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!
- Last week, in addition to the best full-disc photo of Pluto we’ll have for a long time, the New Horizons probe caught over a thousand photos of Pluto and surrounding objects, including ice mountains on Pluto and evidence of active geology on Charon. This is awesome stuff.
- Meanwhile, on Mars, the Curiosity rover has found changing levels of methane gas that are at least evidence of active organic chemistry, if not quite as conclusive as scooping up actual organic microbes.
- I make an effort to bring the best of this wide wonderful web of ours to the Place to Be Nation every week. Only the finest links for us — including eighteen reviews of trail mix.
- If you’re about to describe something as “Judeo-christian,” you probably shouldn’t.
- Good on ya, Big Bird.
- This Week in Wednesday Walk Top Tips: some things to keep in mind if you’re steering someone’s wheelchair.
- Bea Arthur left a significant sum to the Ali Forney Center in her will, which kept its doors open at a sensitive time in 2009, and is now being recognized as the organization begins work on the Bea Arthur Residence for homeless LGBT kids who’ve been rejected by their families.
- The next great innovation in hipster music is here, and it is a tortilla you play like a record. Use uncooked flour tortillas only, as corn tortillas are too lumpy and cooked tortillas get shredded by the needle…but if you want to play a short song on a tortilla before cooking it and making something rustic and artisinal, you’re halfway to your own Food Network show.
- Everything is art — positively everything. Coffee stains? Totally art.
- Sharks are attracted to death metal, because low-frequency vibrations sound like struggling fish. Rock on, metalheads!
- RIP Sandra Bland, pulled over, brutalized by cops as a matter of course, arrested for nothing, and murdered by cops who want very badly for everyone to believe she hanged herself.
- As ancient ice melts in Scotland, the country is slowly rising (counteracting rising sea levels as a result of climate change), slightly pushing England down in a see-saw motion. Take that, Britons.
- An aquatic flatworm is able to inject sperm into its own head in order to reproduce. Let’s be honest here, a lot of us would do the same if we could.
- Give trees email addresses so that people can report when they need to be trimmed or when there’s some other issue, and people will just write letters to the trees.
- This Week in Interviews: what’s it like to be in the Blue Man Group?
- Check out the entymology of Ben Morse’s Ant-Man!
