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 informative.
- This Week in Visual Aids: Scroll down this vision of the sea to see what lurks at any distance in the briny depths.
- RIP Dorothy Fontana, writer & story editor for the original Star Trek and writer & producer for the animated series. When people talk about the most iconic and important aspects of the original series, half of what they’re talking about was invented by Gene Coon or Dorothy Fontana. I wrote a little about Fontana on the occasion of her last contribution to the franchise.
- RIP Rene Auberjonois, of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Boston Legal, The Little Mermaid, and about a hundred other things.
- In the Netherlands, there are no more stray dogs — not because of euthanasia, but because of aggressive neutering and adoption programs.
- 48 people in Samoa have died from the measles recently, including 22 infants, after vaccination rates plummeted, just the newest blood on the hands of anti-vaxx conspiracy theorists and gullible parents.
- Jeopardy champion James Holzhauer is hyping his much-vaunted showdown with Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter via Steiner math. What a world.
- This Week in Neural Net Processors, Learning Computers: The trained-AI dungeon crawler text adventure game turns a time-honored genre into a lucid dream in which you are an active participant in creating the world you’re playing in.
- “I Wanna Be Sedated” is being played on a dulcimer. Your argument is invalid.
- Automatically-generated merchandise can be disturbing and offensive (such as Amazon plastering photos of Auschwitz on beach towels, bottle openers, and Christmas tree ornaments), but the algorithms can sometimes be used against themselves. Some clothing sites use programs that scan social media for people saying they would buy something on a shirt, and stick the attached image on a shirt; understand what it’s looking for and you too may be able to trick it into printing denunciations of itself, or even selling merchandise that will piss off a corporation big enough to sue.
- This Week in Maps: The linguistic diversity of New York City is even more expansive than you think.
- If you like, you too can own one of Queen Victoria’s fruitcakes. And you know what, if that’s your thing, I’m not here to judge. Just…why?
- Artist Chris Soal makes toothpick sculptures that look like fungal growths.
