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!
- Today is the culmination of all history, so far.
- Wal-Mart is all hot and bothered, somehow, over a site the sole contents of which is a horse standing in front of a store.
- Building a full-scale computer simulation of our galaxy is a daunting prospect, not least because you need a computer that can handle 100 billion independent bodies.
- Some people will buy the ten-thousand-dollar Apple watch as a status symbol, but you’ve got to think fewer people will buy the new one a year later.
- This Week in Crowdfunding Initiatives: Back in Time, a timely documentary on Back to the Future that seems to have interviews from everyone you’d expect. (I was waiting for Alan Silvestri to pop up, and was not disappointed.)
- Archaeologists are now excavating a historic cemetery in London, hoping to find out about the lives (and deaths) of people going back hundreds of years, including the last episode of the bubonic plague.
- If you’ve ever on Jeopardy!, remember where you’re most likely to find the Daily Doubles.
- Photoshop experts might be flustered by Photoshop 1.0.
- Last Friday was International Verify Your Backups Day, but nobody will think less of you for celebrating a little late. Save your files, back up your files, copy your backups.
- If you’re going to go off the record to provide information to a reporter, have some fun with it. Maybe the journalists in the room have seen this before.
- On Facebook, racists pick at Native Americans by getting the site to invalidate their names.
- The gendered pay gap starts at home.
- Nicholas Cage has purchased a pyramid that he intends to use as his tomb. It will be one of the richest archaeological discoveries of whatever society, thousands of years hence, dares to explore the section of the Gulf of Mexico that used to be New Orleans.
- Amazingly, the British royal family might bring in much more money than it costs.
- Powdered alcohol is on the way. Maybe. If the flame isn’t fanned and then killed like it was for those alcoholic energy drinks a while back. A spokesperson says it’s not likely anyone would snort it considering that “It takes approximately 60 minutes to snort the equivalent of one shot of vodka,” but that disregards the progressively more horrible ways people find to get alcohol into them. Consider the people shoving vodka bottles into their eyeballs and buttholes and such.
- Chris Borland is retiring from the 49ers after one season due to concerns about head injuries. How’s that for precedent?
- Since we’ve used up just about all of the good .com addresses, as well as .net, .cx, and .xxx, more and more domains are opening up — including .sucks, for the passive-aggressive address purchaser.
- In Sapporo, artisans have made giant snow carvings inspired by Star Wars, inviting the question: where’s Boston been on this with its record-breaking snow?
