Recommended Links of the Week (No. 600)

This week marks the 600th edition of our recommended links, and it feels like just yesterday. It's incredible that this section remains among the most-read on NeoTeo, and it's because it features such interesting notes as those about ancient Greek numerals, detecting a fake USB drive, bread from air, Latin phrases, and even hallucinogenic mushrooms in human blood. I hope you enjoy the ride!

People in Japan are renting a person for €80 to do absolutely nothing: "His business model is simple. Anyone can contact him via Twitter or Instagram, social networks where he has hundreds of thousands of followers. There, Morimoto explains his services (essentially none) and demands a payment of about €80 a day. Once the agreement is formalized, the client can enjoy his company to use it as they wish. Nothing more and nothing less."

What numbers the ancient Greeks used when making their astonishing discoveries: "One of the numeral systems used in Ancient Greece was the Attic numeration, also known as Herodianic numerals, since they were first described in a second-century manuscript by the great grammarian Herodian. But they have a third name that indicates what they were like: acrophonic numbers, so called because the signs used to represent 5 and multiples of 10 were taken from the first letters of the number names."

How to know if you've been sold a fake USB drive: "If these days you go to any of the sales platforms on the internet and look for a USB drive, you'll probably find plenty with capacities of 1 or several terabytes at incredibly low prices. If you're even minimally into the world of computing, you'll probably know that most of these don't have the capacity they claim, but the question is: How can we verify if a USB we've bought has the advertised capacity when we buy it?"

The man who extracted bread from the air (but also killed millions of people): "The 'green revolution' driven by the 'father of modern agriculture', the American agronomist Norman Ernest Borlaug, Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, would not have been possible if forty years earlier the fields had not experienced another revolution whose promoter was both a war criminal and responsible for the salvation of modern agriculture."

"Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" or when the meaning of the cover changes the meaning of the original: "The story goes that Robert Hazard, a singer who always had more desire than luck, tired of his parents asking why he didn't get a girlfriend, composed in 1979 as an answer 'Girls Just Wanna Have Fun'. The song, influenced by power pop and a nascent new wave somewhat rough in its rock revival, was narrated from a male point of view, and in it he complained (whether bitterly we don't know) that girls just wanted to have fun and nothing else. The New Yorker rescued this song and agreed to give it a totally different meaning."

What do "crowns" represent?: "Each of us has had a crown on our head at least once in our lives. Whether it was one from a 'certain burger joint' or one we wove ourselves with field flowers, usually during our childhood. Maybe today it means little, but in the past, wearing something on your head made people feel, in a certain way, superior. Women and men throughout history have tried to stand out in one way or another and achieve success in such a way that it doesn't go unnoticed, the crown was the external sign of some achievement or power."

Google paid €100 million to a star autonomous driving engineer - Years later he quit, went to a competitor and ended up in prison: "The Grand Challenge, however, succeeded in awakening enthusiasm for autonomous driving technology among amateur and professional engineers across the country. Eighteen months later, at the second Grand Challenge, five vehicles reached the finish line. Urmson's team finished in second place, losing to a team led by the head of Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Sebastian Thrun."

The microscope, the invention that led a cloth merchant to make one of the most astonishing discoveries in History: "Thanks to this knowledge, he managed to carve a magnifying glass with three magnifications that allowed him to see the threads of the fabrics he sold in his shop and improve the quality of the textiles. At that time, the English scientist Robert Hooke (1635-1703) lived in that city, combining his duties as Pastor of the New Church of Delft with his microscopic and telescopic observations."

Latin phrases and Latin idioms used today: "Latin phrases and Latin idioms still survive in contemporary language, even in different languages and almost without variations in their meaning. Below, we present the most common Latin phrases and idioms, followed by their literal translation (in italics) and an explanation of their meaning."

The 100 best-photographed films of the 20th century, according to the American Society of Cinematographers: "This list is a collection of key titles that any cinematographer should see and a teaching tool for any student, teacher, or film lover who wants to understand and appreciate the importance of this figure in the industry. 'We hope the list helps the public better understand cinematography and shows the director of photography as an artist who is an essential contributor to the magic of cinema,' concludes Fierberg. These are the 10 most voted films by ASC members."

He injects himself with hallucinogenic mushroom tea and mushrooms grow in his veins: "A 30-year-old American almost died after injecting a tea of hallucinogenic mushrooms into a vein. According to a preprint medical report in the Journal of the Academy of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry, the man developed a potentially fatal infection that made mushrooms grow in his blood. The patient spent nearly a month in the hospital after his family took him to the emergency room in a confused state."

The 'Tomb', a nuclear coffin, is beginning to crack: "According to the BBC, in the late 1970s, more than 4,000 US soldiers spent three years collecting radioactive debris deposited on six of the Enewetak Atoll islands to place it in the crater left on Runit by the so-called 'Cactus' test. This was the explosion of an 18-kiloton surface bomb. The problem is that the seas have risen in the area, about 7 millimeters per year since 1993. So, the water has begun to seep into the ground beneath the dome."

Videos

Twenty-eight musical genres, solving a $30,000 puzzle, a very lazy sloth, a praying mantis watching TV, eight stop motion tricks in two minutes, Bonobo: Cirrus, will it fall or not?, the shape that rolls uphill, this is what music sounded like 2,500 years ago, making pizza in a pan, Alexa vs Google Assistant playing chess, final scene of The Mandalorian with "I Need a Hero" in the background, "Chicks With Guns" presented by Quentin Tarantino, Can a 486 computer play MP3 music in good quality?, Singapore Rediscovers, the music of the cosmos, the roar of the little lion, tutorials for making shapes with balloons and the short films "The Moon’s Not That Great", "Freeze frame", "GUEST" (Horror) and Seinfeld if it were a horror movie.

Galleries

The Mandalorian as a retro comic series, Tomas Libertiny's wax sculptures, I survived 2020, Boris Artzybasheff's anthropomorphic art, snail photos, giant toad, retro terminals, crazy cats, cute and chubby red-haired kitten, Photoshop before Photoshop, beautiful embroideries, beautiful Russian officers, Ryan Bittner's monsters, the most dangerous birds in the world, giving his parrot a prosthetic beak, giant amethyst geode from Uruguay, the Animated Dump of the Week, the Visual Dump and, as a cherry on top, 2020: The Game.

Thank you for these 600 editions! A big hug!