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.
- Sometimes you can’t find a dish made quite the same way as the first time you had it, even when the cuisine it comes from blossoms beautifully in your region, even when you spend years searching and trying to replicate that special experience.
- The internet provides any number of wonders, including the Star Wars opening crawl customizer. Now you too can thrill to the sight of lorum ipsum in a galaxy far, far away. (Warning: autoplay)
- (Warning: sexual abuse/assault) A woman who killed her father after decades of abuse was recently sentenced to nine years in prison. I can’t imagine how this serves the interests of punishment or deterrence, after what this person has already been through, nor how the law can’t at least recognize this as self-defense.
- This Week in Linguistics: In the US, whether you call them fireflies or lightning bugs correlates heavily with how much lightning or fire you have in your region. I’d like to see the equivalent maps of WWE fandom and buzzard sightings, though.
- In Ireland and the UK, a heat wave is affecting grass patterns, revealing Roman fortifications and heretofore unknown henges.
- Speaking of henges, researchers in Chile are figuring out even more stone markers.
- This Week in Puns: Academic Edition.
- Folks, I beg of you, do not start viral threads about random other real people. They didn’t consent to that.
- This Week in Neural Net Processors, Learning Computers: Is there anything they can’t do? Well, maybe they can’t do sexy.
- This Week in Ancient Food: The oldest bread yet discovered is more than five thousand years older than the previously-thought oldest bread, and four thousand years older than agriculture itself, so the people making it weren’t using intentionally-cultivated plants. Also, the next time someone on one of those “paleo” things turns their nose up at bread, tell them to suck it.
- Queen bees used to be called king bees, because Aristotle assumed they had to be male, and from 350 BCE to the 17th-18th century CE most people in the western world kind of went along with Aristotle. See this thread on the fascinating ways that the history of understanding of bee behavior was influenced by sociology and people’s prevailing assumptions.
- Speaking of bees(?), it seems they literally give each other a whoop whoop when they bump into each other, scientifically proving that they are down with the clown.
