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.
- A truck full of Axe body spray crashed on a highway, igniting the body spray and protecting would-be consumers from its foulness at the expense of dousing the highway with toxic fumes. (No one was hurt in the crash. It’s okay. Except for the people who otherwise would’ve been traveling on that road and whoever owned the truck, I guess.)
- This Week in Neural Net Processors, Learning Computers: The chAIr Project uses artificial intelligence, trained on over five hundred photos of real-deal human-designed chairs, to chop & screw different chair elements to create new chairs, better chairs, the chairs of the future, chairs of the future, chairs of the future. One or two of them might be usable right away, and some of them look a little like birthing chairs, but we’re going to have to rearrange some of our limbs to accommodate the rest.
- RIP Donna Castleberry, murdered by an undercover cop. Her family is raising funds for final expenses.
- If you and 32 of your closest friends want to play a mega-sized version of the Game of Thrones tabletop game, your time has truly come.
- This Week in Romance: I know workplace romance can be dicey, but it’s touching when it works out.
- There’s been great hubbub lately about bathtub-entering strategies for those with ever-sensitive testicles. Just how hot are people making their bathwater anyway? If it’s so hot that it hurts your balls, won’t the whole bathroom be sweltering and uncomfortable?
- (Warning: insects) If a date is going to go wrong, it may as well go ludicrously wrong and give everyone a story to tell.
- Leonard Bernstein was born a hundred years ago, and his legacy still looms large.
- This Week in the Internet of Things: Maybe I’m just becoming fearful and distrustful of new technology fads as I approach middle age, but I’m not sure we need internet-connected olive oil bottles. You can get ten of them for €400m, though.
- A recent fire at The National Museum of Brazil has claimed priceless historical artifacts. Even this small selection of what’s been lost is tragic. Over and over again we see fires like this and other symptoms of gross negligence.
- Sometimes I wish I knew someone with the spontaneity to put pictures of Jeff Goldblum in every picture frame they see.
- The greatest cosplay has been achieved. And that’s not terrible.
