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.
- There are lots of regulations about what you can and cannot put out with your trash, and for good reason, because otherwise someone might try to toss out hundred-year-old live ammunition.
- This Week in Neural Net Processors, Learning Computers: Artificial intelligences are generating ice cream flavors for us now, and they range from names that are completely realistic (Chocolate Sin) to ones that really ought to exist (Silence Cherry) to ones that you’d only see on Chopped (Beet Bourbon) to ones that I’m pretty sure I already have (Strawberry Cream Disease).
- Digital forensics, along with solid knowledge of art history, can help recreate art pieces lost to time, mishandling, and war. Intention and presentation make the difference between recovering/reproducing and, say, forgery.
- Just like we make little tutorials for everything, in 1927, folks needed a handy introduction to the rotary phone.
- I recently heard Google’s new virtual assistant that can make phone calls and have conversations with the people who answer them to make appointment and such, and the first thing that hit me was that THE THING SAYS “UM.”
- In the year two-thousand and eighteen, the hot new comic strip lighting up folks’ lives is Nancy. Seriously, go read Nancy. And DO NOT read the comments from boring haters.
- I have a really hard time trying to model the subjective mental states of people who do not think the exact same way that I do. (Perhaps that’s one of those things that’s true for literally everyone, we just don’t talk about it much. Or when we do we’re talking past each other too much.) But I try to realize, as a mature adult, that other people enjoy things I can’t imagine having any strong reaction to, and enjoy them in ways I can hardly imagine. But if you, for instance, start up a baked bean museum…hey, I’m glad you found something in life that makes you happy.
- This Week in Nonsensical Linguistic Restrictions: Publix won’t put a graduation message on a cake.
- A sinkhole has opened on the White House lawn. The earth is literally opening to devour this ongoing garbage disaster. What IS 2018??
- This Week in Belated Updates: In a previous edition of the ol’ Walk I noted an audience member who got delightfully startled during a Stravinsky performance. It is so good to hear that she’s not been shamed about it in the least and everyone really did see it in the best light. I hope the orchestra has made the most of the publicity.
- In the annals of food crimes, there are foods that are crimes because of what they inherently are, ingredients that have no business colliding anywhere on our planet let alone your mouth, and foods that are crimes because of how they’re arranged, ingredients that are completely innocent — transcendent, even, in the right light — but have been mistreated by a cruel lord. I invite you to consider the very worst way there is to make a burrito.
- This Week in the Ongoing Effort to Try to Feel Somewhat Better About Existing Through the Generous Application of Animal Videos: Two lynxes talking to each other sound like two people who just got woken up and are not happy about it.
