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!
- Piled Higher & Deeper is here to show you a little about black hole basics.
- We recently marked Pi Day, when so many people in our offices and Facebook feeds show off how many digits of pi they remember off the tops of their heads. Personally I only remember eight at this point, but my shower curtain goes out to about 4600. The professionals at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who need it for very important things like interplanetary navigation, use fifteen. And if it’s good enough for JPL, it’s good enough for you.
- Meanwhile in the great state of Connecticut, a mariachi band serenades a beluga whale, because of course. Beluga whales deserve entertainment too.
- What Is My Movie? will tell you which one is the one with that guy who did the stuff.
- If we can realistically get patients’ bodies to accept kidneys from previously-incompatible donors, that could be hee-yuge.
- When you ask people what you should name your boat, you wind up naming your boat Boaty McBoatface.
- Some ancient people’s pet dog could soon be brought back through the magic of cloning. Finally we can resolve the emotional trauma of that Futurama episode.
- This Week in Real Things People Did: thanks to coincidence and a single well-placed pun, one intrepid teen convinced a bunch of Christians that they were in the presence of a were-owl.
- The (possible) new Xena series plans to make the subtext text and actually get Xena & Gabrielle together now that we’re not in the freakin’ 20th century any more. I mean, otherwise there wouldn’t be any point. They should still get Lucy Lawless back though.
- While Xena might be moving out of the 20th century, in England the parliament is moving out of the 16th century by ending the practice of recording its business on calfskin parchment. This is being done for fiscal reasons, which means that the British government literally started starving people before it decided to give up calfskin parchment.
- Pandemic Legacy sounds fascinating, but I’m still highly resistant to making permanent changes to the game board, especially given the dire quality of my Game Day group’s record against Pandemic. (The perfectionism runs strong, as well.)
- Medical technology advances ever onward, but the humble stethoscope lives on.
- Remembering Jonestown as mass murder rather than mass-suicide should be a pretty stark reminder not to refer to “drinking the Kool-Aid” any more.
- As of a couple years ago, AOL was making money off the backs of two million people forgot to cancel their subscriptions. Either that or they REALLY want to keep those keyword searches.
