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!
- Some sensations on our skin cause itching while others don’t, and biological research is ON IT.
- Octopus sex is by default kind of sneaky, since the male of the species is comparatively teeny-tiny.
- You may have cause to apologize for something. Shocking, I know, but true. Take a look at this step-by-step guide and your amends-making will be all set.
- This Week in Video Editing: take footage of people running backwards and reverse it. Hilarity ensues.
- Via the great and grand Steve Wille: total suicide prevention is remarkably ambitious, but you could hardly set a lesser goal, could you? (There are suicides I understand, of course; the point is that it’s caused not by random character flaws, but by concrete, knowable, and preventable factors.)
- At the height of the AIDS epidemic (when the official Reagan Administration response to millions of deaths was a series of giggles and guffaws), Ruth Coker Burks took it upon herself to be the one person who would show an ounce of humanity to people disowned by their families and stigmatized twice over. She also has some nice insights into continuing HIV/AIDS stigma in our present age of creeping equality and Getting Better.
- Guinness is going vegan, because everyone deserves their choice of paths to cruelty-free drunkenness.
- While living in space long-term, you really do have to worry about your muscles, your eyes, and your sanity.
- Plans for what to do after we make contact with alien life depend greatly on that life coming in a form that is at all compatible with any way we have of understanding the phenomena that surround us.
- Have I already posted 8-bit Mad Max? Doesn’t matter, still awesome.
- Too long has the human species hoarded all music: it’s time to make some for cats. The samples in the video did little to lure my cat away from wherever he was as I was watching it, but hey, he’s probably on the other side of the house snuggling against a heater. Wintertime is hard for cats in this house.
- Think of any thing, specifically any product of culture, and there’s someone out there who collects it — everything means something, and everything will have some historical value eventually. So don’t sneer at the AOL disc collecting community.
- There’s a controversy brewing in the curling community over high-tech brooms. It can’t be too long until I get to see curling again, right? …wait, crap, 2016 is a summer Olympics year. Poopy.
- Is your phone number prime? IS IT?
- Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr’s descendants have reënacted the fatal duel that is probably the first thing you know about them, so at least their eternal spirits can find some semblance of rest. What I really want to know, though, is did they see the musical?? (That goes for the descendants as well as the ghosts.)
- Winter is just about here, folks. (I know it’s November already, but here in the CT it was 70 degrees yesterday.) That may mean many things to you, but surely the highlight is the renewed availability of egg nog, surely the ruling party of dairy products.
- This Week in Disease: there’s a cure for sickle cell anemia!
