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. Do you have a link you want to see featured in next week’s Wednesday Walk? Email Glenn!
- Happy new year, Nation! Does the year exist? Does time exist?
- This Week in Huge Art Archives: the Smithsonian digitized its entire archive.
- Check out The Internet in Real Time to see just how much data is flowing through the sites you use every day.
- This Week in the World Being Awful: the NYPD, a notorious gang, cuffed a child to a wall and held him for hours over a few bucks; the NYPD also asked for help identifying a thug who assaulted a subway conductor and found out that it was a cop; as-yet-unidentified antisemites vandalized a synagogue in france and set it on fire; one member of the grand jury that decided not to recommend indicting murderer Darren Wilson is suing the “prosecutor” in the case for lying about it; a nuclear power plant has been leaking oil into Lake Michigan for months.
- Reality is harsh, but it also has baby bats.
- Archaeology is a wondrous thing. Sometimes you start digging and discover a new Egyptian queen.
- This Week in Martian Life: Curiosity recently found pockets of methane gas that could have been made by living microbes. They do find a way.
- One for the graphic designers in the house: design a crest for a submarine. The prize includes a trip for two to the ship’s commissioning in lovely Connecticut.
- Hobo nickels, sculpture that takes coinage as its medium, is a fascinating thing.
- There are lots of forms of OCD. Primarily Obsessional OCD can give a person strong urges to kill. (In case I need to say this: Do not assume that people have this particular issue when they say they have OCD, and do not assume that because someone has intrusive thoughts about something, they are going to do it. Mentally ill people are overwhelmingly more likely to be victims of violence or abuse than perpetrators.)
- Here are some facts about the world: Back to the Future II takes place in 2015. It posits the upcoming release of Jaws 19. Here at the outset of our paltry excuse for a 2015, we have but four Jaws movies. We have some work to do.
- It appears fairly certain that there’s a second genuine Mona Lisa. I thought the Doctor took care of this.
- In 1985 John Cage wrote a piece intended to be played as slowly as possible without saying precisely how slowly. One performance began in 2001 and is intended to continue until 2640, on an organ designed just for this task.
- RIP Dr. Marion Downs, who invented the test for a newborn’s senses.
- This Week in Seinfeld: Steve Rogers sends word of the show being used diagnostically.
- This is the internet: on a bodybuilding forum, a couple of bros get into a knock-down drag-out fight over how many days there are in a week.
- One for the metal-heads in the house: Mac Sabbath is a McDonald’s-themed Black Sabbath cover band. In the world of metal, there truly are treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross.
