Recommended Links of the Week (No. 663)

DOOM and the port 666, the history of radio control, the 80s strip poker video games and the most distant star known. Are you going to miss such interesting things? Of course not! Because... who in their right mind would miss everything the Recommended Links of the Week have to offer? Enjoy!

The port of the beast: why DOOM has reserved port 666 since Windows 95 and passes the same in Windows 10 and 11: "The IANA is the global coordination body responsible for assigning numbers to things like IP addresses, ports and other Internet protocol resources. You can see all registered ports on this list, including DOOM's. It is very rare for a game to have a reserved port in this way, not only that, but the port DOOM has reserved is one of the few system ports that exist."

The History of radio control: "Nikola Tesla first presented a radio-controlled boat at Madison Square Garden. Can you imagine making the leap to a new hobby like radio control? The audience was amazed by this remote-controlled boat, operated from a distance. Furthermore, Nikola Tesla patented in 1898 an unmanned vehicle very similar to what we now know as a drone. The inventor imagined this vehicle being used in the future for transporting goods or as a combat weapon."

The 'Strip Poker' games for 8-bit consoles (1982-1990): "Some of the best poker games of the era in terms of gameplay were of the nude variety, so any enthusiast who simply wanted to try the most optimized programs had to be ready to see t... that is, pixels. Because of course, seeing p... that is, pixels, was not contemplated. Well, it was contemplated but not carried out. Things of the target audience, I imagine. Not to mention that at the time, some pixels were unfortunately better regarded than others."

Earendel, the most distant star known: "What were stars like when the universe was barely 900 million years old? Well, incredible as it may seem, that question already has an answer. Thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), a team of researchers led by Brian Welch has discovered a star whose light took 12.9 billion years to reach us. The star, designated WHL0137-LS, has been informally named Earendel, and we are seeing it when the universe was only 7% of its current age. Impressive."

The first complete human genome opens a new era in science: "An international scientific team, called the T2T Consortium, publishes this Thursday the first truly complete sequence of a human genome. Until now, only 92% had been read. The authors compare their task to a giant city puzzle, where 8% of the pieces were missing — those of the blue sky, too repetitive to find their place. Advances in technology have now made it possible to sort out those redundant stretches."

Reconstructing the appearance of a Swedish woman from 4,000 years ago: "Reconstructing in a 100% faithful way the appearance of a person who lived millennia ago solely from their skeleton may be an impossible task, but science currently offers many tools to get as close as possible. An example is the so-called Woman of Lagmansören, a sculpture built from the skull of a woman from 4,000 years ago and exhibited at the Västernorrlands Museum in Sweden."

DABUS case: Can AI be an “inventor”?: "Specifically, it is a complex system of neural networks that are stimulated to generate simple notions and, in turn, combine them to obtain complex notions. As a result, DABUS has been able to develop a fractal liquid container and a system of fractal light signals. Far from focusing on whether these inventions are sufficiently innovative (and meet the legally established requirements to be patentable), we ask ourselves, can DABUS be considered an “inventor”?"

Desecrated graves and stolen corpses: the true origin of Frankenstein: "However, what if she had actually been trying to hide something about her direct inspiration for conceiving Frankenstein, and that's why she made the excuse that the idea had come to her in a dream? Could it be that with 'fresh' Shelley was not actually referring to those works that she and her friends read, but rather to the corpses that day after day arrived at the forensic anatomical centers of London at the beginning of the 19th century? And what if those corpses were of innocent murdered people to whom enthusiastic scientists denied the right to keep living?"

The philosophy of cats: "Human beings spend their lives continually anxious about the correct way to exist. For centuries, with Aristotle, reason has been the fundamental characteristic that defines humanity. We are 'rational animals'. However, it is reason, and with it imagination, that makes fictions such as good, justice, kindness, friendship or love not let us live in peace. We always aspire to achieve something that almost never arrives or that, when it arrives, disappoints us. The human animal never stops aspiring to be something it is not, with the frustration that this entails."

MTT S60 - The first Chinese graphics card for gaming with its own architecture: "The Chinese company More Threads has presented the MTT S60, a graphics card that has the honor of becoming the first solution of its kind to use an architecture developed entirely locally, a longed-for technological independence for the country and a step further towards that goal. The company was founded in 2020, so this is an important achievement both for what it represents in terms of architecture and for how quickly it has been achieved."

Soylent Green (When the Destiny Reaches Us): filming and curiosities: "The original story in the book is set in 1999 and mainly deals with overpopulation and the excessive use of resources leading to increased poverty, food shortages and social disorder. For the film, the plot was set in 2022 and quite a few changes were made to the screenplay to add more action and chase scenes. Specific details were also changed, such as the concubines or 'furniture girls' (as they are defined in the film), which receive a very different treatment compared to the novel's plot."

Project Nimbus: how Google and Amazon made billions from the Israeli occupation: In their letter, the signatories protested a $1.2 billion contract between Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the Israeli government that provides cloud services for the Israeli military and government, which “permits greater surveillance and illegal collection of data on Palestinians, and facilitates the expansion of Israel's illegal settlements on Palestinian land”. This is Project Nimbus, announced in 2018 and in force since May 2021, in the first week of Israel's war against besieged Gaza.

VIDEOS: A mega-city in 100 years of SimCity, a robot playing tic-tac-toe, industrial machines and clever tools, Anxiety: The War in Your Brain, trombone in an empty pool, the fine art of repairing televisions, cat stealing toys, robot dog protecting the ruins of Pompeii, realistic robots animated for film, flock patterns, the best film scene of all time, how the Romans built their aqueducts, spectacular abyss hole in Turkey, Pumped Up Kicks (Foster The People) on triple guitar, bullet vs Newton's Cradle in super slow motion and two horror shorts to close: Beast of Prey and Hell Creek.

GALLERIES: The best April Fool's pranks by Google, non-human cemeteries, NASA photos of a changing Earth, gold prospectors ascending a mountain pass, cartoons without the cartoons, Ching Yeh's cyberpunk, Tim Molloy's monsters, vegan delicacies, miniature sculptures with everyday objects, the Animated Dump and the Visual Dump of the Week.

Thanks for stopping by, friend!