Want to watch a remake of Kenny Rogers’ song “The Gambler” with lyrics about sorting algorithms? I knew it. This one compares selection sort and quicksort. Another video (sadly music free) compares quicksort and bubble sort. Besides those sorting videos, I came across these visual representations recently that are almost beautiful.

• Flags of Imaginary Nations is a flickr pool of photos that work as flags. The thumbnails are great for flattening the image into simple shapes and colors, and the detail view reveals you’re really looking at.
• It’s difficult to count, but I think there are ten women dancing to create the bodhisattva of “a thousand hands.” coool. and incredibly precise.
• The redundant clock.

“Time lapse video of night sky as it passes over the 2009 Texas Star Party in Fort Davis, Texas. The galactic core of Milky Way is brightly displayed. Images taken with 15mm fisheye lens.”

• This page compares the size of many of the world’s biggest cities’ public transportation systems. In short, subways at scale. Paris looks so tightly packed.
• A gallery of all the anonymous avatars that different sites use.
• In B-flat: Play some clips. Play them together. I love it.

This is part of a series of photos from inside a modern Russian nuclear power plant. Gotta love all those dials.

The Chicago Music Exchange blog found an obscure interview Kurt Cobain gave to Fender guitar magazine months before he died. In it, he talks candidly about performing song writing:

Interviewer: It must be a very odd feeling for Nirvana to be performing in sports arenas these days. How do you get along with the crowds your attracting now?

Kurt: Much better than I used to. When we first got successful, I was extremely judgmental of the people in the audience. I held them up to a sort of punk-rock ethos. It upset me that we were attracting and entertaining the very people that a lot of my music was a reaction against. I’ve since become much better for accepting people for who they are. Regardless of who they are before they came to the show, I get a few hours to try and subvert the way they view the world. It’s not that I’m trying to dictate, it’s just that I am afforded a certain platform on which I can express my views. At the very least, I always get the last word.

…

Interviewer: On In Utero, and in concert, you play some of the most powerful “anti-solos” ever hacked out of a guitar. What comes to mind for you when it’s time for the guitar to cut loose?

Kurt: Less than you could ever imagine.

• The Sears Tower is adding glass-bottomed platforms to its observation deck. It’ll be open in June.
• An American living in Holland, Russell Shorto writes about the differences living in a modern “socialist welfare state.” It’s fascinating in part because direct comparisons to the US are so difficult. The Dutch have one of the oldest free market economies in existence, but they also have a 52% tax rate.
• In the cool looking flash game Effing Hail, you control the wind and the hail to destroy things.