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.
- The discovery of a fifteen-thousand-year-old mammoth trap near Mexico City shows how prehistoric residents dug huge trenches and drove mammoths into them to make them easier to take down, a method similar to pitfalls used by ancient elephant hunters in Africa.
- I recently heard a fascinating episode of the Gastropod podcast about animals & plants that humans have eaten to extinction, including the noble mammoth. Fun fact: Lewis & Clark fully expected to find mammoths and mastodons at some point in their expedition across North America, because the world seemed so incredibly big, with so many undocumented areas, that surely they must still be out there somewhere. The concept of extinction wouldn’t be invented & commonly accepted until later, and initially vexed some Christians the same way that evolution did.
- Disney’s bespoke streaming service launched this week, unleashing the ferocious power of maklunky on an unsuspecting world.
- Sephora has color-coded hand baskets that tell store staff whether or not you want to talk to any of them, which frankly ought to be the model for all other stores and/or businesses and/or public spaces.
- This Week in Privacy: Ring is proud to announce that it filmed millions of children this past Halloween and is just going to use the data for, y’know, whatever.
- This Week in Medical Malpractice: Whoooooooooooops!
- To commemmorate the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a German nonprofit sent a section of it to the US president as a reminder of the wall’s cruelty and ultimate failure.
- When you’re studying ninja history, you get to do things like writing your essays in invisible ink while staying on topic.
- Hard drive capacity keeps growing, even as SSDs keep getting larger and more affordable. Bring on the 50TB hard drives, I say, I might need one if I ever decide to remake my music collection in FLAC.
- I was under the impression that microtransactions in video games existed solely to exploit people with gambling problems and kids with their parents’ credit cards, but it turns out I was wrong. They’re also very useful for money laundering.
- This Week in Emoji: Someone who’s knowledgeable about horses rates horse emoji for health & fitness. I’m afraid many emoji horses don’t have long careers ahead of them. Nor, apparently, do most of the jockeys.
- This Week in Neural Net Processors, Learning Computers: The robots aren’t just coming for our jobs, they’re coming for our popular culture as well — they’re even developing new Pokémon to aid in their takeover. I can think of a few people who already have the Rum Power ability.
- We’ve recently seen gender reveal stunts for people who don’t even exist yet (“festive” occasions where parents-to-be announce the shape of a fetus’ genitals as if that’s a good and proper topic of conversation) start forest fires, murder one of the grandparents-to-be with an improvised explosive device, and crash a plane. Meanwhile, the only casualties of gender reveal parties for adults debuting their new and interesting genders are bottles of wine.
- The best wildlife photography often involves years of hard work and moments of incredible luck, such as when you get the perfect photo of an eagle landing on a branch you’ve had a camera trained on fomr three years.
- This Week in Good Dogs: Who’s a good dog? A dog who went through guide-dog training but flunked out due to an excessive desire to play fetch is a good dog.
- Who else is a good dog? A dog who’s trying their best to play fetch but just hasn’t gotten it right yet is a good dog.
