The sexual liberation in outer space, the benefits of masturbation, how waiting in line reminds you that you are poor, bullshit jobs, the teachings of Epictetus, and anarchist propaganda in Argentine sweet pastries. Lots of beautiful things, as always, in this week's recommended links. Are you going to miss them? Don't be a fool!
Barbarella: Sexual Liberation in Outer Space: "In 1968, a year before Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon, the first media astronaut in history, embodied by a beautiful Jane Fonda, arrived on the big screen to stay forever in the popular imagination. The plot might seem so absurd, so Ionesquian, that it captivates any lover of the illogical and scares those who do not know how to play without a clear set of rules and conventions. After all, what can you expect from a Frenchman of the sixties?"
What is the probability that a woman gets pregnant?: "Let's imagine that a healthy couple decides to have a sexual relationship. What would be the estimated probability that that sexual act results in pregnancy? Depending on the day of the month, the figure will range between 0 and 9%. On average, we can say that the probability that a coitus ends in pregnancy (provided there are no measures to prevent it) is approximately 3%."
The thousand and one benefits of masturbation, from taboo to recommendation: "According to a study conducted by Superdrug's Online Doctor, a British portal specializing in sexual health, 88% of women and 96% of men admit to having masturbated. The survey was conducted on a sample of almost 1,000 people, both men and women, from different countries in Europe and the United States. The results are quite striking."
Waiting in line. Yes or no? A lot or nothing? To wait or not to wait is a reflection of your social class: "Javier Auyero, director of the Laboratory of Urban Ethnography at the University of Texas, studied queues as a social phenomenon and concluded that they perpetuate our place in the world and, specifically, remind us of social class. In other words: waiting is for the poor. Money allows you to avoid queues and waiting in general while flaunting certain wealth and power."
Bullshit Jobs. A Theory: "There are the 'flunkies', who are hired to make other people feel important, like the receptionist at the publishing house whose responsibilities were limited to filling the candy jar and answering the phone a few times a day; the 'goons', who aggressively sell people things they neither need nor want, like call center employees who sell expensive credit reports to people who could get them for free; and the 'duct tapers', who exist only because of a 'glitch' in an organization, like the woman who had to review research reports written by a statistician who was a terrible writer."
If you understand and apply these teachings of Epictetus, you will avoid suffering unnecessarily: "Epictetus was one of the most celebrated Stoics. He thought that the secret of happiness lies in radical acceptance and in living simply in communion with nature, depending as little as possible on material goods. He also thought that the source of suffering lies in our inability to assume a psychological distance from what happens to us and to develop a more logical and less emotional perspective."
Why are pastries in Argentina 'weapons' of anarchist propaganda?: "The first time I visited a bakery in Buenos Aires I thought my ears were deceiving me. Around me, the Porteños were ordering their favorite pastries to have with their morning coffee. But I couldn't believe what they were saying: did that person just order six 'bolas de fraile' and half a dozen 'cañoncitos'?"
How the Romans Multiplied: "The Roman civilization reached a very high level in engineering, as we can still verify today in some of our cities. To do so, they had to have well-developed mathematics and algebra. However, they did not know the number zero nor decimal numbers (how could they calculate the slope of a water channel without them?), and the nomenclature of their numbers made their use in addition, subtraction, and other arithmetic operations very difficult. In fact, it has always been said that one of the advantages that decimal notation brought was making multiplication much easier. Adding CLXXVII to XXIII doesn't seem too complicated, but can you imagine multiplying them?"
Horn Effect - How do our negative prejudices act?: "No one escapes prejudices. Whether we admit it or not, we carry a backpack more or less loaded with prejudices. Prejudices are nothing more than the formation of a judgment about a person, group, or event in an anticipated manner and with little data. Generally, this process occurs below the threshold of our consciousness and distorts our perception, making us react to the idea we have formed, not to reality. The Horn Effect is one of the worst manifestations of those prejudices."
Mordor was real, the WWI battle that inspired Tolkien: "The Battle of the Somme —a river in northern France that gives its name to the place where the offensive took place— was the bloodiest battle of World War I, a cluster of military errors that on the very first day, July 1, 1916, resulted in the death of 20,000 British soldiers. 'It was there that I first contemplated a fire that could only be compared to a spectacle produced by nature,' Ernst Jünger, a direct witness from the German side, would write in his memoirs, titled Storm of Steel, one of the best war accounts according to historians."
Indiana Jones - The Pinball Adventure: "Video games about Indiana Jones? Of course, and some of them very good. Everyone's favorites are Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (1993), both from Lucasarts itself, great graphic adventures. But there is a truly unique game... although not exactly a video game."
The best-selling games in the United States from 1995 to 2017, are they also the best?: "When compiling this list, the volume generated by DLCs or microtransactions of each title has not been taken into account, but only the dollar sales of the games in both physical and digital formats. And at VidaExtra we ask ourselves, are those games also the best of each year?"
VIDEOS: Captain America vs Ryu (Lego Stop Motion), Le Gardien du Temple, Star Destroyer on a bicycle, the Dark Phoenix saga in TL:DR, a waterfall tree, karate cockroach, cat vs rat (rat wins), a supersonic toy rifle, competitive King of Fighters 2002 at Marambio Base (Antarctica), woodpecker or machine gun?, dogs work as a team to drink water, llama 'takes' a taxi in the city of Cusco, climbs mountain at 70 and without insurance, crab grows legs back, and the horror shorts Reverse and Dead House.
IMAGES: How to avoid being buried alive, Japanese workers sleeping drunk on the ground, Harlem in the 70s, the 'oooo' faces of mid-century women, street art, perfect makeup, giant cat, photomontages, small mushrooms that look like tiny butts, abandoned records, cartoon houses that were built in real life, confused cats, the art of Daimen Pape, action figure logos from the 80s, Dizzy Gillespie's puffed cheeks, the Animated Dump and the Visual Dump of the Week.
Thank you for stopping by, buddy! See you soon, if neither of us dies before, of course.
