America Buys Mexico 3 Why 2001: A Space Odyssey remains a mystery 6 The Human Microbiome Reimagined as a Cut-Paper Coral Reef by Rogan Brown 11 The tiny ways prejudice seeps into the workplace 21 The Pits: An Endearing Short Film Follows a Lonely Avocado Searching NYC for its Other Half 26 The pigment made of human remains – and more surprising hues 28 The reasons why women’s voices are deeper today 32 Persons outside the Law 36 Huge Galaxy Cluster Found Hiding in Plain Sight 41 THE EMPTY UNIVERSE 44 Lovers of Wisdom 48 Why non-smokers are getting lung cancer 55 Surreal Paintings by Matthew Grabelsky Take the New York City Subway for a Wild Ride 59 Earth Has Many More Rivers and Streams Than We Thought, New Satellite Study Finds 66 What will humans look like in a million years? 69 Cyclo Knitter: A Bicycle-Based Machine That Knits a Scarf in Five Minutes 73 The best way to understand ourselves? 76 Magnetic Microrobots Deliver Cells Into Living Animals 83 Unique Weathering Pattern Creates Fascinating Geometric Ripples on a Chain Link Fence 84 The nuclear bunker in ‘Europe’s North Korea’ 91 The War in Five Sieges 97 Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila Russia Developing Super-Autonomous Robotic Submarine Powered By Batteries 102 Tipping the Scales 104 The words that change what colours we see 112 Land-based portion of massive East Antarctic Ice Sheet retreated little during past 8 million years 116 SOUTH VIETNAM'S PRESIDENT NGO DINH DIEM 119 THE MAFIA OF SICILY 122 Human Limbs Mysteriously Emerge from Marble Slabs in Milena Naef’s Performative Sculptures 125 Beyond the point-dipole approximation 130 The cost of changing an entire country’s alphabet 134 Defunct Old Cars Given New Life as Pools and Pizza Ovens by Benedetto Bufalino 144 Düssel… 150 In Hawaii, being nice is the law 154 Different Speeds, Same Furies 160 The Mesmerizing Animation of Sinusoidal Waves in GIFs by Étienne Jacob 182 How to extract the interacting spectral function from a ground state DFT calculation 187 Five myths about first aid 190 Elegant Dip Pen Illustrations Inside the Sketchbooks of Elena Limkina 195 2 Infoteca’s E-Journal No. 454 september 2018 Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila America Buys Mexico Today's selection -- from Villa and Zapata: A History of the Mexican Revolutionby Frank McLynn. In the early 1900s, under the policies of longtime Mexican president Porfirio Díaz, Americans owned three quarters of the mines and more than half of the oil fields in Mexico "[Porfirio Díaz led] a hard-driven programme of industrialisation. Iron and steel works were constructed in Nuevo León, textile mills in Veracruz, and there was a massive mining boom, especially of lead and copper, stimulated by new technologies for refining precious metals. Most of all there was oil, the black gold of the twentieth century. The first geological discoveries and drillings took place on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico at the turn of the century, making Tampico the new boom town. Oilwells were spudded in and production began in 1901. By 1910 Mexico was one of the world's leading producers and by 1918 was second only to the United States. Such was Díaz's myopia, however, that his 1884 mining code vested the ownership of subsoil rights in the proprietor of the surface land. Those who had acquired public lands at a giveaway price now found they had a second and much more lucrative bite of the cherry when petroleum was found on their territories. "The porfirista policy according Pineda" "This was the context in which foreign capital, already a leech on the Mexican economy, became a veritable octopus. It is doubtful if Díaz ever did say: 'Poor Mexico, so far from God, so near to the United States' -- it sounds too witty for him -- but he was aware of the truth contained in the remark. Viewing the Mexico 3 Infoteca’s E-Journal No. 454 september 2018 Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila stabilised at gunpoint by Díaz as an investment cornucopia, American capitalists flooded across the border. Among the famous names with substantial holdings south of the Rio Grande were Hearst, Guggenheim, McCormick and Doheny; Mexicans became familiar with the corporate identities of Standard Oil, Anaconda, United States Steel, and many others. Soon the Americans owned threequarters of the mines and more than half the oil fields and they also diversified into sugar, coffee, cotton, rubber, orchilla, maguey and, in the northern provinces of Sonora and Chihuahua, cattle. Out of a total foreign investment of nearly three billion dollars in Mexico by 1910, the American share was 38 per cent, or over one billion dollars, more than the total capital owned by native Mexicans. In 