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? Comment on the Walk post at the Place to Be Nation Facebook page, or find Glenn on the social media platform of your choice!
- This Week in Headlines: Feral bunnies are taking over Las Vegas. You know, I say this as someone who’s never lived in Las Vegas, been to Las Vegas, or learned much of anything about the fragile balance of environmental factors in the ecosystems of the southwestern US, but: maybe we can let the bunnies have Vegas?
- This Week in Illusions: Synchromize a camera’s shutter to a helicopter’s rotor and watch the magic happen as the unmoving blades lift it high into the sky.
- Also in illusions is this photo of strawberries that has no red pixels in it but looks red because your brain is helping you out, for consideration next time you and your friends disagree on what color a dress is.
- Slow TV seems like a natural venue for anyone with a webcam.
- If you’re a US citizen, there are a few common-sense tips for not screwing up horribly while trying to help those who aren’t.
- It must be exciting to work at a used-items store sometimes. You never know what could come in next — a signed first-edition book that some late collector’s grandkids had no idea was in their possession, fake-looking jewelry that turns out to be actual gold, or even submarine schematics from some Cold War-era spy scheme that ended in someone’s attic in Wales instead of Soviet Russia.
- This 14th-century guite to treating melancholy sounds like how I want my vacations to go.
- Okay, I’m not here to harsh on pretty much any way someone absorbs grief and loss. Call it a Wednesday Walk Life Lesson. If someone is genuinely comforted by generating an avatar of their loved ones to appear in new photos, that’s good for them. (Warning: autoplay video.)
- Record low water levels in Venice are revealing all sorts of things that’ve been tossed into the water, from all varieties of human filth to, apparently, a lot of forks.
- This Week in Comics: Cast your mind back in time to a Golden Age Wonder Woman movie.
- The World Community Grid is one of those background processes that works on various things using your spare processor cycles, like the old SETI@Home, except for medical simulations.
- Appliances do battle in the epic knock-down drag-out struggle between freezer and toaster. What temperature is YOUR bread??
- In the 1820s and 30s, John James Audubon painted hundreds of species of birds across the US, forming the first catalogue of birds in the country. Five of them have never been identified.
- Fear drives a lot of people away from reporting or testifying against perpetrators of all sorts of abuse, especially domestic violence, so adding a heightened risk of being deported is just a dandy thing to do…not to mention pulling people out of cancer treatments and other lows reached by ICE thugs. (Warning: autoplay videos in both links.)
- Also in unconscionable abuses of power, we have a fertility doctor who just kind of fudges the donor records and gives people his own sperm when he wants.
- Typographers watched the to-do at the end of the Oscars and lamented how easily they could’ve prevented it.
- This Week in Poetry: How are crackers made? Read it out loud.
- Let’s end on some good good animal news. A blind dog lost in the Santa Cruz Mountains for eight days is happy and healthy back at home.
