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. Do you have a link you want to see featured in next week’s Walk? Email Glenn!
- This Week in Beautiful Natural Phenomena: striped icebergs.
- Now available to play in-browser on archive.org: Oregon Trail and Star Trek 25th Anniversary, widely regarded as the best Trek game there’s been to this day.
- Now available to play on Twitter, a choose-your-own-adventure experience, because we have games everywhere and in all things.
- One for the BTAS fans: check out the storyboards for one of the best title sequences in TV.
- This Week in Terror: in Nigeria, Boko Haram attacked a town and killed up to two thousand people; in France, antisemitism is still coursing throughout the land, and the situation is getting scary (the Grand Synagogue of Paris didn’t have shabbat services last week for the first time since literal Nazis were running France); it’s no picnic being Muslim in France either; in New York, police choke holds such as the one used to murder Eric Garner often go unpunished; in Florida, murderer George Zimmerman was arrested again for domestic violence, and since his victim this time is white there’s a chance he might be punished in some way.
- This Week in Get Your Damned Vaccines and Vaccinate Your Damned Kids (If You’re Not Immunocompromised or Something): people don’t typically go to Disneyland for measles.
- To soothe the ol’ mood somewhat, imagine Spider-Man hanging out with cats, and then see it done in an even cuter way than you were imagining.
- Ambiguity Woman just wants to interrogate illegitimate authorities.
- When you’re a blond woman studying engineering at MIT, people say some super special things to you. (More)
- Here’s a welcome bit of good news: the first new antibiotic discovered in almost 30 years may enable us to fend off the threat of antibiotic-resistant diseases for some time.
- Speaking of antibiotics, back in the good old days penicillin was conserved and reused by extracting it from the urine of patients.
- Before there were search engines, some people posed their odd queries to the New York Public Library. I do feel sorry for the person who called in to ask if women are mammals, though…actually, on second thought, I feel more sorry for the women he knew.
- Lightpaper can be printed and used just like other paper, except it’s also a light source.
- New Zealand to Iceland is a hell of a commute.
- Anyone among us who watches football will remember Marshawn Lynch’s amazing touchdown run in the 2010 playoffs, and the roar of the crowd that set off a nearby seismographic monitor that was supposed to be watching out for earthquakes. During the Seattle game last weekend, seismographers installed monitors even closer to the stadium that fed into a live online feed, and because that feed was a few seconds ahead of the TV broadcast, it acted like an advance warning system telling viewers to look up at the TV.
- This Week in Headlines: Group of fourth-grade girls planned to kill their teacher with hand sanitizer, police say. (The teacher’s fine.)
- Also This Week in Headlines: Missing woman unwittingly joins search party looking for herself. That’s kind of sad, and casts a bit of doubt on search parties in general, right?
- Focusing on abstinence before marriage leaves a lot of people unprepared to integrate it into their lives post-marriage, in your NO FOOLIN’ moment of the day. Abstinence: just say no. Wait, that works both ways. Abstinence: not even once. Wait, crap. Oh, screw it. There we go!