E-waste, reverse engineering, the fight to the death between two mammoths, and the Laconia Incident serve as an appetizer for an edition of the Recommended Links of the Week that has all that and much more, including viral videos and great galleries. Enjoy!
Recommended Links
E-waste in 4 charts: how the world wastes $62.5 billion a year: "If we could gather all the old cell phones, computers and appliances we discard each year in the world, their weight would be equivalent to the nine Great Pyramids of Giza, in Egypt. And their economic value would exceed the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Costa Rica, Croatia or Tanzania."
This is how reverse engineering changed the history of computing forever: "In his book, Galler explained how some manufacturers occasionally tried to market clone PCs with copies of their BIOS, and IBM stopped them with legal lawsuits. That's where Phoenix Technologies took advantage of the concept known as a 'clean room' (also known as a 'Chinese wall') to try to replicate that important subsystem."
What is logic and what is it for?: "There is a very widespread classification of scientific work into two major branches: formal sciences and empirical sciences. Among the latter are all those disciplines whose success criterion is a sort of agreement between theory and experience, nuanced by other epistemic values such as simplicity. The case of formal sciences is different, since the truth or falsity of their statements can be known a priori by applying exclusively reason unaided by observation."
Diseases in America before, during, and after the conquest: "They lived healthy. There was no disease, no bone pain, no fever for them, no smallpox, no chest burning, no stomach pain, no consumption. Their body went straight and erect then." This is how the Chilam Balam describes the idyllic state of health of the Mayan world before the dzules burst into it, that is, the foreigners who would later be known more specifically as kastelan (Castilians, Spaniards).
Tattooing from prehistory to the present day: "Although there are indications that it may have been practiced in the Upper Paleolithic (the theriomorphic figurine of the Lion-Man of Ulm and that of the Venus of Hohle Fels are covered with incised drawings), we must stick to material evidence and, consequently, the chronology goes back to the fourth millennium before Christ. We are talking, of course, about Ötzi: that unfortunate man who died around 3255 BC - in the middle of the Neolithic, then - and whose body, frozen in the Alps, was covered with tattoos; sixty-one, to be exact."
The story of the fossil that revealed the ferocious battle to the death between two mammoths 12,000 years ago: "Voorhies was determined to exhume the entire skeleton, but he never succeeded. To his surprise, instead of finding all the bones, he came across four tusks intertwined in an almost warlike position. The vestige of this battle between mammoths has been preserved for 12,000 years. Voorhies knew then that he could devote his life to the study of this event."
What is learned helplessness: "Perhaps at some point in your life you have believed that you cannot escape a situation you dislike or that you cannot achieve your goals, no matter how hard you try again and again. You perceive that you have tried everything, but nothing has worked to get what you wanted or to avoid suffering some more or less serious adversity. At times like this, you have probably felt defeated, helpless, sad and without energy to move forward or face setbacks. This psychological state is called learned helplessness."
Story of a Martian cloud: "This rising air, laden with moisture, condenses when it cools at altitude and forms the millions of ice crystals that make up the immense elongated cloud, which forms at an altitude of 45 km (25 km above the volcano). Scientists believe this height is reached due to the characteristics of the Martian atmosphere, where there is no jump between the troposphere and the mesosphere."
Uyoku dantai, the strange Japanese far-right: "As expected, politics in Japan maintains palpable differences with that of the rest of the world due to its particular social and historical context. It is enough to see how Japanese cultural and artistic expressions sometimes even clash with their closest neighbors. And, of course, the extreme right, known as uyoku dantai (literally, rightist groups), is no exception."
The Jötnar, the threat of the Nordic world: "In Norse mythology, the jötnar(1) were the race that inhabited Jötunheimr, a realm opposed to the æsir(2) of Asgard. They are popularly called giants and gods, opposed until Ragnarök, but this translation is problematic. Not only does it mask that there were giants among the gods, but the term "giant" encompasses both the jötunn and the troll, the risi(3) and the þurs(3)."
The Laconia Incident, when German submarines rescuing shipwreck survivors were attacked by American planes: "The RMS Laconia was a transatlantic liner built in England for the Cunard company with a length of 183.26 meters and a beam of 22.43, a tonnage of 19,695 gross tons and a speed of 16 knots. Launched on April 9, 1921, it made its maiden voyage the following year between Southampton and New York, but its fate changed completely when World War II broke out and it was requisitioned by the British Admiralty to transform it into an armed merchantman."
Archimedes and the defense of Syracuse: "This formidable adversary did not wield sword or spear against Rome, but put his enormous scientific talent at the service of his homeland, determined to frighten his enemies. As has so often happened in History, how many great progressions of science and technology will not have a purely warlike background? Such is the case of Archimedes of Syracuse, one of those names that present themselves alone."
Videos
Sudden flooding in a daycare, Sudden flooding in a daycare, recreating a can of Spam, a lunar habitat, Gerudo Valley (Zelda OoT) on violin, three-year-old prodigy girl plays piano, the most successful music from 14000 BC to 2010, skateboarding with a jetpack, larvae vs pickle, Disney drawing about World War II in 4K, Mega64: Resident Evil VILLAGE, robot with wheels puts on a show, the Martian dust that costs billions, cooking a sausage with a 20,000-volt capacitor, a tiny camera on the kitten, Gordon Ramsay orders fast food, a foldable synthesizer, saving a baby chimpanzee and the shorts: Four Laps, DYNAMO DREAM, Shroud (horror), The Beauty and the classic The Landlord by Will Ferrell, which turned years old.
Galleries
Cursed Computer Setups, the Avengers with swapped genders, find the hidden letter, images from the 80s and 90s, unsettling things at the bottom of the sea, the badly photoshopped beauty of Instagram, how to make shadow puppets, the hidden secret of the Appennino Giant, the Animated Dump and the Weekly Visual Dump.
