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? Comment on the Walk post at the Place to Be Nation Facebook page, or find Glenn on the social media platform of your choice!
- RIP Fyvush Finkel.
- Last Week in the Olympics: the Ukrainian men’s gymnastics team threw some of their events, and folks are trying to figure out why.
- Meanwhile, people still insist on increasingly-invasive and consistently-bullshit sex tests for women who want to complete in the Olympics. (Warning: autoplay video.)
- There are some standard stories that are told over and over again by the collective staff opf NBC Sports every time the Olympics come around. It’s possible, though, to insert some different stories, some better stories.
- One more Olympic tip: it’s possible to time swimmers to the thousandth-of-a-second and avoid some of the recent ties for medals, but there are good reasons why that’s not done.
- This Week in Relativity: because gravitational fields warp time and space, the center of our planet is a couple of years younger than the outer crust, and the center of the sun is 39000 years younger than its surface.
- This Week in Graphs: discover the marital status of people in the US of any age.
- There is so, so much thought and design and taboo wrapped up in the effort to get less splashback from toilets and urinals, when much consternation could be avoided by sitting the hell down. It doesn’t always have to be complicated, folks.
- Seagate is making 60 TB solid-state hard drives. Comment 1: now I can remake my entire music collection in FLAC! Comment 2: *drool*
- This Week in Architecture: McMansions are a bloat on the land, but what is it that makes them so distinctly bad? Off-topic for that particular post is the fact that they all appear to have huge lawns.
- Donald Trump quotations make much more sense when rad by Zapp Brannigan. Read by the actual voice of Zapp Brannigan, of course, because that’s just what 2016 is.
- Also in 2016 as the year reality goes “boink,” they caught the Nigerian prince who needs your help moving money between banks.
- Whirlpool boosted attendance at schools by donating washers and dryers so kids were guaranteed clean clothes to wear to school. It’s amazing what people can do when they have a hand with basic needs rather than some scolding comments tossed at their parents.
- This Week in Shocking News: Getty Images, frequent denizen of the watermark-and-sue school of image curation, stole photographer Carol Highsmith’s images and then sued her for using them. Nice job, folks.
- In Florence, a family has kept personal records for over 600 years. I commend such extensive archiving.
- Sometimes Thor can be a real jerk.
- The theory that ancestors of native peoples in the Americas crossed over a land bridge from Asia appears not to be true.