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!
- An HIV-killing condom may be available in Australia soon.
- More on HIV: it’s theoretically possible to use RNA to edit out parts of an infected person’s genome.
- Cut paper art is intricate, delicate, and beautiful.
- This Week in Crowdfunding Initiatives: we could potentially buy eleven Pennsylvania bridges and brand them however we like.
- One hazard of paddling out to see the whales is that you might get temporarily stranded on a whale.
- If you’re looking for the Cryptkeeper’s diminutive great-uncle, apparently you need to look in an antique store in Maine.
- If you have a phobia that can ruin an evening (or more) if you see it in a movie, or know someone who does, Phobias at the Movies is putting together a database you can consult.
- Hey, whatcha thinking about Bane? “Oh, I can’t stop thinking about Bruce, wondering where he could be, who he is with, what is he thinking, is he thinking of me, and whether he’ll ever return someday.”
- Thousands of KGB documents are now available for viewing online, in case you want to look up whether the shady neighbor you had when you were growing up really was a malicious interloper.
- Steve Wille obviously doesn’t want any of us to be able to sleep ever again, for he’s releasing a massive cloud of mayflies from his stronghold in Wisconsin to come after us all. Great. Thanks.
- Also in reader submissions, Joseph Lee wants you to know about this lovingly-crafted portrayal of a very uncomfortable place. (Like the back of a Volkswagon?)
- Last week I showed you had books on posters. This week, behold some imaginative books on books.
- Hey, tri-state sports fans! With Mike and the Soundboard you can have your very own meeting of the minds with Mike Francesa! Go ahead, talk sports, go at it as hard as you can.
- I never read the Star Wars EU — I was always a Trek book kid when it came to tie-ins — but this level of devotion about tie-in novel covers has got to be admired.
- Lawns are utter crap; this becomes especially apparent during water shortages.
- Take a couple photos from the surface of Mars of its moon Phobos crossing in front of the sun, put two of those photos side by side, and what you get is googly eyes.
- This Week in the Black Death…welp, that’s an unfortunate thing to type. In northern china, quarantine procedures are being put in place after a man died of the bubonic plague.
- Sometimes you might like to think things are going to be okay. Sometimes you might like to think we as a society can figure things out, move forward, make real progress. Then you’re reminded that the third-pound hamburger failed because people can’t figure out fractions.
- Astronomers recently found an exoplanet with a much longer year than most planets we’ve found so far.
- MIT researchers propose new algorithms to optimize traffic light cycles. I wonder what sorts of bureaucracies you have to get through to change the programming on traffic lights.
- Under ideal circumstances, you don’t want to have to have brain surgery. I hope that’s not controversial. But if the road ahead of you leads that way, you might as well have to do it because of metal.
- One intrepid designer looked at parking signs that require you to read a lot of text from your car, found them wanting, and designed a new signage system that you could not possibly read from your car.
- This Week in Dramatic Readings: The Beyoncelogues.
- While she was pregnant, cartoonist Lauren Weinstein and her husband went through an agonizing wait to see if their potential child would have cystic fibrosis.
- In our PTB Nation Link of the Week, Tim Capel would like a word or two with fandom.
