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 informative.
- This Week in Actual Good News: Congolese studies of new Ebola treatments show drastic and amazing improvements in survival rates. Ebola isn’t incurable after all.
- You may have recently seen a trailer for the big upcoming uncanny cat film. It’s important to do your research ahead of time so you’re well prepared.
- The first of those plain-text Helvetica T-shirts was a Beatles tribute. Someone who’s seen Yesterday can tell us if there’re any extras inappropriately wearing them.
- The city of Seattle has an extensive and busy bus system with designated lanes that routinely get clogged by selfish and impatient car-drivers…until brave and honorable citizens stand up to them. Not all heroes wear capes.
- An Objectivist Conference in the year 2019 sounds like a dour experience…except for the panel about how carbon dioxide is actually a fabulous sign of human progress, of course. It’s heartening to hear that fewer children are going through their Objectivist phase these days than were in the throes of it at the same time I was, but I must admit it’s a little bittersweet to read about the attendee who wants to become “one of the world’s first Objectivist literary critics — buddy, that was my goal too when I was twenty.
- This Week in Schadenfreude: It took a lot of victims coming forward, a lot of investigative effort, and no small amount of luck to take down the dine-and-dash dater, but down he came.
- This Week in the Internet of Things: Some “smart ovens” have developed a habit of turning on in the middle of the night. My friends, it doesn’t make me backwards to say that you don’t need a smart oven, any more than you need a smart toaster or a smart doorbell or a smart light bulb. What utter nonsense.
- The chief element of the gig economy seems to be a fundamental and frightful lack of security.
- By all means, play Pokémon Go all you want, but please don’t do it while driving. The bicycle Pokémon grandpa had the much better idea.
- This Week in Food: Sometimes you make a horrible garbage sandwish from an honestly rather forgettable Rodney Dangerfield movie and it actually turns out pretty well.
- The obvious thing to do when a state legalizes pot is to liberate anyone still dealing with jail sentences, probation, or any other penalty for what should never have been a crime in the first place. That this is obvious doesn’t make it less of a cause for celebration when someone actually does it.
- After the mass shooting in El Paso, Antonio Basco was left with a funeral to plan for his wife and no close friends or relatives to invite to it, so he invited the public. The public came.
- It’s always interesting to find natural versions of human inventions — such as the biological gears found in some jumping insects — but I didn’t expect to find a mussel with googly eyes.