1900 Edward L. Doheny acquired huge swathes of oil-rich Tamaulipas, near Tampico, complete with subsoil rights, for less than a dollar an acre. Once oilwells were installed, Doheny's plant could literally suck Mexican national treasure out of the ground, to the tune of 50,000 barrels a day, all completely taxfree except for an infinitesimal stamp duty. 4 Infoteca’s E-Journal No. 454 september 2018 Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila "The Americans were not the only economic predators. The British (who still held 55 per cent of all foreign investment in Latin America as a whole), were well represented with 29 per cent of foreign investment in Mexico, mainly in mines, banks and oilwells. The great English entrepreneur in Mexico was Weetman Pearson, later Lord Cowdray, whose construction firm, Pearson & Son, had built the Blackwall Tunnel in London, the East River tunnel in New York and a number of railway bridges in Mexico. As a personal friend of Díaz, Pearson was able to cash in on the oil bonanza and obtained the rights to the Tuxpan fields in 1909; Díaz thought it a good idea to build up Pearson's oil company, Mexican Eagle, as a counterweight to Doheny and Rockefeller's Standard Oil. Eventually, Lord Cowdray (as he became in 1910) extended his business ambitions into Ecuador, Colombia and Costa Rica, exacerbating pre-existing Anglo-American tensions in Latin America and leading Washington to invoke the Monroe Doctrine. "The Anglo-Saxon nations, though by far the biggest foreign investors, were not the only ones. The French, forgiven for their sins of the 1860s, were allowed to control the textile industry while the widely hated Spanish or gachupines dominated the retail trade and the tobacco plantations. All foreign capitalists were secretly resented to greater or lesser degrees -- the Spanish sometimes openly -- but Díaz rigged his judiciary so that in any dispute involving foreign companies and Mexican nationals, the foreigners would always get a favourable judgement. It was a standing joke that only gringos and bullfighters (another of Díaz's favourite groups) could get justice from a Mexican court. Nor did the foreigners endear themselves to the locals by their lifestyle and obvious contempt for Mexico and Mexicans. Disdaining to acquire Mexican citizenship, the expatriate community lived in splendid and luxurious isolation, repatriating profits and making sure their own nationals rode the privileged managerial gravy-trains. To all complaints about the exploiters in their midst Díaz returned the same answer: the foreigners were needed to make Mexico a modern nation, since the Mexicans themselves lacked the know-how." author: Frank McLynn title: Villa and Zapata: A History of the Mexican Revolution publisher: Basic Books date: Copyright 2000 by Frank McLynn pages: 5-8 https://delanceyplace.com/view-archives.php?p=3622 5 Infoteca’s E-Journal No. 454 september 2018 Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila Why 2001: A Space Odyssey remains a mystery Kubrick may have set out to make a science-fiction film, but 2001: A Space Odyssey, which turns 50 this week, is closer to home than we think, writes Nicholas Barber. By Nicholas Barber It’s been 50 years since the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and we’re still trying to make sense of it. Stanley Kubrick’s science-fiction masterpiece is regularly voted as one of the greatest films ever made: BBC Culture’s own critics’ poll of the best US cinema ranked it at number four. But 2001 is one of the most puzzling films ever made, too. What, for instance, is a shiny rectangular monolith doing in prehistoric Africa? Why does an astronaut hurtle through a psychedelic lightshow to another universe, before turning into a cosmic foetus? And considering that the opening section is set millions of years in the past, and the two central sections are set 18 months apart, how much of it actually takes place in 2001? Much of 2001: A Space Odyssey is baffling – Kubrick likened the film to a painting or a piece of music (Credit: Alamy) 6 Infoteca’s E-Journal No. 454 september 2018 Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila Kubrick himself wouldn’t be too upset by all this head-scratching. “You’re free to speculate about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film,” he told an interviewer in 1968, “but I don’t want to spell out a verbal road map for 2001 that every viewer will feel obligated to pursue or else fear he’s missed the point.” Kubrick’s co-writer, Arthur C Clarke, answered some of the story’s questions in his tie-in novel, which was published just after the film’s release. But the director edited out anything which might have made it too easy to comprehend.