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.
- RIP Alan Bean, who was inspired to make art after walking on the moon, to try to communicate the experience to the rest of us in a way the traditional histories don’t.
- You may have noticed emails streaming in from every website you’ve ever signed up for, notifying you about data collection and such. That’s because of a highly respectable privacy law passed by the EU requiring sites to be more forthright about what data they keep about you and how they use it.
- This Week in Hypothetical Maps: Switch land and water on a world map, turn the ocean trenches into mountain ranges, and you get the reversed world. I wonder what weather conditions might be like without the Atlantic and Pacific water cycles…would you get hurricanes forming across the Asian Ocean and pummeling the Mediterranean peninsula? Torrents of clean water coming down on either side of the Marianas Mountains from melting snow?
- Sometimes the “close door” button in an elevator pops right off and you see its purpose was purely psychological.
- I’m no good at reading music (it’s one of the many things I hope to learn someday), but even I can look at something like the notation for the THX logo and appreciate the shape of it.
- This Week in Hipster Bullshit: Bowl food is the trendy act of…eating food…from a bowl.
- This Week in Product Endorsements: You can’t get a much better endorsement for a makeup product than “I got in a car accident and my eyeliner didn’t smudge, look at my neckbrace selfie.”
- A new study identified more than four thousand deaths in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria. I do quibble with phrasing the deaths as happening “due to Hurricane Maria” rather than “due to the willful negligence of the US federal government,” of course.
- Do you remember when you were a teenager and you felt all of your feelings so hard? Cast your mind back and feel some of those feelings again. (Warning: autoplay audio)
- Speaking of the enthusiasm of children, Gideon has pet more than three hundred dogs, which is certainly more than I have.
