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.
- On Monday we saw fires at the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris and the Marwani Prayer Room at the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, both religious sites old enough to have wider importance to world culture (despite the worldwide scourge that is the Catholic church, notably). Thankfully, the mosque fire seems to have been smaller and more quickly put out. The first photos released of the interior of Notre Dame after the fire was put out show a lot of it intact, though with reports of lead being melted by the heat of the fire and dripping down into the cathedral, I was most concerned for the stained glass windows, but it appears they survived.
- Meanwhile, the black churches that were recently burned down in Louisiana — by arson, not a construction accident — don’t have billionaire benefactors or 1500-year-old religious institutions backing their reconstruction, so it’s up to us.
- This Week in the Continuing Adventures of Florida Man: The Floridian Splinter is threatening to destroy us all with his army of turtles, which would be par for the course for 2019, actually.
- Not content to let Florida Man get all of the action, horny alligators are now in the mix.
- We’re just out of Tax Time in the US, so here’s your yearly reminder that TurboTax, H&R Block, and other tax-preparation companies actively write and lobby for bills that prevent the IRS from making the tax process easier and more efficient.
- This Week in Internet History AND Neural Net Processors, Learning Computers: Neural networks are finally being put to the highest of uses, providing us with fresh and brandy new Strong Bad Emails.
- Also This Week in Neural Net Processors, Learning Computers: There have been numarous stories in recent years about efforts to train learning algorithms to parse MRI and CT scan results to detect cancers and other illnesses, with ambitions ranging from assisting busy doctors by spotting the easy ones and reducing human error, to replacing expensive doctors to some extent. Of course, training a computer program on scans indicating various diseases can also enable a malicious user or bot to generate such images and superimpose them onto scans, or remove them from scans that would otherwise show them, sometimes with frighteningly realistic results. We’re in Battlestar Galactica territory, we can’t network our computers lest the damn Cylons hack everything.
- Israel recently launched the Beresheet spacecraft toward the moon, where unfortunately it crashed on the surface. It’s still earning a payout from the Lunar X Prize, though, because technically it did make it to the moon, and technically making it to the moon is definitely one way of making it to the moon.
- My boss likes to talk about eliminating workarounds — a lot of our procedures and workflows are built on mounds of workarounds hastily established when previous workarounds became untenable, and she keeps reminding me to actually email developers and put tickets in for new and old issues rather than just figuring out some way of getting through the day myself, which in my opinion has the advantage of not requiring me to talk to other people. But there are definitely times when you need to take the time and gather the resources to make a fresh start unencumbered by the weight of past systems overlapping and depending on each other, such as when you work for the US IRS’ IT department, and at its base your system for accepting, filing, and checking millions of people’s tax returns still depends on 60-year-old code. When you’re calling up retired programmers who remember using COBOL on IBM mainframes, you are in trouble, and when you’re doing it on the day taxes are due you are in REAL trouble.
- Linear DooM reimagines tle classic DooM levels as straight, narrow hallways, but even under that limitation still manages to make most of the levels feel like their spread-out counterparts.
- Presented without further comment: “Blue (Da Ba Dee),” as performed by Goofy.
- Friend of the Walk Mick Price brings word of a loophope in an animal cruelty statute that left the state unable to prosecute one person for grievously mistreating and endangering a fish.
- This Week in Workers’ Rights: Old friend of the Walk Nick Duke brings word of a Georgia company that sought to find a Devious Defecator by testing employees’ DNA — except it turns out that’s super illegal, thanks to measures meant to keep corporations from going full Gattaca.
