Here's what we have for today... at first glance, the Hitchcock cameos, the night the Moon exploded, rare books, a thought recorder and the complete history of Eddie (Iron Maiden's mascot). But there's much more! Keep reading and discover the rest on your own.
Braille, the story of the ingenious boy who invented the system for the blind: "One day in 1812, in the commune of Coupvray, near Paris, France, Louis Braille was playing in the workshop where his father made harnesses. At age 3, it wasn't unusual for him to be attracted to the leatherworking tools and, imitating what he had seen, he took one of the sharpest and started playing at "being daddy". (...) And, on this occasion, an accident occurred that would change his life and, a few years later, many others."
The 19th-century book that can still kill whoever dares to read it: "The reference is to 'Shadows from the Walls of Death: Facts and Inferences Prefacing a Book of Specimens of Arsenical Wall Papers', whose translation is 'Shadows from the Walls of Death: Facts and Inferences Prefacing a Book of Specimens of Arsenical Wall Papers'. It is a creation of Robert Clark Kedzie, who was a Union surgeon during the American Civil War and later became a chemistry professor."
Index Librorum Prohibitorum Et Expurgatorum: "The Index Librorum Prohibitorum et Expurgatorum (full name), also called 'Index Expurgatorius' and known in Spanish as 'Index of Prohibited Books', contains a catalog of books that the Sacred Congregation of the Inquisition of the Roman Catholic Church considered harmful to the faith. The purpose of the list was to prohibit and prevent the reading of certain works and authors, either in whole or in part, whose content is offensive, immoral, or attacks Catholic beliefs."
Hugo Gernsback's thought recorder: "In May 1919, Hugo Gernsback, one of the fathers of science fiction, wrote in the magazine Electrical Experimenter about the thought recorder. As with many of his inventions, he didn't live to see anything remotely similar, nor did he expect to, since his intention was to incite curiosity to solve a problem." More about Hugo Gernsback in an article I wrote 12 years ago.
Greening the Sahara: "Eleven million hectares suffer severe degradation in Tunisia. Every year, the desert advances 10,000 more hectares. Stopping that trend is a priority. Entrepreneur Sarah Toumi, nicknamed the 'acacia lady', combats desertification in this African country. Drought, erosion, pesticide use, and overgrazing degrade thousands of hectares of Tunisian soil each year. In the image, Sarah Toumi, awarded the Rolex Award for Enterprise in 2016, assesses whether the land in the Menzel Habib area is good for planting acacias." I hate the acacias that grow all over my garden, they are so tenacious I'm not surprised they want to use them there.
The night the Moon exploded: "On the afternoon of June 18, 1178, five monks from Canterbury, in southern England, reported having witnessed an unusual phenomenon in the sky. According to Monk Gervase, the abbey chronicler, the men were looking at a new crescent moon when they saw its upper part split in two."
11 movies that imagined what 2021 would be like, this is how cinema predicted our present: "Cinema really likes to imagine what our future will be like, but obviously, time keeps passing and we have been overcoming different visions of our future that had little to do with what actually happened. Today we stop at the current 2021 to see what scenarios the 11 films below proposed."
10 fun silent film short films online with Spanish subtitles: "Among them, Charles Chaplin (Charlot), Buster Keaton (Pamplinas) and Harold Lloyd (The Kid) became the references of humor and comedy, entertaining audiences with the dozens of short films and movies they worked on over the years. These three pioneers of film comedy were filmmakers in the broadest sense of the word, since in addition to working as actors, they also worked as directors of their own films, screenwriters or producers."
Alfred Hitchcock's 38 cameos: "The legendary Alfred Hitchcock was a genius. At least as a filmmaker that seems beyond doubt. And like all great geniuses, he also had his eccentricities and his little quirks and manias, some known, others not so much. Among his well-known habits, one stands out that, although well known, is still curious, and it is his fondness for appearing in a small cameo in all his films, although in reality this is not entirely true. Of the 53 films he made, he appears in 38."
1991 Harvest albums, one of the most productive musical events in rock history: "It's been 30 years since a year that ended up becoming one of the musical events of the end of the 20th century, and also a kind of re-ignition in rock, from many angles, shapes and styles. 1991 was one of the years that hosted the most notable and influential studio album production in the history of rock, and in this 2021 that begins, 30 years of all that are already being fulfilled."
Iron Maiden, The complete history of its mascot Eddie: "We cannot talk about Iron Maiden without thinking of its well-known mascot Edward T Head, 'Eddie' to his friends. After almost 40 years, Eddie still appears on every one of the band's covers as well as in its merchandise and during its concerts. This is the complete story of Eddie through the singles of one of the most important Heavy Metal bands."
Reading a programming language does not activate the same brain regions as reading a regular language: "Reading code activates a general-purpose brain network, but not language processing centers, which shows that programming language is not assimilated as if it were a common language we use to communicate. Thus, although computer code has the characteristics of a language, reading it activates a distributed network called the multiple demand network."
VIDEOS: What the COVID vaccine does to your body, "Happy" on ukulele by orchestra, axial tilts of the planets in the solar system, bridge competition, Borat 2077, Ireland 65 years ago, Leonardo da Vinci's mechanical lion, the popcorn with legs, a Beatles album generated by neural AI, the McGurk effect, video lapse of the process of coloring an old photo, video lapse of things drying, pelican that wants to eat a capybara, Uruk-hai with normal voices, Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here" on a gayageum, if Mandalorian were a 90s sitcom, damn dog!, deleted scene from "The Office" about "The Matrix", deleted scenes and bloopers from "Back to the Future Part II", an inflatable motorcycle, is 6174 the most mysterious number in the world?, how editing saved Star Wars, Plato's cave narrated by Orson Welles.
GALLERIES: Retrofuturistic cars, sculptures with books, 80s dreams, WTF stock photos, Dune portraits, truck arrives with giant wind turbine, futuristic illustrations, over 700,000 digitized artworks, artificial intelligence that generates images from text, The Mandalorian art, Star Wars as Renaissance paintings, Fedor Titov's concept art, great illustrations of popular characters, 2020 in 100 photos, more photos from 2020, rare creatures on Earth, AI used to generate children of fictional celebrity couples, Anthony Hopkins trying on masks for Hannibal Lecter, plush sculptures, the surrealism of Ted Chin, the construction of the Statue of Liberty, buildings on the verge of collapse, art with banana bruises, more photos of Tanya Roberts (R.I.P.), the Animated Dump and, of course, the Visual Dump.
That's it. I'm out of links. Thanks for your visit!
