This Week on the Web

As the holiday shopping season kicked off in earnest with the American Thanksgiving holiday on Thursday, this week was full of Web rumors about special Black Friday deals and new gadgets and games for sale. But amidst all the consumer madness, there was one very sensible suggestion: instead of buying friends and family a lot of expensive gifts, do them a favor and update their browser for them instead.(Trust us, they didn't really want that iPad anyway.)

And what better place to start than with the browser on their phone? If your nearest and dearest are Android users, you can give them a brand-spanking-new version of Opera Mini: Opera Mini 6.5.2 for Android. It's got lots of stability fixes to make your experience on Android easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy.

Meanwhile, a bit of news for those of you who count actor Kevin Bacon among your social media friends: researchers at Facebook and the University of Milan announced the average number of acquaintances separating any one human being in the world from any other was not 6, as previously assumed, but a more scientific-sounding 4.74. Does this mean that 20% of the world population is not yet your friend, but could be?
(Or merely that those of us with horrible math skills can do our own social media "research"?)

Finally, on a more personal note, I must share something that intrigued and horrified yours truly more than anything else I looked at on the entire Internet this week. Two words, my friends: Dental. Robot.

You know they just had to use the highest-pitched drill as possible in that video...

Have a great weekend, everyone!