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!
- Sean Bean does die in a lot of his movies, but not more than any other actor.
- Our moon (for it does indeed belong to all of us, no matter whose flag is planted there right now) is slowly drifting away from Earth and will eventually reach a stable spot where one side of the planet will always be facing the moon and the other side never will again. This has some interesting implications for werewolves.
- Alanis updated “Ironic” for our times. Also, kudos to the James Corden show for obtaining a time machine and featuring 1996 Alanis as a guest.
- Cops and FBI agents and the like often engage in criminal activity to catch the folks who are doing the same thing without the official permission of the government. There are some people, though, who’re uncomfortable with the FBI running child-porn servers to collect information on the people accessing the servers. How much does your impression of those tactics change depending on how many of the viewers they actually catch?
- Meanwhile, the CIA is busy shredding the evidence of years of routine torture.
- Meanwhile, Philadelphia cops are slapping Google Maps logos on their spying vehicles.
- Let’s try some pet therapy to get back on a positive bent. Let’s try rolling up to a cat cafe.
- Sometimes the past fights back against the encroaching present, such as when a Russian medieval reenactor threw a spear at a drone flying overhead.
- Brad, our beneveolent PTBN overlord, sends word of the ways that you are likely to die. Cheers!
- Before you take a screenshot you’re going to post publicly, you might want to take a moment to clear out your porn tabs. It’s about attention to detail, folks.
- Our current understanding of physics and cosmology places some serious limits on how much of the universe humanity could possibly explore…and also indicates that in billions of years we’ll no longer see any light from distant galactic groups, so far-future societies will likely have no reason to believe they exist.
- Alternatively, maybe outer space doesn’t actually exist. That would certainly explain some things, for certain definitions of “explain” and “things.” (Warning: gendered slurs.)
- Antarctic scientists need help tracking what’s happening to penguin nests, and they’re turning to crowdsourcing — which means you can help scientists by looking at cute pictures of penguins. Go and do!
- The internet is a wonderful place. Sometimes people from all manner of perspectives and disciplines come together to figure out whether a suggestive-looking mineral can safely be inserted into the human body. Turns out, there are much better things to put in your body.