Recommended Links of the Week #558: Floating Cars, TED Talks and More

Floating cars, anal hygiene, films that changed everything, TED talks and something called endoliths. As always, all that and more in the salad of links, videos and images we call Recommended Links of the Week. Hallelujah!

Recommended Links of the Week (No. 558) — Sabrina Salerno

Floating cars in the 60s: the 'retro-futurist' reality imagined by these artists: "Artists have turned to photo retouching to represent a rather striking idea: floating cars, without wheels, but taking as an aesthetic reference some classic models that may sound familiar. Moving quite away from the flying taxi models that companies decide to bet on."

The hundreds of languages and writing systems of the world, illustrated on a beautiful 1741 map: "Hensel's work is not particularly valuable for the accuracy of its content, but for its originality: until then, no linguist had proposed to synthesize in a single work all the languages of the planet, much less with their respective alphabets and systems. The map, whose aesthetics is typically 18th-century, represents a journey into the unknown."

Brief history of anal hygiene: when did we humans start wiping our bums?: "Enter the bathroom, close the door, pull down your underwear, have a bowel movement and clean yourself. And before leaving the bathroom, pull your clothes back up and flush the toilet, of course. In any case, how to do your business is more or less clear in Western society of the 20th century. And cleaning yourself, with a little toilet paper, too. But how did all this cleaning and giving splendor to the anus after evacuating begin?"

Fertility of the Sea (Taiko)

When technology transforms cinema: 19 films that changed everything: "Next, I propose to review 19 films —both feature films and pieces that last only a few seconds— whose technological advances and innovations completely changed the medium and transformed it into what we all know today."

The rotating Solarium of Aix-les-Bains, an astonishing building: "It no longer exists, which is a pity, but it must have been something impressive to behold. Aix-les-Bains is a town in western France where one of the most singular structures I know was built. Here is a photograph from the time when the Solarium stood in all its splendor."

TED talks to kill boredom and learn a lot in just 15 minutes: "More motivating phrases than any of those that live on sugar packets, some touch of humor, originality in presenting and a lot of digital synthesis when teaching are some of the keys to TED talks, those interesting conferences of no more than 15 minutes that have been held for years around the world. The topics are most varied: technology, culture, geography..."

Star Wars Coronavirus PSA

Operation Balmis: the expedition that saved the world in 1803: "His expedition should be remembered not only for the adventure, "which was tremendous, but because he managed to take the treatment of the vaccine from arm to arm, that is, vaccination", explains Javier Moro, author of A flor de piel (ed. Seix Barral), a volume that details the feat. Thanks to this feat, Moro emphasizes, "smallpox is the first and only human disease eradicated. The last case occurred in 1978."

Endoliths: the microorganisms that live inside rocks: "There are a good number of beings that use solid structures as a home. Turtles carry them on their backs as part of their own morphology, like many mollusks and those with an exoskeleton, such as crustaceans or corals; but we can also remember hermit crabs or those that take advantage of any element, like octopuses. And then there are those that simply enable caves, cavities, cracks and the like. Within these, endoliths would have to be placed, even though a subtype of them not only settle but also dig into the rock."

Cryptography in World War II: the case of Colonel Fellers: "In September 1941, three months before the United States entered the war, General Cesare Ame, head of the Italian SIM, the Servizio Informazioni Militari, launched a daring plan. The plan consisted of stealing the codes, military and diplomatic, from the North Americans, directly from their embassy in Rome."

DOOM ETERNAL PUNK SONG by Bonecage

Solve a crime to keep your brain active during lockdown: "If Agatha Christie raised her head and saw what Modesto García is doing on social networks with his #Crimenesilustrados1, she would die again, but from envy. The man from Malaga was already known for his great narrative threads on Twitter, but now he has given a further twist to this way of narrating on social networks."

Moral disconnection in our lives: "The Canadian psychologist Albert Bandura proposed, within the framework of social cognitive theory (SCT), the concept of "moral disconnection", a way of understanding why a person who behaves kindly and piously can come to commit inhuman acts, or why people transgress the moral norms established in society."

What chickens teach us about coronavirus and its control: "As its name indicates, avian infectious bronchitis causes, only in these animals, a generally mild respiratory condition. The virus can also be found in the digestive tract, kidneys and ovaries and testes. Therefore, a coronavirus infection reduces the laying capacity of birds. Hence its great impact on laying poultry, and also the need for its control."