Recommended Links of the Week (no. 480): Mr. Bean, Bauhaus, surrealism and more

The best Mr. Bean scene, pooping after coffee, the history of the Bauhaus and surrealism. Because here we don’t only have fun — we also learn a lot from the links. All among viral videos, galleries, and other surprises.

This week’s links

What is the best Mr. Bean scene?: “Despite having spent more than a decade on television, film, and theater before creating this character in 1990, and also considering that he has tried to ‘kill him’ on occasion, no, there has been no way: Atkinson is and will be Mr. Bean. So we will take this opportunity to recall some of his best sketches. Vote for the one you like the most or add your favorite in the comments.”

Screens, cathode rays, and geeks: “The first thing to understand is that modern monitors — LCD, TFT, LED… — have nothing to do, in how they paint the image on the screen, with old CRT monitors, literally Cathode Ray Tubes. In modern ones, to simplify a lot, the screen is a matrix of light bulbs of three colors that we turn on with different intensity to show a pixel of color. That is, each pixel, at each moment, is on at a specific intensity or off. The mixture of colors and their intensities gives us the color we are looking for.”

What causes the irresistible desire to poop after coffee: “Coffee and a cigarette, a clay doll.” You may have heard that saying, mainly because it’s true. Until a few years ago, nobody knew why the hell we felt that irrepressible urge to head to the throne after coffee. This is what science says.

“Star Wars: A New Hope”, in anime style

Bauhaus - 100 years of the creative revolution: “Bauhaus (house of construction in German) was a project of arts, crafts and experimental architecture, whose evolution was closely linked to the political and social climate of the time. Its birth is linked to the emergence of the Weimar Republic, a democratic but highly unstable period in post-war Germany.”

History of Surrealism: “Surrealism is an artistic movement that has had a lasting impact on painting, sculpture, literature, photography and cinema. The surrealists, inspired by Sigmund Freud’s theories of dreams and the unconscious, believed that madness was the breaking of the chains of logic and represented this idea in their art by creating impossible images in reality, juxtaposing improbable shapes onto unimaginable landscapes.”

The four great evils that tech companies cause in the world: “Without us realizing it, Facebook, Google and other technology giants have been colonizing the economy and society. Monopoly, fake news, ideological manipulation and biased algorithms are the four big problems associated with their ever-increasing control.”

Sausages screaming while being cooked

Can I eat that cheese?: “Humans have been making cheese for at least 7,200 years, but even so, we still have many doubts when we want to sink our teeth into it. Can we eat that piece of cheese that has mold? And what about the rind? Is it better to keep it inside or outside the fridge? Below we will try to solve those and other questions related to the safety of this dairy food.”

How long will the Solar System be stable?: “The Sun formed from the collapse of a large cloud of dust and interstellar gas in which grains of solid material collided and joined, accumulating into ever larger masses that grew to produce the planets. However, although the general outlines of this process are fairly clear, the exact chain of events that gave the planets their current orbits is a more uncertain ground because, as I will comment in a moment, any small disturbance in a planet’s orbit can be amplified over millions of years, so modeling the distant past of the solar system is not an easy task.”

The joke and its relationship with consciousness: “In ‘The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious’, Freud analyzes some Jewish jokes, among them that of the rabbi who says: ‘I bathe once a year, whether I need it or not.’ Freud is not interested in the genesis of jokes, but in their psychic function (which, according to him, consists of symbolically castrating the father), and tells us nothing about their possible origin. What could it be in this case?”

“Star Trek: The Next Generation” on cat piano

The three legionaries who hijacked a plane and flew to Switzerland: “The reasons for the hijacking were ‘to demonstrate that the Legion is useless, nor are its security systems.’ They were offered to exchange the civilians on board for Legion military personnel, but the proposal didn’t work either. Tired of the back-and-forth and at gunpoint, they forced the pilot to take off.”

The world 2000 years ago: “2000 years ago, at the end of the 1st century AD, much of Europe, Asia and Africa were united and in permanent contact with each other. The great empires that emerged in these parts of the world were related to each other and all knew, more or less accurately, of the existence of the others. If the American continent had been in contact with the cultures of Africa and Eurasia, one could almost have spoken of the first great ‘globalization’ of History.”

The cleptograph, automatic detective: “It is a device designed to record thefts, producing a photograph of the culprit while inscribing the exact time of the attack. The room where the cleptograph is installed contains a system of contact points, ingeniously distributed throughout doors, windows, furniture, safes, drawers, etc.”