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.
- A wedding should really reflect the passions of the blessed couple. When Olympic weightlifters Lisa Yang and Wek Hernandez got married, instead of lighting candles or releasing doves, they did a big ol’ deadlift together.
- You can learn a lot about history from video games, such as that for France the Plague mostly consisted of vast hordes of glow-eyed rats pursuing everyone.
- Automated Gender Recognition is software that takes a photo of your face and guesses your gender (with two options) based on your cheekbones, or your jawline, or your eyebrows — as if physical features have anything to do with gender, and as if projects like this aren’t just codifying & perpetuating stereotypes held by the people creating them. Hell, it was barely a month ago that I was relaying a completely different digital reinvention of phrenology, from the same industry that brought us automated soap dispensers that don’t recognize black people past a certain skin shade.
- Take a quick whirl through the history of scroll bars and see how far we’ve come. Personally, I can’t stand the ones that disappear when you’re not actively using them (including phone browsers).
- With all of the cryptids running around, we have to ask: are any of them kosher? As it turns out, they’re mostly not, though if you run into the Jersey Devil you may be in luck.
- The dominant trend of online services in recent years has been to move people away from keeping data in local files and toward accessing everything through proprietary services. It’s easy to get all “old person yells at cloud” about it — you know, ok boomer — but of course some of us still download and hoard things so they’re not on the cloud (meaning, someone else’s computer).
- Secondhand food may not be worth buying from Amazon.
- This Week in Medical Malpractice: Typically one begins a journey with a therapist with the understanding that they won’t, you know, flagrantly violate their trust and consent.
- The Fortingall Yew is a Scottish tree that’s several millennia old, and as it turns out is transitioning. It truly never is too late for a transplant.
- Sometimes when we lose something that made the world just a little more interesting and gave us just a little chuckle every now and then, life gets just a little more bland. Farewell, can-opener bridge, may flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.
