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. Do you have a link you want to see featured in next week’s Wednesday Walk? Email Glenn!
- White Supremacy Update: Michael Brown’s funeral took place on Monday; his murderer, Darren Wilson, who previously had a job with a police department so racist it was disbanded by the city, has not been arrested or charged with a crime, while a fundraiser for his benefit has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars. Such is the world we live in. (Also: tear gas has been linked to spikes in miscarriages in places where it’s been used. One wonders how many pregnant people there are in Ferguson.) Elsewhere, a coroner says that a young black man shot himself in the back of a cop car, while his hands were cuffed behind his back. Yeah. Okay.
- The Curiosity rover has picked up its share of Martian dust in two years.
- This Week in the Smithsonian Archives: little-seen art from World War I.
- We’ve got life everywhere on this rock we call home. It finds a way, you know.
- Sometimes you have to stop for a moment to contemplate the deep questions of life. Who are you? What do you want? Where are you going? Whom do you serve, and whom do you trust? Who’s a good dog?
- This Week in Classic Superheroics: shake your bootie, Clark!
- How long you can expect a CD to last depends, but CD rot is coming for you sooner or later.
- Work hard, play hard. That’s how Godzilla does it. (And how!)
- How do you present a huge archive of old drawings in the age of Tumblr? .gifs, baby, .gifs!
- RIP Gillian Bennett, who chose to die rather than let dementia take her slowly.
- RIP Sir Richard Attenborough.
- RIP Earth’s oldest known eel, because APPARENTLY EVERYONE AND EVERYTHING IS DYING NOW.
- Via the beneficent Greg Phillips: Bane crashed a wedding. “With this ring, I thee wed…” “And this gives you power over me?”
- The North Pond Hermit hid out in the woods of Maine, living off of what he could steal and barely surviving the harsh winters, for twenty-seven years.
- This Week in Cats: humans weren’t the only veterans of World War I.
- Researchers are getting closer to understanding how lizards’ regenerative capabilities work on a genetic level. A certain Dr. Connors is leading efforts to bring limb regeneration to humans.
- Other researchers (collect them all!) have identified material in an ancient star that came from the first generation of stars.
- Hey friends, did we all watch the return of Doctor Who this past weekend? That title sequence sure was a departure, eh? as it turns out, it was made by a fan who’s now ascended.
- Long-time Wednesday Walkers may remember the Italian scientists who were charged with manslaughter after an earthquake killed several local residents. The trial was a global laughingstock — surely you can’t convict people for not precisely predicting a natural disaster! Oh, but you can, with an argument that takes full advantage of cognitive biases and the ambiguity of language.
- These maps of which sports teams you should root for if your only criterion is which teams are closest to you aren’t far off in a lot of places. I mean, Raiders Country isn’t that big, but hey.
- In Africa, twelve nations are cooperating to build a Great Green Wall across the continent to protect against the shifting desert.
- Twitter seems determined to fix what isn’t broken. There’s this weird incestuous relationship between Twitter and Facebook in which they both keep adopting features of the other that really aren’t needed. This has been your Fearful and Distrustful of Change Moment of the Day.
- Video game history could stand to be better preserved.
- The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song is highly adaptable.
- A Cameroonian soccer player is dead due to opposing fans throwing things at him.
- Fashion is done. We have achieved all there is to achieve. There are no worlds left to conquer.
- Carrie Murphy’s elegy to her dead father is harrowing, and difficult at times.
