Incredibly stupid, the first Photoshop photo, domestic killers, the Nazi Zuse Z4 computer and flat Earth in the Middle Ages are just a few of the topics you can read about in this week's Recommended Links. Thanks for your visit!

Recommended Links of the Week (No. 584)

The story of the 'incredibly stupid': "In the morning a fisherman picked him up and handed him over to the North Vietnamese soldiers, who took him to Hanoi. When he arrived, Hegdahl told his story; of course they didn't believe him and gave him the usual welcome beating. Hegdahl concluded that he would be better off pretending to be someone rather short on brains. And so it was. The North Vietnamese became convinced he was totally stupid."

Jennifer in Paradise, this was the first photograph edited in Photoshop in history: "A photograph with more than 30 years of history turned into an icon in popular culture, or at least, it remains in the memory of those who have ever used Adobe Photoshop, the well-known photo editing tool. Behind software like Photoshop there are dozens of stories. One of them has to do with a photograph taken on a vacation trip that served to bring to life what would become Photoshop. Its artistic value made it popular and it has reached our days."

How the speed of light was first measured: "One of the first people to carry out a tangible experiment to test whether light had a finite speed was Dutch scientist Isaac Beeckman in 1629. Despite living in an era before lasers, which is astonishing, Beeckman understood that in the absence of lasers, the basis of any good scientific experiment should always include explosions of some kind."

Macro things

Cooking made us human, but spices kept us safe: "Nobody knows when humans started cooking food. There is solid evidence that our ancestors used fire 300,000 years ago, but primatologist Richard Wrangham thinks that in reality our ancestors already mastered fire a million and a half years earlier."

Post-truth is more dangerous than lies: "What best characterizes post-truth is the lack of respect for truth or contempt for it. This characteristic should not be identified with lying. Lying and contempt for truth are different forms of deception. The liar knows what the truth is, plays the game of truth, but intentionally hides it."

Domestic cats killed all 232 animals in this photo in just one year: The photo by Wonderly, "Caught by Cats", won first place in the BigPicture Natural World Photography 2020 contest in the Human/Nature category. Its image highlights a bleak panorama: the photo would have to be multiplied by 10 million to even come close to representing the billions of animals that cats kill each year.

Synchronicity by David C. Roy

What do we do now with Venus?: The discovery on our infernal neighbor Venus of a molecule considered a biomarker or "signature of life", phosphine, has surprised scientists who work on planetary atmospheres. Recovered from the initial impact and after the rivers of ink that have flowed, both praising and downplaying the discovery, it's time to reflect on the next steps we need to take to reach a conclusive answer.

The Nazis funded it, it took 3 seconds to multiply, and it was used to design fighters: the surprising story of the Zuse Z4: "UNIVAC I may be more famous, but it arrived ten months later than the Zuse Z4 computer (or 'Z4' for short), which is considered the first commercial computer in the world and was built in Germany by German engineer Konrad Zuse in 1945."

Ocean Falls: how an industrial colony from a century ago became a ghost town and an eco-friendly Bitcoin farm: "Obviously, Bitcoin did not generate an economic and social boom in Ocean Falls. The ghost town seems to continue its irreducible march toward ignominy, but at a much slower pace. Where only ruins once existed, they still persist today, but some resist the designs of Chronos more stubbornly."

The total collapse

The lies they told you about Sparta: "Given the focus on military excellence, the totalitarian system arranged marriages to produce strong children who, at age 7, would leave home to spend their childhood and adolescence in barracks to train the body, discipline, brutality, and harshness. Basically, they turned them into a war machine that would carry out its mission successfully and faithfully, without objections or feelings that might limit their performance."

'Bucky' Fuller, the inventor of the future: "The vital legend of this unique man, his astonishing visionary ideas and his ultra-modern projects are now explained in Curious Radical, the exhibition at the Telefónica Foundation that helps us marvel at the occurrences of this singular American born in 1895 and who achieved great relevance in the 1950s."

Flat Earth in the Middle Ages: "Today we know that none of this is true. In the Middle Ages it was perfectly known that the Earth was a sphere, and if Columbus had many opponents to his voyage, none of them was because they believed in a flat Earth. If the flat Earth is a myth, so is the idea that the Middle Ages believed in that idea. The question then arises: when and how did this false idea about the Middle Ages emerge?"

The Hindenburg Disaster colorized

Videos

Mad World - Pentatonix

Galleries

Nuclear Dummies, Stephen King with cats, the beauty of stray cats, women of mixed races, the face of a 4000-year-old dog, invisible light, amazing porcelain and glass costumes, the best drone photos of 2020, how he makes his best photos, dragons in watercolor, beautiful portraits of little birds, illustrated guide to bicycles for women from 1896, Chen Zhun's super action photos, amazing Polish movie posters, Soviet ships turned into millionaires' yachts, long-exposure photos, Victorian workers, hundreds of photos from Ghibli movies, chandeliers in subways, Animated Dump and Visual Dump.

https://old.neoteo.com/un-viejo-tv-afecto-el-servicio-de-internet-de-un-pueblo-gales-por-18-meses/

You may have noticed that this time the Links were quite delayed, but it wasn't my fault! The site had technical problems beyond my control and I couldn't upload anything, even though I had everything ready. Thanks for stopping by and sorry for the delay!