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!
- Good news, everyone! The universe is not a black hole!
- Today is celebrate bisexuality day, coming as it does in the middle of Bisexual Awareness Week.
- It now seems apparent that David Cameron, the British Prime Minister who’s already murdered people through the application of economic policy, actually fucked a dead pig once. That doesn’t entirely stand in contrast to the time he burned a fifty-pound note in front of a homeless person as a rite of initiation into a club of his fellow horrorbags (plus, y’know, his life-threatening policy platform), but it’s certainly funnier and less horrific.
- As we all know, Whose Line Is it Anyway? is the show where the jokes are made up and the points don’t matter. But what if the points DID matter?
- It’s more than possible to have enough caffeine, or booze, or salt, or water, to kill you. But you probably won’t. I’d recommend against it.
- There’s big business, apparently, in buying up the rights to old prescription drugs that are used in routine treatments and cravenly jacking up the price. Such is life when the terror of the profit motive is allowed to run rampant in health care.
- This Week in Things Muslim People Can’t Do Without Harassment or Worse: build a clock. Can you make a clock by hand? I can’t make a clock by hand. By now just about everyone’s heard about this and a lot of people have Stood with Ahmed, including NASA engineers and the president and such. One thing: nobody ever thought he actually had a bomb; it’s only a convenient substitute for Islamophobia for everyone from this kid’s English teacher to the cops to Richard Dawkins and other mediocre Tweeters plying their bigotry. No bomb squad was called, no students were evacuated, no special precautions were made in handling the clock, because everyone knew it was a fucking clock. Then they arrested him anyway.
- Incidentally, last weekend Tamir Rice would have turned thirteen. You know, if a cop hadn’t decided to murder him.
- Happy belated World Elephant Day! The day itself was over a month ago, but elephants are eternal (hopefully), so enjoy several hundred years’ worth of attempts at drawing the massive animal by European artists who had never seen one.
- Seven Ways the Internet Is Improving Language. We invest any medium we use with measures of subtlety, which it’s best to be fluent in.
- The speed of light in a vacuum — the universal speed limit, as they say — has been known for a long time, but what determines that particular speed?
- This Week in Athletics: cheerleader Angel Rice went on national television to try to set a record for double twists.
- It’s getting to the end of September, and you know what that means, Wednesday Walkers — the 2015 Ig Nobel Prizes have been awarded! This year we pay homage to research into un-boiling eggs, bribing cops to get them to refuse bribes, the long-term effects of smooching, and whether it’s possible for one person to sire almost one thousand children in thirty years.