Recommended Links of the Week (No. 683)

This week's recommended links

Today's Recommended Links of the Week feature real conspiracies, cow-dung cookies, spider dreams and an algorithm for forging credit cards. A perfect excuse to procrastinate for a while this weekend. Enjoy!

The best reads of the week

The five true conspiracies you should know…: "One of the most damaging results of these false conspiracy theories is that they help divert people's attention from the true conspiracies that are systematically harming billions of people around the world, destroying the living Earth and, if left unchecked, can bring our entire civilization to collapse. These are the conspiracies everyone needs to know. Unlike the nonsense of QAnon and Plandemic, they are real."

Two-thirds of humanity would starve after a nuclear war between the US and Russia: "A global-scale nuclear war between the United States and Russia would cause 5 billion deaths, directly linked to famines, in the two years following its outbreak. That is, two thirds of the world's population would perish from malnutrition. If the nuclear conflict were regional, between India and Pakistan, for example, up to 2.5 billion deaths from malnutrition would occur."

Nakano Broadway, the chaotic mecca of 'otakus': "After passing under the arches of the Nakano Sunmall shopping street, which starts from the north exit of JR Nakano station, we reach Nakano Broadway, the mecca of the otaku world. This building, full of shops offering anime figures and all kinds of related products, is a dream place that many fans from other countries want to visit at least once in their lives."

Goes viral after eating and reviewing cookies made from cow dung: "What you may not know is that cow dung is also considered 'sacred', and it is one of the best-selling products in India. Made in rural areas of the country, the excrement is mixed with straw and sold in blocks to be used as a method of lighting fires or in offerings and religious rituals. However, recently they are being produced in the shape of 'cakes' or 'cookies', which makes them much more attractive to the eye."

The 6 differences between gray matter and white matter in the brain: "Morphologically, the brain is incredibly complex, and it can be divided into different regions depending on the classification parameter one wants to use. But one of the most elegant classifications is, without a doubt, the one that divides the brain into two regions: gray matter and white matter. But what exactly is gray matter? And white matter? What functions do they have?"

25 years of 'South Park': how to challenge religious offenses and 'woke' cancellations: "The bet was complex: an adult animation series at a time when Homer Simpson seemed like the most transgressive character. The content checked every box of the explicit: inappropriate language, sex, drugs, violence, racist stereotypes... All of it starring four children, one of them openly racist, anti-Semitic, and many more 'isms' that we didn't yet know."

The most luxurious and spectacular arcade machines, Sega's motion arcade cabinets: "Undoubtedly, one of the main attractions of arcades was the design of the cabinets. There are few experiences that can be compared to playing a game of Mortal Kombat on the original cabinet, and those spectacular vinyls... or on a 4-player Gauntlet arcade. The 'kings' of the arcades, those machines that always had the highest volume and were at the entrance of the hall, were the gun games and the driving games."

The Starship program fires up engines for the first time in 2022: "These ignitions are a necessary step toward the first orbital flight, as they are the first tests of a Raptor 2 on Starship system prototypes. Prototypes S7 and S24 could well be the ones chosen for that first orbital launch from Boca Chica, although if necessary SpaceX can count on the other prototypes under construction."

Do spiders dream while they sleep? This new finding suggests so: "The REM sleep phase has been widely studied, mainly in humans, but it also tells us a lot about animal cognition, since over time it has been observed in other vertebrates and even cephalopods. Now, a discovery could shake some serious considerations about cognition in arthropods, especially spiders. A study published in PNAS reveals that when they rest they can dream, in a state similar to REM."

The fall of Falsetti, the newsstand man who discovered an algorithm to create credit cards and carried out at least 169 scams: "Fernando Alberto Falsetti is 56 years old and lives in the Buenos Aires town of Villa Madero. He works at a newspaper stand, also in La Matanza, although that was not his only source of income in 2021. From May to September last year he devoted himself to carrying out a series of scams using a method that powerfully caught the attention of investigators: the newsstand man discovered an algorithm to create credit cards and in that way managed to steal at least more than a million pesos."

In memoriam – Wolfgang Petersen: "I once heard an American military man, a veteran who served on several submarines, say that his crewmates always made fun of war movies about submarines. They saw them full of inventions and fantastic details, so every time one was shown to them they burst out laughing and let out an endless stream of mocking comments. They laughed at all of them except one: Das Boot. A movie that, quite the opposite, plunged them into a funereal silence."

Masquerade, in search of the treasure: "Tom Maschler, from the British publisher Jonathan Cape, contacted the artist Kit Williams. After seeing his work, he suggested he could make a book with illustrations. However, Williams did not want to make a children's book and his intention was to create a book that would not be discarded without more once read and that would linger in the memory of its readers for some years. That is how he devised his plan. Dear reader, we are going to discover the story hidden behind this book. Today we will talk about 'Masquerade', by Kit Williams, which revolutionized the United Kingdom in 1970."

Video and visual gallery

The power of GauGAN 360, where mathematical symbols come from, nanobot helping a sperm, a chess match in the field with tractors, they look like Pokémon, mud fighters, the song of an insect that no longer exists, why companies stopped making games, GoPros attached to dolphins, "Journey Through Time" by AI Journey, Madagascar's sapphire mines, the origin of Siren Head, anthem with a saw, 'Better Call Saul' as a Pixar movie, how airplane cabins work, Canon/TRANSFORMERS, and the shorts: The Cloud Racer, Hell Creek, and MANY MORE.

Photographs of waves, winning zombie insect photo, more Star Wars behind-the-scenes photos, alternative angles of historical events, art with cats, winners of the Nature TTL Photographer of the Year 2022, archive of science fiction passages, if there had been a GoPro in the French Revolution, movie posters created by AI, the mythical creatures of Toco Oco, pasta production in 1920/1950, the Animated Dump and the Visual Dump of the Week.

Well, that's it. I hope you like it. I'll disappear until next week with the next Recommended Links. Have a great weekend!