Weekly roundup: free comics, the ban on pinball, how coffee affects us, a spy story from the World Cup, and the atheist mathematician who challenged God to kill him, among many other things. Don't miss them!
Start with Stone Bot Comics: not an article but an excellent page of original comics written and drawn exclusively for the platform. It features artists with recognized careers and more than 10 series, including my favorite, a kaiju series illustrated by Salvador Sanz called MEGA. The site is in English and Spanish, among other languages you can select from the menu at the top right. It is totally and completely free, funded through donations. You can spend hours reading all volumes of all series.
Why was pinball banned in New York for more than 30 years?: “It is known by many names, depending on the age of the person you ask. Its English name is Pinball, but it was also known as flipper. In Spanish it was known as máquina del millón or petaco. In the second half of the 20th century it was one of the most popular arcade machines and coexisted with arcade machines despite being a basically mechanical device. But in the 1940s it was banned in several cities in the United States, especially New York. What led to this ban?”
How coffee affects us: “Coffee is the second most common beverage in the world, after water, although there are differences between countries. Nordic countries like Finland, Norway, Iceland and Denmark lead in per-person coffee consumption. But when did our love for coffee arise and why? And most importantly, is it harmful to our health?”
Wealth visualized to scale: not an article but a graphic demonstration of the distribution of wealth in the world. It's done in a very clever way such that your jaw will drop when you realize how bad things are.
Degner's escape, a spy story from the World Cup: “On September 17, 1961, Ernst Degner, leader of the 125 World Championship and star rider of MZ, suffered a breakdown during the Swedish Grand Prix. And he disappeared off the map. He was fleeing to the West with the secrets of the East German brand.”
The SS Bessemer, the anti-seasickness steamship: “The celebrated engineer Henry Bessemer (1813-1898), known for the homonymous process for refining steel, suffered severe seasickness on his journey from Calais to Dover in 1868, which continued on his railway journey to London and lasted there for twelve more hours, recovering with small doses of hydrogen cyanide administered by his doctor. To avoid this experience in the future, he quickly devised the project that would become the steamship Bessemer.”
Arctic wolf spiders have changed their diet. They are eating each other: “Rising temperatures in northern latitudes are bringing disturbing changes to one of the Arctic's most abundant invertebrate predators. Wolf spiders are becoming cannibals.”
The big business of the Church - Indulgences: Some Protestants claim that Luther was outraged, among other things, by the existence of a papal bull, known today as “Taxa Camarae”, in which the pope set the fees to be paid to the papal court based on the various possible sins, with a view to their absolution. According to this, one could obtain forgiveness for sins committed, or buy it in advance for sins to be committed, as a license, by paying money.
The photographer who got ahead of death: He had a gift for being in the right place at the right time. Some even said he anticipated death. Wherever a murder or an awful death occurred, he appeared with his camera like magic. So much so that they called him Weegee as a phonetic interpretation of Weegee «ouija». He communicated with the dead, or so it seemed. Listening to the police radio, he managed to be the first to arrive at crime scenes.
Hardy, the atheist mathematician who challenged God to kill him: “There are a series of mathematical problems that will make any mathematician who solves them famous among their peers. One can refer to the well-known list of problems by David Hilbert, made public by him at a congress in Paris in 1900. Some of those problems still remain unsolved. But there are a few more; we can talk about that another day. Among those problems unsolved for decades and centuries, there are two or three that will make whoever solves them famous, even beyond the mathematical realm. The Riemann hypothesis is one such case.”
The dog-headed saint - cynocephali in Armenian iconography: “Anthropomorphism and zoocephaly are phenomena that can be found in many cultures without generating much surprise. We are accustomed to all kinds of fabulous beings like centaurs and minotaurs, and although we may never have considered it, also to cynocephali, like Anubis, for example. However, these deviations of the imagination become strange in the context of Christianity. The following article aims to present to the reader a very revered figure within Armenian Christianity.”
The ruthless killer who poisoned a hundred people driven by greed: “Married and mother of nine children, six of whom died, she worked as a laundress and caregiver for children and the sick, earning the nickname Goeie Mie, something like Good Mie. But behind this sweet nickname, the one also known as the Poisoner of Leiden, her hometown, hid a double life with a macabre side: she was one of the world's greatest serial killers.”
Videos
Videos: Rick and Morty x Wendy’s, Tiger King Kombat, New York in 1976 (Super 8mm), surf in storm mouth, Eminem - Godzilla (played with rubber bands), The Weeknd - Blinding Lights (with bricks), POKEMON - DARK EDITION, the largest Star Wars collection, acoustic phenomenon, DAY-O from Beetlejuice recreated in quarantine, Never Gonna Give You Up with an AI trying to extend it to infinity, little bug vs kitten, robot patrolling the streets, BATTLE between a MANTIS and a GIANT HORNET, DIY cardboard 7-speed gearbox, a bunch of live streams of all kinds of little animals, funny ballet, the impossible trick, playing "Come Together" with the family in quarantine, 501KG Deadlift - Hafthor Bjornsson, and the shorts Nebula-75 (Episode One) and The Rickety Lady (horror short).
Galleries
Galleries: a marvel in the middle of the jungle, the best portraits of 2020, anatomy of fantastic creatures, award-winning macro photography, Woodstock photos, the flying car of the 40s, Viking runes in Sweden, Russian imprisoned women recreating classical paintings, the fire snail, sunset selfies, chalk adventures, in memory of Chernobyl, a night in Piccadilly Circus, beautiful tulip garden, the curation of Stephen Romano, the Animated Dump and the Visual Dump of the Week.
The End. Game Over. See you next week and thank you for your visit. We'll read each other soon, coronavirus notwithstanding. A big hug!
