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 Who’s Been a Good Boy: in Mississippi, a dog came home with over a pound of pot, proving beyond a doubt that pets improve your mood.
- You may have heard of the Panama Papers leak, revealing tons of information about offshore tax shelters that’s only begun to be examined in public. The Guardian has an easily-accessible FAQ about it. The British Virgin Islands seems to be the biggest hub of hidden funds; people have already traced about two billion dollars to Vladimir Putin, and the Prime Minister of Iceland has already resigned over his ties (warning: autoplay video). Most of this is legal, mind, but still abhorrent. Like a lot of things rich people do. Much more here.
- We’ve found not only a trinary star system, which is vanishingly rare, but one with a planet in stable orbit around one of the stars.
- RIP Erik Bauersfeld, so soon after sppearing in the new Star Wars.
- This Week in Merch I Need: the bat’leth letter opener, for opening all your correspondence with the petaQs in your life.
- At least one study suggests that human sacrifice has been practiced less in more egalitarian societies. Be ever on the lookout.
- This Week in Procedurally-Generated Art: thanks to some ingenius software, Rembrandt’s style is analyzed in enough detail to produce a new Rembrandt-esque piece, all the way down to 3D-printing it in real paint.
- This Week in A+ Parenting: when you’re writing letters from your kids’ favorite fictional characters or figuring out ever-more-complicated ciphers, that’s dedication.
- What might a person do to stop a flight and force a plane to land? In one of those phrases I didn’t think I’d wind up typing, one answer seems to be aggressive yoga.
- Before Our Bodies, Ourselves, there was an illegal Canadian handbook on contraception and other health concerns.
- This Week in Real Things That Happened, Politics Edition: Trump supporters had trouble finding parking spaces at a recent rally, and so decided to drive over some graves and park on top of them. I mean, it’s probably the 749th most offensive thing the Trumpenproletariat did that day, but still.
- Any design element of the products you buy has a reason behind it, even if you hate it.
