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? Email Glenn!
- If you haven’t been watching this week’s broadcast of the 25th-anniversary remaster of Ken Burns’ The Civil War, go look up your local PBS station and get on it. Last night saw the always-delightful episode about just how much, and in how many ways, General McClellan sucked.
- Represent anything visually and someone will make visual art out of it. Observe: Synthesia shows piano notes as a guide almost like Guitar Hero does, and has birthed a new venue for note art.
- Researchers in San Francisco recently tested PrEP, the drug that purports to prevent infection from HIV, by giving it to 600 bisexual and gay men. How many contracted the disease while on the drug? Zero. Some of them did get other diseases, though — there’s more than one reason to use protection, kids!
- Between Mr. Rogers and Bob Ross, public television can claim to have been home to two of the kindest, most thoroughly decent human beings in recent memory. Bob Ross was approached once by a person who said he couldn’t paint, because he was colorblind and could only see grey tones. And so Ross did an episode dedicated to painting in grey tones to show that anyone can paint. Anyone can make art.
- Also in people doing really decent things: The Crayon Initiative collects crayons destined for the trash bin, melts them down, and reforms them into brand new sets. The new crayons are thicker, as well, a boon for some people with special needs.
- ALSO in people doing really decent things: a tattoo artist in Brazil does free tattoos for women and girls who have survived abusive relationships or breast cancer. (Work-safeness note: there are photos of tattooed breasts.)
- ALSO ALSO in people doing really decent things, and also in escaping abuse: one moving company will help people in abusive relationships move out for free.
- The results are in with regards to the question of how booze might be affected by being in space.
- In Missouri, business interests conspired to gerrymander a local district such that it would have no residents, and the business owners themselves could vote on sales taxes and the like. The only hitch in that plan seems to be that they forgot one person, leaving them with a district where one woman is the sole deciding vote. The word of the day is “schadenfreude.”
- This Week in Crucial MCU Background: how exactly would you go about thawing out Captain America? (Potent quotable: “Steve Rogers is 100% American meat. Fahrenheit shall be considered the appropriate unit for this project.”)
- What the color (or non-color) black represents has changed with the materials we’ve used to create it.
- Thanks to some choice tectonic activity, a bed of dinosaur footprints was arranged sideways, as if on display. Thanks, nature!
- Use this guide to the physics of melting cheese to your greatest culinary advantage.
- An architect in France designed a concrete pool table for use in communal public spaces. Make sure your town has both kinds of community pool.
