Recommended Links of the Week (No. 707)

Regular readers know I love palindromic numbers. To celebrate, here's the usual mix—that's what you came for. In this edition you'll find Paleolithic erotic art, child geniuses, the Nazi Titanic, pigeons and artificial intelligence, and much more. Enjoy!

Erotic Art and Paleolithic Passions

Sex in the Cave, Paleolithic Erotic Art: "And those individuals—who were like us—also got 'horny', and, it seems, they liked all that stuff as much as we do. Fertility, to which they apparently sanctified and worshipped, would be important, because the survival of the group depended on it; but I suppose that even if there were no reproduction, if they could get some, they wouldn't stop."

The Sexual Theory of a Hundred Lays (and Why the 101st Goes Downhill): "Love, in chemical terms, is an overdose of dopamine that makes you feel cool for a while, but not forever. Scientific theory says that this dopamine decreases as the sexual act is repeated with the same partner. That is, the sequence of a hundred fucks has a decreasing emotion ratio."

The Painter with X-Ray Eyes: "Photographer before painter, the self-proclaimed creator of skeleton fighting aspired to the 'Art of seeing beyond what our eyes can reach', that is, to the bone. Although the term etymologically refers to a 'battle of skeletons', it was devised by the artist himself for his first exhibition in 1931, probably thinking of some gimmick for his themes and genre scenes starring skeletons."

Books, Games, and Child Prodigies

Parts of a Book and Their Terminology: "The names given to the parts of a book vary by country and region; they can even change over time: now the term 'front cover' is used for the cover of a book. And so, with front and back covers we can refer to both an external and internal part of the book. There are sources that do not agree on how to name each part. And that is why we can come across certain confusions."

Conan and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: "One of these new lines was the series of adventures based on Conan, two short adventures for its Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. As we see in the following image, TSR used Arnold Schwarzenegger for the covers, surely as a draw after the success of the recent films (Conan the Barbarian was released in 1982 and Conan the Destroyer in 1984)."

Mensa: What Happens When 'Child Geniuses' Grow Up: "A 4-year-old boy made headlines last week after becoming the youngest member in the UK of Mensa, the international society for people with extremely high IQ. Teddy, who can count to 100 in six languages, including Mandarin, is already far more advanced than his peers. But what happens to children like Teddy when they grow up?"

Spielberg, Propaganda, and Pigeons

When Spielberg Was So Annoying He Became the 'Nightmare' of a Video Game Studio: "But his devotion to electronic entertainment goes back a long way and goes beyond a simple commercial vision of this industry that moves millions each year. Since he discovered video games during the filming of Jaws, Spielberg has been, above all, a player. So when his friend George Lucas founded his own video game company... you can imagine. There was no getting him out of there!"

Titanic, the Nazi Propaganda Film of 1943: "Titanic is a German film from 1943 made during World War II, commissioned by the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, from the production company Tobis Film. The film depicts the catastrophic sinking of the RMS Titanic in 1912 from a propagandistic point of view for the Nazi regime, with the intention of showing not only the superiority of German cinema but also as a vehicle for propaganda."

Pigeons Share a Mental Process with Artificial Intelligence: "Pigeons share a mental process with artificial intelligence. Pigeons use the same basic process, called associative learning, as the most advanced AI technologies, according to psychologists from the University of Iowa in the journal 'Current Biology'. The researchers subjected a sample of these birds to complex categorization tests that high-level thinking."

The World Beyond Our Senses

What Animals Know About the World That We Don't: "Most humans don't usually ask themselves if reality is truly as we know it. But this question has fascinated philosophers since ancient times; and if Plato or Kant lived today, they would probably be astonished at all that science has revealed about the reality around us that we do not perceive, but many other species do."

Breaking the Limits of Classical Computing: "An analog optical neural network could perform the same tasks as a digital one, such as image classification or speech recognition, but because calculations are performed using light instead of electrical signals, optical neural networks can run many times faster and consume less energy."

Solar Paint to Generate Electricity: Everything You Need to Know + How It Works: "Solar paint uses perovskite, a promising crystalline mineral compound that can collect light. Cheap to produce and as efficient as silicon cells at capturing solar energy, perovskite solar cells are the leading technology to replace or compete against crystalline silicon solar cells."

Video Roundup

Videos: The problems with Google-funded transport capsules, a sudoku with only four digits, Mario Party in real life, meat cooked with lava, an ancient Chinese game, someone built a chainsaw sword, they filled a building slated for demolition with graffiti, the first kiss in cinema, a hat for a corgi, coordination challenge, concrete repair, from age 12 until she got married, chameleon wall, butt-slapping competition (NSFW), building height comparison, ReachBot is a robot with a lot of reach, how the Game Boy almost ruined Nintendo, how gold is extracted from mines, helping him see better, a stealth wave, an ice cube texturizer, and the short films 'The Devil and John Q' (about the American recession), an alternate epilogue for 2001 A Space Odyssey, 'El faro' (CGI 3D), 'Dji. Death Sails' (CGI 3D), 'In the shadow' (noir), Edmond (stop motion about cannibalism), Drone (animated, about new technologies), and Midnight Televisión (dystopian science fiction).

Galleries and More

Galleries: Bad Movies with Fabulous Songs, winners of Underwater Photographer 2022, American roadside attractions, if countries were women (by AI), architecture with bubbles, the largest ghost town in the world, winners of Travel Photographers 2022, Arthur Radebaugh's Retrofuturism, the story of El Ateneo (famous Argentine bookstore), the Animated Dump and the Visual Dump to finish.

And that's it! Yes, I do the writing and you do the watching and reading. I hope you liked something, and see you next time. A big hug!