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.
- We still need your advice questions for Steve Wille’s guest appearances on the ol’ Spectacular — big or small, we’ll consider them all! Email us or go to our Ask.fm page to send your questions today. (Your name won’t be read on the show without permission (so tell us what to call you if anything), and Ask.fm allows anonymous submissions.)
- Honestly, it’s time for everyone to come around on Jupiter Ascending.
- This Week in Sports: Pita Taufatofua, the Tongan Olympian who caught everyone’s eye at the 2016 opening ceremonies, has switched sports from taekwondo to cross-country skiing and qualified for the Winter Olympics.
- This Week in Wholesome Goodness: Sometimes, you can give a complete stranger the confidence to do something cool.
- Alert! Alert! Klaxon! Klaxon! Romaine lettuce might be trying to kill you!
- This Week in Evolutionary History: It seems that teeth evolved from fish scales.
- Settle down, folks, the Tide pod challenge is dangerous but kind of overblown, like a lot of things parents freak out about.
- If, however, you find yourself thinking about smashing a tasty pod, you may be stopped by the eternal question — is it kosher? I love Jews, I really do.
- This Week in Star Wars: I can’t believe the obvious sound design choice for the Wookiees was cast aside. Heads must have rolled for that one.
- This Week in Performance Enhancers: It’s just sad when you can’t let a camel’s natural beauty speak for itself and instead resort to cheating in a beauty contest. Such a waste.
- In olden times, a lot of wallpapers were made with arsenic pigments to bring out some brilliant greens at the price of, you know, poisoning a lot of people who plastered their rooms in them. Arsenic dust is serious stuff. One doctor made a sample book of poisonous wallpapers which is now a bit of a quandary for archivists. While they digitized the book in the sense of scanning its pages, they’ve not yet managed to digitize its passive deadliness.
- We could eventually wind up sending a blimp into the Great Pyramid of Giza to have a better look around. It certainly won’t need as big an opening as a person.
- Radar-equipped street lights that automatically dim when there aren’t any cars and brighten when someone comes near should save energy costs and reduce light pollution. Neat. Who knows when any of us could see something like this in our regions, though.
- On the one hand, yes, wine glasses may have drastically grown in capacity in the last few hundred years, but on the other hand, I have a smallish rectangle in my pocket that brings to me in mere seconds all of the terror and horror going on in the whole entire world that would have taken months to trickle into someone’s consciousness in the 18th century, so can I have a drink and try to relax for one damn second.