Death and Halloween, pseudosciences, gold in the solar system, and end-of-world dystopias. The usual, but always with fun and interesting links. Plenty to read, plenty of videos to watch, and some galleries to enjoy. Welcome to the Links!
The Halloween Party and the Dying Spree…: "The thing is that, for a few days, black humor is socially imposed, it becomes fashionable to make fun of death, we play the exciting game that spirits exist and therefore that there is no end, but metamorphosis. People not only dress up as murderers, but above all as the murdered. Isn't that wonderful?"
Emotional intelligence: "Stay in your comfort zone until you die. It's not easy to reach a point in life where, when your alarm goes off, you don't want to hang yourself or hang the person looking at you from the other side of the pillow. Some people, however, achieve it. The snake-oil salesmen say those people are installed in their comfort zone and should leave it. It's obvious that whoever recommends that is not only an idiot but has never been happy in their entire miserable life. And never will be."
The mythological roots of Studio Ghibli films: "In Studio Ghibli films, technology and fantasy predominate, specifically Japanese airplanes and fantastic beings. Japanese mythology and folklore, although popular, are unknown to most of the population. For that reason, it is likely that many don't know that they have a history beyond cinema."
Why do pseudomedicines seem to work?: "Because that's how our brain works, looking for the simplest correlation between two facts that may or may not be connected, an evolutionary adaptation that, although it allowed us to survive and prosper in our most remote past (...), now is only a scourge that anchors us to irrationality and that not only doesn't serve our survival but is a more than verifiable hindrance that leads the most ignorant or most desperate members of our species straight to the family pantheon."
Where does all the gold in the solar system come from?: "The first thing to keep in mind is that the sun and planets formed from the gravitational collapse of a large cloud of gas and dust, as I explained in more detail in this entry. The gas consisted of hydrogen and helium, the two "lightest" elements on the periodic table, formed in large quantities after the Big Bang, while the dust was made of the rest of the "heavier" elements such as oxygen, silicon, iron, uranium, and gold."
The Stomachion puzzle and the Archimedes Palimpsest: "In this mini-series of two entries of the Science Culture Notebook, I would like to talk about the oldest known Tangram-type geometric puzzle, the Stomachion. But before talking about this geometric puzzle, I think it's interesting to start this story with the Archimedes Palimpsest, which includes the most extensive copy of the original work Stomachion by the Greek mathematician."
False memory, a bias of our mind: "False memory is one of the cognitive biases most used in advertising, and even in politics. It starts from narratives that have many details. This generates a psychological sense of credibility, even if the content or consequences derived from the speech are absurd."
How the atomic bomb conditioned our understanding of science: "The public understanding of science as a discipline of special knowledge superior to other forms of knowledge, or what some authors have agreed to conceive as the problem of the Two Cultures, would change radically after the detonation of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Unbeknownst to him, that sunny summer morning Paul Tibbets, pilot of the Enola Gay, would alter the course of culture itself."
End-of-world dystopias: "In a context like the one we just analyzed, it's not surprising that our favorite series are impregnated with a political ideology with propagandistic purposes. The political need to create a social opinion that adapts our society to upcoming changes is essential. How? Through three performative maneuvers:"
The clever rats that learned to dissect with "surgical precision" some poisonous toads to eat their hearts in Australia: "A water rat is achieving in Australia what scientists have been trying unsuccessfully for years: stopping the advance of the cane toad, a species that when devoured by other predators releases a deadly venom. But the feat of this water rat known as rakali lies not so much in the what but in the how."
The secret of ants to avoid traffic jams even in the worst traffic conditions: "Until now we knew that ants are able to "flow" in columns that can reach a rate of thousands of individuals per minute, but how do they do it to avoid traffic jams? A team of researchers from three universities has tried to solve the mystery by studying one of the species with the best mobility on the planet: the Argentine ant (Linepithema humile)."
The last "singer" of terrifying crimes: "That last storyteller, who defined what she did as 'singing', seems a figure from the past, but from a remote past. In old illustrations and engravings we have seen them from town to town, unfolding posters in which they narrated morbid stories, lost loves, or chivalric deeds. Their audience was mainly the illiterate and they belonged to the popular landscape, to those vanished trades. They had been doing it since the Middle Ages. Then they disappeared. Or almost, because during the Republic some could be seen. She, possibly, was the last one."
Videos
Watch: Rick and Morty: Halloween Adventures, a Japanese flying car, ten thousand years of volcanic explosions, how to make a super small paper airplane, if Tom Selleck had been 'Indiana Jones', Pinky and the Brain jazz style, wild vs domesticated food, how an octopus reacts to music, Star Wars: Origins, cats vs bottle maze, optical illusions with furniture, surprises her while she dances, washing a carpet, dressed as Lunar Lander, wave tank, Shaun of the Dead Remix, "Déguste", Nine Inch Nails - Closer but with Ghostbusters music by Ray Parker Jr., how a solar eclipse looks from space, le tiene miedo a las orejas, Joker accidentado, and a bunch of shorts: "Firebird" (1974), an Estonian animation, "A Short Vision" (1956), also animated, what would happen if an atomic bomb falls on a populated area. Two more shorts for kids: Maestro and Pip, two very funny animations. And to finish, horror shorts made especially for Halloween: "YOU'LL LIVE", "La Noria", "MERMAID", "TRICK", and "WANDERING SOUL". All very good!
Galleries
Extreme packaging, zombie baby, the night of a thousand demons, photographs of dogs and cats, mind-blowing portraits of women, the evolution of the scroll bar, winter in the outskirts of Russia, the beautiful Valerie Leon, the Animated Dump and the Visual Dump, to finish.
https://old.neoteo.com/creepypasta-scp-162/
