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? Comment on the Walk post at the Place to Be Nation Facebook page, or find Glenn on the social media platform of your choice!
- RIP John Glenn.
- Word from Aleppo is terrifying.
- A 99-million-year-old dinosaur tail encased in ember shows off its tail. (!!)
- We’re well into the holiday season now, so of course it is time for The 2016 Hater’s Guide To The Williams-Sonoma Catalog. This year: tartan, tartan everywhere!
- This Week in Social Psychology: Roadway designers in Cambridge put in a fake traffic circle on the theory that it’d catch drivers’ attention and get them to slow down as they go by.
- Our li’l ol’ planet has a quasi-moon, and will for a few hundred years or so. Welcome, friend! Sorry we’re doing so badly with this planet you’re orbiting now!
- In Kansas, cops set up a camera to find a mountain lion, and then the locals noticed.
- Sometimes I say that all teens are dirtbag teens; this is not quite right, and sells short the minority of teens who somehow manage to be functional people. For instance, in her teens, Freddie Oversteegen flirted with Nazis, lured them into the woods with promises of hot makeouts, and instead shot them.
- You may have seen photos of hieroglyphics that superficially look like helicopters or flying saucers, passed around by folks who like to allege that ancient Africans couldn’t possibly have built their monuments. Many of them actually result from a combination of erosion and re-carving done by some emperors over previous emperors’ text, plus modern people’s pattern-seeking of course.
- This Week in Tardigrades: Finally, finally, bah gawd finally, researchers have filmed tardigrade sex. I’m pretty sure this is safe for work, so have at it.
- “Unsatisfying” is a video compilation of the tiny daily tragedies of life.
- Sometimes, if you love something, you truly do have to let it go.
- Embedded within this exploration of beauty double-standards and Renaissance women’s body hair is a recipe for a hair-removing solution consisting of arsenic and quicklime boiled together. “When the skin feels hot, wash quickly with hot water so the flesh doesn’t come off.” I bet!
- It seems someone purported to make a smartphone app that took people’s blood pressure using the phone camera and microphone. It didn’t.
- This Week in Product recalls: Cuisinart is recalling literally eight million food processors because some of their blades happened to shatter on what should have turned into good good food.
- It’s fascinating to hear someone who really knows what they’re talking about analyze accents in movies.
- In England, a woman with a plastic fork repelled a man intending to rob her shop with a sword. It’s all in the enthusiasm.
- A marketing campaign has yielded the supposed most relaxing song in the world. It doesn’t quite soothe my existential despair, but that’s a tall order.
- Speaking of relaxing, here at the end of another edition of the ol’ Walk, let’s just fly over Iceland for a while.
