Welcome to the Wednesday Walk Around the Web, where we weave & wind through weblinks weekly. Hopefully you will find the links on offer amusing, interesting, or, occasionally, profound. Views expressed in the Wednesday Walk do not necessarily reflect those of anyone but the writer.
- Yo-Yo Ma’s appearance on Song Exploder is a fascinating look at the subtleties you can find in different performances of the same piece, by the same person, at different points in his life.
- Hyundai is developing a car with unfoldable legs that allows the vehicle to walk, like a miniature AT-AT. And of course, we all know that a car has to walk before it can run.
- If you’ve enjoyed recent major food recalls in the US, including the back-to-back lettuce scares caused by lax enforcement of what food safety laws we actually have, you’re going to love the effects of furloughing the FDA during the government shutdown. And that’s not even considering that the FDA is already ludicrously understaffed.
- Let’s check in on how Tumblr’s doing searching out and eliminating porn on its platform, shall we? Oh.
- The Consumer Electronics Show always has a fascinating array of products on display, from the cat hamster wheel to the welt. Which stands for Wearable Belt. Belts are now wearable, y’all.
- CES also, of course, has yielded one of the best headlines of the new year: Sitting in This Lamborghini Massage Chair Was Like Having Bad Sex With Optimus Prime.
- In my hometown, the landmark Shakespeare Theatre burned down this past weekend. The theatre has been an enormous boondoggle for the town since the 80’s, with numerous people and groups coming and going with bold plans to renovate and reopen the theatre that never came to fruition. Every candidate for mayor has had a bold new proposal for it as well. It’s sad to see it end like this; I just hope they don’t sell off the land to a condo developer.
- The modernist penguin pool at the London Zoo has fallen into disrepair partly because its concrete ramps proved dangerously unhealthy for the penguins, so it can hardly host them any more, but it’d be a pity to see such a lovely space destroyed.
- This Week in Connections to History: A thousand years ago, a woman in Germany was involved in producing manuscripts or artwork using extremely expensive ultramarine pigment. We know because particles of it were found on her teeth.
- Every article about how Facebook Messenger and other social media & messaging outlets are garbage fires made of psychological manipulation & spamming reinforces just how bad these things are, and how sad it is that for so many of us they’re the way we connect with each other. No, I don’t quite know how to quit either.
- This Week in Science: The next generation of particle accelerators, following the Large Hadron Collider, is starting to take shape. After the LHC found the Higgs boson, the possibility of an even more advanced accelerator discovering more about dark matter or other mysteries is really exciting.
- This Week in Maps: We can get a Mercator globe in every classroom if we put our minds to it. We can DO this.
- When you’re a person with actual expertise in the field of clothing history, watching historical dramas is going to be a laugh-or-cry situation.
- With the new year and its attendant NFL playoffs upon us, it’s more important than ever to read up on the situation vis-a-vis chips and dip and novelty dip receptacles. It’s the reason for the season!
