Recommended Links of the Week (No. 652)

Flash Gordon, Shinobi, dogs and time, Spartan black broth, and bitcoin consumption. All that and much more, depending on what you like. With plenty of videos and several galleries. Take a look at this week's Recommended Links of the Week—you'll find something to take away.

Recommended articles

Flash Gordon (1980), by Mike Hodges: "There are some films that, no matter how much they age or how many 'buts' they had at the time, you still hold dear. Whether because time hasn't taken its toll on it, or on you, or maybe your perspective has changed for the better. This happened to me with 'Flash Gordon', a movie very much of its era, with a tone so crazy and surreal that it makes it hilarious, enjoyable, and unique. And I think that's precisely why it became a cult film."

Movies are getting darker and duller: how cinema has abandoned color little by little: "If you're cinephile enough, you'll have noticed that many movies and series in recent decades have become much grayer and duller. No matter the plot, a grayish glow covers everything, silencing colors and giving a dark and 'sinister' appearance. This is a filter applied to every scene, one that strips vitality toward a sinister monotony. A good term that summarizes this trait was coined on Twitter by Katie Stebbins. She calls it the 'intangible sludge'"

Shinobi: "In the late 80s, in any bar in a lost corner of the city of Alicante, in addition to the still-common slot machine, a black arcade cabinet appeared with a video game that would change my life. The now-classic 'Shinobi' from Sega arrived as just another game, one of many to be seen and enjoyed in arcades, but it soon showed me it wouldn't be mere software for entertainment, because not only did it become one of the titles I've played the most over the years, but it gave me the chance to enter a totally unknown world that made me in great part who I am."

The clinic with 184 frozen people waiting to wake up in the future: "Linda and Fred Chamberlain are the founders of the clinic, formally established in 1972. They were inspired by Robert Ettinger, the so-called father of cryonics, who is also frozen at another facility in the United States. (...) In total, 184 people are lifeless inside a capsule. For example, Du Hong, a Chinese writer; Marvin Minsky, a scientist; and Dick Clair Jones, a film producer. There are also more than 90 pets, including dogs and cats, that came to the basement at the wish of their owners, as Linda revealed to the cited media."

Black broth, the food of the Spartans: "The prime example is black broth, one of the traditional dishes of Sparta and the fundamental base of its gastronomy and the diet of its citizens. No recipe has survived indicating the ingredients and quantities used in its preparation. However, from descriptions by ancient sources we know it consisted of pork meat and blood boiled with salt and vinegar, resulting in a kind of dark soup with chunks."

Dogs and their curious way of telling time: "Anyone who has lived with dogs will have noticed that they often seem to know when it's time for a walk, for food, or even when a family member is about to come home. And it's completely true: although the concept itself is human, dogs know exactly what time it is. Or rather, when it's time for them to do certain things. (...) Man's best friend also has other mechanisms to determine at all times the passage of time, the routines of the people they live with, and when their favorite—or detested—activities are approaching."

The Turk, an automaton that played chess: "The Turk was a famous structure believed to be an automaton that played chess. It was built and revealed by Wolfgang von Kempelen (1734-1803) in 1769. It had the form of a wooden cabinet measuring 1.20 cm × 60 cm × 90 cm, with a mannequin dressed in a robe and turban seated on top. The cabinet had doors that, once opened, showed clockwork mechanisms, and when activated it was capable of playing a game of chess against a human player at a high level."

The experiment that ended with a researcher masturbating a dolphin: "Scientists often say that research is an intricate and winding path, full of unexpected turns and unmarked detours. Some great discoveries were serendipities, accidental findings, and many research lines lead to destinations where the researcher never expected to find themselves. And in this business of knowing where you start but not where you end, there are surely few cases as extreme as the animal communication experiment that ended with a researcher repeatedly masturbating a dolphin named Pete"

Did you know that white T-shirts were invented for bachelors who couldn't sew buttons?: "There is a popular saying: 'Necessity is the mother of invention'. Could it apply to this curious invention? Maybe. Who invented the T-shirt? It is said that the idea of marketing this new product occurred in 1904. Thinking of bachelors, the Cooper Underwear Company launched in its magazine a new product: a buttonless undershirt."

The ridiculous consumption of bitcoin: "We had a digital electronics course where we had to build a calculator for the exam. The calculator had to add and subtract, and to do that, you could only use logic gates. When grades were posted, I had failed the exam by a small margin; I had calculated at least a 5 out of 10, but when I went for the review, the teacher told me that my calculator solution was not optimal and used one too many logic gates. For that reason, according to his criteria, he couldn't consider the answer 100% correct, because, in his view, that decision in my design could increase the cost when the calculator was mass-produced"

Against the crypto ideology: decentralization means financialization: "Cryptocurrencies are not a decentralizing or democratizing force. Quite the contrary, argues Ethan Firdmanski in his doctoral thesis: the centralization of the infrastructure and organization of these systems is deeply intertwined with the underlying social structure. Understood this way, as a passive revolution, the rhetoric of cryptobros merely legitimizes transformation along capitalist lines and reinforces existing power structures. Remember that 0.01% of bitcoin owners control 27% of the coins in circulation"

The case of the Eskimo diet: "In 1968, an anonymous editorial in the weekly newsletter of the Danish Medical Society mentioned the very low and unusual rate of cardiovascular disease among the Eskimos of Greenland, then an autonomous Danish region. The editorial's author encouraged researchers to look into this fact and added, 'before it's too late'. A young student and budding scientist, Jan Dyerberg, read the editorial with interest and set out to explore the matter raised by the anonymous author."

Videos

Videos: Doom on a rotary phone, most humans live in this small circle, Sylvester Stallone 30 years younger, the algorithm that transformed the world, a water pipe bursts on a snowy mountain, quantum levitation at -196°C, how a NASA image tells dozens of stories, Ramjet engines: how do they work?, making lunch in space, crab robot infiltrator, broken light bulb in liquid nitrogen, the skater duck, 80 ostriches on the run, Space Battle of Endor without CGI in 4K, if the speed of light were the same as walking speed, the history of metal, and the short films: It's A Bird (1930 stop-motion), Higo (2006, Koji Yamamura), Re-Entry, and a super crazy animation. Plus a sample of the interactive museum of game mechanics: lockpicking, and a video by a travel YouTuber about the town where I live: Navarro.

Galleries

Galleries: Pigasso the painter pig, the caricatures of Anthony Geoffroy, 'The Night Watch' by Rembrandt in 717 gigapixels, Hong Kong in 1945, amazing Lara Croft cosplay, spine-chilling illustrations by Dolce Paganne, urban photos of San Francisco, puts classic artworks in the present, the art of roots, Soviet space exploration propaganda, Ryan Eicher's glass snakes, more photos of Margaux Hemingway, the winning Milky Way photographs of 2021, the Weekly Animated Dump and the Visual Dump of the Week.

That's it. Thanks and see you next time!