Thursday Things: Now More Than Ever
13 February 2020. Vol 2 No 7. By Dan McGirt. #27
Welcome to Thursday Things! You can now post your comments directly on the Thursday Things website! So please let me know your thoughts about this week’s edition.
The pictures really have nothing to do with the text. Or do they? Photo by Drew Bernard on Unsplash
In case you missed this, You can now stop Facebook from tracking your activity on other sites.
Here's how to find out what sites are sending information to Facebook about you. The "Off-Facebook-Activity" tool isn't easy to find (though you can click that link to go directly to it). If you want to navigate there, click on the drop-down carrot in the top right of the desktop version of Facebook. Then select "Settings" and "Your Facebook Information." There you'll find an option for "Off-Facebook Activity."
There you'll find a list of all the sites that are sharing information with Facebook, and you can clear your history (removing this information from your account), turn off tracking for specific sites, or disable this tracking completely. To be clear, if you turn it off, Facebook will still receive information about your activity, it just won't be associated with your account.
I was Adolf Hitler’s next-door neighbour: Jewish woman reveals how she lived next to the future Führer in Munich in 1920s and 30s. And you thought your neighbors were bad! A true eyewitness to some unfortunate history. (Also, this would be the worst sitcom pitch ever.)
Alice Frank Stock, 101, spent years living in the same apartment block as the Nazi dictator while growing up in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s.
Her family lived on Prinzregentplatz in Munich, just doors away from one of the most notorious figures in history, who moved in to the block in 1929.
Mrs Stock said she would sometimes see Hitler being rushed into the building while flanked by towering SS guards, most likely fearful of an assassination attempt.
Here is a more upbeat, yet in its own way disturbing, story from Germany: This Man Created Traffic Jams on Google Maps Using a Red Wagon Full of Phones
Artist Simon Weckert walked the streets of Berlin tugging a red wagon behind him. Wherever he went, Google Maps showed a congested traffic jam. People using Google Maps would see a thick red line indicating congestion on the road, even when there was no traffic at all. Each and every one of those 99 phones had Google Maps open, giving the virtual illusion that the roads were jam packed.
“By transporting the smartphones in the street I’m able to generate virtual traffic which will navigate cars on another route,” Weckert told Motherboard in a Twitter DM. “Ironically that can generate a real traffic jam somewhere else in the city.”
The sharks are up to something. Cluster of sharks in one spot off Carolinas coast grows more intense, and mysterious:
The clustering of great white sharks off the Carolinas coast is growing more pronounced and mysterious, based on satellite tracking data shared Saturday on social media.
Researchers began noticing a convergence of great white sharks off the Carolinas in late January, but the group was more spread out.
Now the sharks are exhibiting a clear preference for the same spot off Southport, near Wilmington, the data shows.
This is how you get sharknados.
Meanwhile, in Brazil, where something strange is always brewing… Scientists Discover Mysterious Virus in Brazil With No Known Genes They Can Identify:
Scientists have identified an enigmatic virus whose genome seems to be almost entirely new to science, populated by unfamiliar genes that have never before been documented in viral research.
The so-called Yaravirus, named after Yara – or Iara, a water-queen figure in Brazilian mythology – was recovered from Lake Pampulha, an artificial lake in the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte.
While Yaravirus (Yaravirus brasiliensis) may be no supernatural siren, the virus could prove to be just as mysterious as the water nymph of legend.
That's because the virus constitutes "a new lineage of amoebal virus with a puzzling origin and phylogeny," the research team explains in a new pre-print paper about the discovery.
Nothing to see here. Just a mystery virus with unknown genes, never before seen by science, lurking in a Brazilian lake. I assume aliens are involved.
Good news for burn victims and others in need of skin grafts. “Handheld device ‘prints’ new skin directly onto wounds”:
In 2018, Canadian scientists unveiled a handheld device that “prints” sheets of artificial skin directly onto the wounds of burn victims.
“The analogy is a duct tape dispenser,” researcher Axel Günther told Smithsonian Magazine at the time, “where instead of a roll of tape you have a microdevice that squishes out a piece of tissue tape.”
On Tuesday, the team published the promising results of its latest trial of the device in the journal Biofabrication — putting it one step closer to actual use in burn clinics.
… The team’s device eliminates the need for grafts altogether by depositing strips of a special bioink directly onto a wound. This bioink contains healing proteins as well as mesenchymal stromal cells, which assist the body’s immune system and encourage new cell growth.
A complete online gallery of the original illustrations of Jules Verne’s novels of the fantastic can be found at The Illustrated Jules Verne. Some background from Open Culture:
Not many readers of the 21st century seek out the work of popular writers of the 19th century, but when they do, they often seek out the work of Jules Verne. Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Around the World in Eighty Days: fair to say that we all know the titles of these fantastical French tales from the 1860s and 70s, and more than a few of us have actually read them. But how many of us know that they all belong to a single series, the 54-volume Voyages Extraordinaires, that Verne published from 1863 until the end of his life? Verne described the project's goal to an interviewer thus: "to conclude in story form my whole survey of the world’s surface and the heavens."
Verne is one of my favorite authors, and maybe one of yours. I know I’ll be spending quite a bit of time looking at these awesome illustrations. And perhaps even borrowing a few, since they are public domain.
From Digg: “The Lumière Brothers' 1895 short "Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat" is one of the most famous film clips in history … YouTuber Denis Shiryaev wanted to update the look of the clip, so — with the help of several neural networks — he upscaled the clip to 4K resolution and 60 FPS.” Have a look into the past. The high-resolution past:
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