in the boreal summer of 1977. The expectation was maximum and, therefore, a group of scientists asked NASA to include some object that would serve as a time capsule of what the Earth and human beings were like at that time. If some extraterrestrial race encountered the probe in the future, it could get an idea of who sent it. It was our cosmic calling card. To design it, the best minds of NASA and American academia created a committee chaired by Carl Sagan himself from Cornell University. The result was a precious piece and, in the opinion of Rebecca Orchard and Sheri Wells-Jensen of Bowling Green State University in Ohio, an immense gibberish that (very likely) no one would be able to understand.”

Poom Lim, the castaway who lasted 5 months on a wooden raft: “Shipwreck stories are a classic and even the scene of a man alone on a small island is a base element in many jokes and stories. If not, remember that silly question of what would you take to a desert island? Some have spent months on land and very few have endured years, like Pedro Serrano, who survived eight years on a desert island. Today we are going to see an almost more impressive story, that of a man who was adrift for 5 months on a raft made of sticks.”

“Spurt” (Nightmare Gasoline)

The terrible and sensual Lilith, mother of demons and goddess of darkness: “In Jewish tradition, she is considered one of the worst demons, although in other sources she appears as the first woman created on Earth. According to a certain legend, God shaped Lilith as the first woman. He did it in the same way he created Adam, with the only difference that instead of using only clean earth as raw material, he also used garbage and filth. Traditionally it has been considered that Lilith means 'the night', and she is related to attributes linked to the spiritual aspects of sensuality and freedom, but also to terror.”

Eugea, the prostitute to whom men gave themselves without caring that they would die: “The most desired of them all was called Eugea: a woman with white skin, brown hair, gray eyes, pink and fleshy lips, housed in a body for which more than one man sighed knowing he could never have her in his arms. She was known not only in Greece, but beyond its borders. Important men from this nation and other places unknown even to Eugea herself traveled long months to meet her and enjoy her sexual skills, which, on the other hand, were well known. However, a kind of curse weighed on Eugea's humanity and the men who had the privilege of being with her: so great was the ardor of this young woman, her skills in bed were so advanced and her resources for giving pleasure so glorious that the men who managed to reach her and pay the price to combine their fluids with hers died at the precise instant they reached orgasm.”

Clint Eastwood was right: “On another occasion, a professor at Columbia College recommended a visit to an interesting exhibition of Japanese samurai art. Immediately, one of his students protested angrily, calling his suggestion politically incorrect because it could hurt the feelings of Chinese students. Obviously, the objection was absurd; the invasion of China by the Japanese imperial army had ended seventy years earlier. However, for the student, the elapsed time was irrelevant. Following his logic, German art would offend in France, French art in Spain because of the Napoleonic invasion, or Spanish art in Flanders.”

“Evolution”, a psychedelic Levi's ad from the 70s

La Abadía del Crimen Extensum, the Best Remake: “It is the best remake of La Abadía del Crimen Extensum, based on the book The Name of the Rose. Despite being an easy-to-play game with a most intuitive interface, searching for certain things can become quite annoying. Thanks to this remake, we can relive that great work of art from Opera Soft in 1987. This is not just a game, it is a tribute to an entire era. It is worth downloading La Abadía del Crimen: Extensum, because it is a very important piece in the history of Spanish video games. The good thing is that La Abadía del Crimen: Extensum can be played without problems on any Windows, Mac or Linux computer, we just need to have the latest Java plugin installed.” Java is a dirty word, but it's worth it.

Aurora Monsters - The most bloody toys that set the world on fire: “In 1971, when the first Aurora toys (the so-called 'Aurora Monsters') began to be mass-marketed, a huge campaign was unleashed to ban them at all costs. In 1962 they had been presented at a toy convention, but the stand of that strange brand was seen as an eccentricity or a bad-taste joke. It received few orders, but little by little some began to be interested in the 'innovative line' of atrocious toys. Parents' associations, feminist groups and Catholic groups raised the alarm. They called them 'sick toys'. During the winter of 1971, several feminist pickets gathered in front of the company's offices under the slogan “Sick Toys For Children Make A Sick Society!” and even burned boxes of toys in several stores.”

The Moment, the movie the viewer controls with their mind: “When using the NeuroSky MindWave headset while watching The Moment, the device analyzes the user's attention level through the electrical activity of their brain. It is believed that there is a range of frequencies for brain waves that corresponds to attention (although it should be noted that there are doubts about the effectiveness of this type of device in doing such tracking). The measurements, which are taken continuously, are sent wirelessly to a laptop. There, software designed by Ramchurn uses the data to modify the editing of scenes and the flow of background music, among other things. The viewer doesn't have to lift a finger.”

People falling down a hill while chasing a cheese in 2018

When we're hungry, are we really capable of eating anything?: “They said Rambo was capable of eating things that would make a goat vomit. In some survival stories, people have had to eat other people. However, around the need to satisfy hunger there are many myths. For all the borborygmi our stomach emits, apparently we prefer to die before eating certain things. What we know, according to available studies on the matter, is that being hungry makes you a little more flexible with available foods. In other words, disgusting food can become slightly more appetizing if we've gone many hours without eating.”

Too much time on the couch? This is how a sedentary lifestyle affects your personality: “Almost 20 years later, a total of about 9,000 people took the same surveys again. Stephan and his team found that subjects who reported being less active had greater average reductions in conscientiousness, openness, agreeableness, and extraversion (four of the five big personality traits) even after taking into account baseline differences in personality and health. No relationship was found with the fifth trait, neuroticism. The changes in traits were small, but the link with exercise was relatively strong.”

Roaming Mantis infects smartphones through hacked routers: “A while ago, our experts investigated malware they dubbed Roaming Mantis. At that time, it attacked most users in Japan, Korea, China, India and Bangladesh, so we did not analyze the malware in the context of other regions, since it seemed like a local threat. However, in the same month the report was published, Roaming Mantis had learned 12 more languages and had spread rapidly around the world. The malware uses compromised routers to infect Android smartphones and tablets, redirect iOS devices to a phishing site, and run the CoinHive mining script on desktops and laptops. It achieves this through DNS hijacking, which makes it difficult for users to detect that something is wrong.”