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? Comment on the Walk post at the Place to Be Nation Facebook page, or find Glenn on the social media platform of your choice!
- Okay, so this is the creepiest thing I’ve seen in a while: the life-sized Lego figure with human skin. If yours is a sensitive soul, feel free to peace out before they reveal the hands.
- It’s a hard time for tech support in TV shows.
- What would happen if the Earth was made up of protons and the moon was made up of electrons?
- This Week in Climate Change: a heat wave in Siberia has unearthed zombie anthrax that’s swept through herds of reindeer.
- Robots are coming for all of our jobs, such as crawling around on blimps searching for leaks.
- The world’s billionaires can be located on a map just in case someone might want to, you know, plan a tactical strike or anything. Not that I or the fine folks at PTBN would condone such a thing.
- The fourth wall is so, so broken. It may as well be OVAH.
- DC fans want to shut down Rotten Tomatoes because a lot of people don’t like DC movies. I mean, it’s all well and good to be passionate about something, but it’s okay for people to not like the thing you like. It’ll be okay.
- This article on relative amounts of detail denoted by different languages is pretty fascinating, though I’m not sure “efficiency” is the best way to frame it. That seems a little too normative.
- In addition to all of the things we’re still discovering, apparently we’re still discovering new pigments.
- The ice bucket challenge may yet make a huge difference for people with ALS.
- Why do we haggle for cars? Why? Why oh why? Why do we force such difficult and social and horrible things on people who only want something with four moving wheels? (The inclination, once a conversation has started, to immediately seek the quickest way out of said conversation is inconvenient in contexts I’ve not yet counted, but haggling is one that definitely gets embarrassing.)
- Norway might give a gift of a border adjustment-slash-mountain to Finland. That’s so sweet, but geez, way to make the rest of us look bad when our friends’ and sweetums’ birthdays come around.
- Also in Norway, plans are underway to build a network of floating tunnels to help cars navigate the fjords. Insert your own “pining for the fjords” joke.
- This Week in Free Books: the New York Public Library has an app that people with library cards can use to check out 300000 ebooks.
- Bats are really cute. You can find awesome pictures and videos of them. You don’t want one as a pet.