Each Friday we compile a list of interesting links and articles our editors find from across the web. Here’s what’s catching our eye this week.
CNN tells the scandalous story of D.E. Paulk and his family:
The boy was watching people sing at a sweaty Pentecostal tent service one Sunday morning when a prophet onstage scanned the congregation and fixed her eyes on him. “You need to come up here,” the prophet told the wide-eyed 9-year-old, D.E. Paulk. “The Lord has a word for you that you need to speak to the church today.” As he was led to the stage, D.E.’s heart raced and his legs went numb. He grabbed the microphone with clammy hands and stammered the only words he could find: “Uh.. God… uh… loves you.”
Powdered alcohol is a thing. And it’s now legal in the United States:
A powdered form of alcohol called Palcohol is now approved for sale in the United States, but how safe is this product? Some health experts say they are concerned that powered alcohol could be abused by minors, or could be more easily more easily hidden and consumed in places where people are not allowed to have alcohol. But others argue that there is no reason the drug would be more hazardous than liquid alcohol.
Learn more about the mascots for every team in the NCAA tournament:
There are 68 colleges and universities in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, all with their own ambassadors roaming the sidelines and the stands—and each mascot has its own story.
You may not post your location information on Twitter. But if your friends post their location on Twitter, these scientists can pretty much find you:
Our method infers an unknown user’s location by examining their friend’s locations. We frame the geotagging problem as an optimization over a social network with a total variation-based objective and provide a scalable and distributed algorithm for its solution. Furthermore, we show how a robust estimate of the geographic dispersion of each user’s ego network can be used as a per-user accuracy measure which is effective at removing outlying errors. Leave-many-out evaluation shows that our method is able to infer location for 101, 846, 236 Twitter users at a median error of 6.38 km, allowing us to geotag over 80% of public tweets.
Hollywood’s famous “Wilhelm scream”:
Chances are, you’ve heard the Wilhelm Scream — but you probably haven’t heard of it. Since being recorded in the 1950s, the sound effect — an overly-dramatic, desperate yelp — has become a staple in some of Hollywood biggest films. It is the choice cry of Stormtroopers falling to their death in Star Wars; it is emitted by Buzz Lightyear as he is sent careening out of a window in Toy Story; it is cried out as Jafar lifts the palace in Aladdin, and uttered by a man who’s being crushed by a monster in Avatar.
The New York Times on Kendrick Lamars’ new album:
Following the success of his major label debut, “good kid, m.A.A.d. city,” in 2012, the rapper Kendrick Lamar did not indulge in earthly luxuries. Instead, he got baptized. That album was the story of his redemption, not just from street gangs through rapping but from a life of sin by embracing Jesus Christ. His long-awaited follow-up, “To Pimp a Butterfly” (TDE/Aftermath/Interscope) is about carrying the weight of that clarity: What happens when you speak out, spiritually and politically, and people actually start to listen? And what of the world you left behind?
A map of the Internet cables that connect the world:
Cables lying on the seafloor bring the internet to the world. They transmit 99 percent of international data, make transoceanic communication possible in an instant, and serve as a loose proxy for the international trade that connects advanced economies. Their importance and proliferation inspired Telegeography to make this vintage-inspired map of the cables that connect the internet. It depicts the 299 cables that are active, under construction, or will be funded by the end of this year.
Sufjan Stevens’ “Should Have Known Better”: