Recommended Links of the Week (No. 632)

Tarkovski, Orwell, serial killer paintings, Pixelon and the Soviet planes. Want more? There's more, but it's below and only for the brave who dare to lose a couple of hours of their life in search of knowledge and fun. Because that's what the Recommended Links of the Week are all about.

This Week's Picks

The story of Stalker, the film that cost Tarkovski his life: "Perhaps it is an exaggeration to say that this film – poorly received and rarely seen at the time of its release – changed the history of cinema. It is not risky to propose that it changed the life of many of its (few) viewers. Or, at least, that something in this film addressed them intensely and created an ineffable and lasting suggestion, a magnetism that sent them back to it again and again and contributed to shaping their tastes, what they could expect from cinema and even the traits of their own work."

The Orwell Problem: "How does power manage to create consensus among the majority of the population about its decisions and about the very configuration of society and the current political system, while keeping alive the illusion of its democratic character? Chomsky argues that it is achieved through strict control of the ideological framework in which reality can be discussed. Apparently, there is freedom to debate the facts that happen daily, but in practice critical positions are drastically reduced to those that never manage to question the very foundations of the system."

The strange aircraft of the Soviet Union: "When the Soviets learned that England and France were developing a supersonic passenger plane, they couldn't stay behind. A supersonic jet, larger and faster than the Concorde, quickly went into production: the Tupolev Tu-144 could accommodate 150 passengers and travel at Mach 2.15. But speed came at a cost. The plane was unreliable, noisy and fuel-inefficient."

Hell is the children: Elisa, Elvira's neighbor, Pocha's mother, Matildita's friend, said that hell is the children. Elisa said that at Mamá Cora's wake, God rest her soul, when she finished her turn of Hail Marys and slipped into the living room to have coffee with Elvira and Nora. "If hell exists," she said, "it must be upholstered with children." Elisa doesn't smoke a pipe or wear tweed jackets, but she is a nihilist, an existentialist, and more Sartrean than Sartre.

Art of horror, the 10 most sinister paintings by serial killers: "Criminals, even those real-life “monsters” that serial killers are, don't stop being people. And as such, and despite the rights they may have lost according to their respective sentences, many of them have been allowed to express themselves through art. And there is nothing wrong with that. Now, what happens if what is expressed on canvas or paper is a reflection of the most sinister part of a person?"

Pixelon, the company that promised to get ahead of Netflix or Twitch 20 years ago and ended up being Silicon Valley's biggest fraud: "Pixelon was a company that barely lasted 2 years. Its promise, to revolutionize streaming video, was still unviable due to bandwidth speed. But Pixelon's downfall was not because they were ahead of their time. For wanting to be the first IPTV, or be Netflix before Netflix or Twitch before Twitch. Simply, they were selling smoke to investors."

The man who invented karaoke, the Japanese innovation that became a global sensation: "In practice, it is a device that allows any of us to sing a popular song without worrying about achieving the correct vocal range: singing even if we are not singers. And that is exactly where the inspiration for karaoke came from, in 1971. Daisuke Inoue was a keyboardist and drummer at a club in Kobe. He played nagashi (a traditional form of popular music in Japan and Taiwan) in a group of independent musicians who performed for the office workers and businessmen who visited the place."

The 'Herrera suit': the space suit made of rubber, wool and steel from 1930s Spain that paved the way for NASA: "Among those who dedicated themselves to studying the event in detail, one of the great figures of Spanish aeronautics of the 20th century stands out, a multifaceted character —he would come to preside over the Government of the Second Republic in exile and accumulate an enormous amount of knowledge— and who is celebrated today as the father of the first aerospace suit, a device polished after the accident of 1928 and which decades later would inspire NASA during the Apollo 11 mission: Emilio Herrera Linares."

A mammal weighing 2 grams: "It is a tiny insectivorous mammal measuring 4 centimeters in length and weighing 2 grams. It is one of the smallest mammals in the world and in fact could be the smallest on Earth if it weren't for a tiny bat from Thailand that has smaller dimensions. As far as is known so far, only two species of North American shrews have a similar size."

Without Edgar Allan Poe we wouldn't have Sherlock Holmes: "Although the roots of the detective story go back to Shakespeare, Poe's narratives about the rational resolution of crimes created a genre. Poe establishes the scheme along which detective fiction will run: his stories mix crime with a detective narrative in which a puzzle must be solved and readers are invited to do the same."

If walls could talk...: "The officials of the Old Masters Picture Gallery in Dresden have just made public the first images of the restoration of Johannes Vermeer's painting 'Girl Reading at a Window'. And it comes with a surprise. It now has a Cupid figure in a painting that appears in the background of the scene. The boy's presence does not surprise the museum's restorers, since they had already detected it earlier using X-rays and other techniques."

Explicit sex as magical protection in Mesopotamia: "Although the usual was to use the demon Humbaba or chimerical beings, with or without a portal to their side, other tablets used by commoners showed erotic figures in daily aspects of this group of the population. As in love songs, the goddess Inanna was used as a model. Unlike in the elite, where Inanna had a singular role, either as queen of heaven or warrior goddess, in this area she represented the positions available to common women."

VIDEOS: A river of sand, fly in 360° like an eagle, water balloon bursting in super slow motion, the floor is lava, vegetarian turtle eating a live chick, the vinyl record of keyboard sounds, when you smoke 100 e-cigarettes (sequel to this other video), dachshund Olympics, the boiling water river, restoring a damaged pipe (without replacing it), robot grandson for Japanese old ladies, destroying a wasp nest, Tesla vs bad drivers, laying a bridge, turtle eating vegetables ASMR, cat obsessed with food, built his own X-ray machine, sea cucumber pooping and, a little gift, Neuromancer narrated by William Gibson.

GALLERIES: Photorealistic portraits of famous characters, best CEWE 2021 photos, infrared photos of France, panoramic selfies, rare but real apples, nature surprises, portraits of Russian women, little fish in a resin pond, behind the scenes of "A Nightmare on Elm Street V", surreal photos, a museum on a train that travels from one side to another, adults coloring children's books, skeletons and passion in 3D, the pink algae of the French salt flats, Marcello Dudovich posters, the Visual Dump and the Animated Dump of the Week.