Hey I just got back from Argentina. Did I miss anything?

All this Michael Jackson memorializing reminded me of a chart of sampling that's been done of his songs that was viral a little while ago. I didn't realize it at the time but the guy who made it does these "sample maps" has a whole bunch of them. Also interesting to read how it went viral.

I also liked this "Origins of the Moonwalk" video.

Less cool but I still watched it, Billie Tweets.

And I imagine this year's Thrill 2009 will be well attended.

Just reading the phrase "inkjet-printable shrink plastic" should set your brain ablaze with ideas but in cast the transition from Michael Jackson was too much for that, "Make Photo Necklaces, Earrings, Magnets and More Using Shrinkable Plastic." It's DIY Shrinky Dinks.

Speaking of DIY, my favorite new site is There, I Fixed It. A wonderful tribute to human ingenuity.

Kid builds his own roller coaster.

360 view from inside a water bottle

How language effects the way you think. Not as long or as dense as it looks. Good food for thought. How is the way you see the world guided by the language you use to describe the world?

Stop Paying Attention: Zoning Out Is a Crucial Mental State

Amazing face painting. With some of them I can't even make out the face.

Why the Terminator sounds like Arnold.

Countdown featured this last week but it's the kind of thing that's better online so you can play it a few times and figure out what the guy's doing. He appears to swing the baseball bat at least twice with every motion.

For a long-hair considering making a clean aesthetic break before I end up looking like an old metal head who didn't know when to quit, the results of the Today show's latest semi-regular emasculation exercise are not very encouraging. They look worse, right?

The state of the music review industry (some curses) - A whole lot of implications for news reporting here. Look for the "crowdsourcing kills" meme to catch fire.

This experiment of virtual homelessness in  Sims 3 is pretty compelling even if it has some wonky lines: "She's now got a negative moodlet for 'embarrassment', which almost negates the mood bonus she got for getting clean."

Insane. I wouldn't even do the gorilla stunt but the tattoo? That's just insane. (That said, at the recent International Tattoo Convention in New York City, one of the most common sights was cover-up work, so maybe this guy is giving himself a mental "out" with the idea that he might do a big sleeve to cover it one day. The part I don't get is that the phone is only $200. Surely that tattoo cost at least that much.

Steve Martin's business card

Remember those "literal video" spoof songs that make fun of music videos? The one for "Total Eclipse of the Heart" is good.

This guy is using Twitter to conduct scientific experiments on psychic phenomenon. Basically you try to guess where he is.

How does anyone plug anything in in Brazil?

Metro Dig at Tysons Stirs Underground Intrigue - This is basically the opening chapter of a spy novel. Or maybe another Men In Black sequel.

How to Learn About Everything - Might be best to first read How to Understand Everything (and Why) - This is really about science learning but I do think it has broader parallels. By coincidence I've been thinking about this kind of general learning lately as I've been watching my son learn to speak. He's at a stage where he's nailing down tenses and prepositions and it reminds me of something we saw here a while ago about how to learn a language quickly. (After poking around I figured out I was confusing two different articles but they were by the same guy: Learn any language in an hour and learn any language in three months.) The idea behind the language articles is to learn the general parameters and most common references.
From those basic parameters it's a matter of building your vocabulary.

(Metamodern's map of science is also really neat.)

Latest stunt from the Improv Everywhere folks is a surprise wedding reception for a newly married-at-city-hall couple. This seems like less of a joke than just a really nice thing to do for some people. I smiled through the whole thing. (Their last stunt, the fake funeral, totally suckered me. I didn't see it on April 1st so I didn't think of April Fool's Day when I saw it.)

If you like tennis... (Actually, in my experience, if you like tennis you won't think this is funny. If you don't like tennis, this reduces tennis to the ridiculous sport you think it is.)

Bullet Time is wicked hard but also quick to play a bunch of times so it's not much of an investment. I must have played 15 times but still never lived past 30 seconds.

Damian Walters show reel gymnastics - I never get sick of parkour videos. What does someone do with skills like this? Stunt man is the only occupation I can think of that could make use of this guy's assets. Maybe also circus.

Seriously cool balancing trick - Also explains why the fork you're eating with at that restaurant is all bent and wonky.

Google Holodeck: StreetView In 360 Degrees - I remember once playing with a Microsoft map program that gave you a street view and put you in a car or something to kind of drive around. This reminds me of that only room sized.

The backgrounds of famous Web memes - How many can you name?

Topsy is a new Twitter based search engine. There are few out there now and I'm woefully behind on researching them. The idea is that the search engine folks are really enthusiastic about the idea of "real time search" and taking advantage of the immediacy inherent in the content people are pumping into Twitter (not just what they're saying but what they're linking to and submitting to Twitpic, etc.). It reminds me of how people thought of Technorati and its ability to gather data quickly from blogs.

How Long Did It Take for the World to Identify Google as an AltaVista Killer? A pretty fascinating review of how Google came into the public consciousness.

Scribble maps - draw on a Google map.

Slate has a (relatively) new photoblog as well. I didn't know Magnum belonged to Slate.

While it's not typical for a TV show's Web support to contribute much to the actual on-air content, last week I got to participate in the production of a segment about an effort to plot as much as we know about North Korea on a Google Earth map file. The segment was based on this Wall Street Journal piece but you can download the file directly from the blog of one of the main participants in the project here.

If you aren't able to make Google Earth work for whatever reason* I plotted some of the interesting points on Google Maps as well on this page so you don't have to do quite the amount of hunting I had to do.