Shown in the image are representations of all the Earth’s water and all of the air in Earth’s atmosphere collected into spheres and placed next to the mass of the planet for comparison. The site where I found this image also includes sources of information for finding the mass of all of the water and air, and some complicated math which claims to prove the accuracy of the claim. Whether or not the math actually proves anything, I think the picture is pretty interesting. There is also a post at boing boing about this image, which means a lot of users are sharing their comments about it.

This is the arcade that my inner 12-year-old would put together if I were given a blank check and access to the favorite games of my youth. Peter Hirschberg has made that pipe dream into a reality. With over 60 games spanning video game history from Pong to Donkey Kong, he has gathered a very impressive collection. He spent 2 years planning and building the structure, and describes it on his site.

Luna City Arcade is our private home arcade. It is housed in a seperate dedicated building, right next to our house. The building itself is 60′ x 40′ with 2 stories, a bathroom, and 12′ ceilings. The entire main floor is dedicated entirely to the arcade, so it is 2400 sq ft of wide open arcade space. Vintage posters for ’80s movies, toys, and video games line the walls, along with other period kitsch.

If you just need a quick way to convert a music file to MP3 format, or a Word Document to PDF, or a BMP image to a JPG file, you can do it online for free with Zamzar. You may have to deal with a pop-up ad or two, and there is a limit of 100 MB for the free version, but that’s plenty of space for almost any common audio file, document file, or image file. It’s probably not the best free tool for video conversion because of the limit, but it looks like it would be convenient in some situations.

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. This may be one of the most unique grammatically correct sentences in the English language. The three different uses of the word buffalo include the city, the animal, and the verb meaning to harass. The meaning of the sentence can be stated in a more understandable way using synonyms. Bison from the city of Buffalo [Buffalo buffalo], who are harassed by other bison from the city of Buffalo [Buffalo buffalo buffalo], themselves harass a third group of bison from Buffalo [buffalo Buffalo buffalo]. Now that’s a lot of buffalo. Read more about the structure and the history of this sentence on Wikipedia.

Pizza seems like a fairly simple food. A crust of dough is covered by a tomato based sauce, cheese, and toppings before being baked in a hot oven. If you stop to think about it, however, there are many interesting ways that the simple food is prepared, and many of them are regional variations. I’m not talking about the latest change made by Pizza Hut to put cheese in the crust, add another layer of pepperoni, or fill sausages with pizza sauce. SeriousEats.com has a story detailing the different styles of pizza around the country, and it’s pretty interesting to read a little about the history about the origin of these different kinds of pie.

The World Beard and Moustache championships is held every two years, and by all accounts it’s an exciting and fun-filled event. The 2009 version will be in Anchorage Alaska in May 2009. Franz “Schani” Mitterhauser, a contestant shown here, has won numerous accolades around the world with his impressive partial beard, and he hopes that his streak will continue in Anchorage. Some of the other extraordinary examples of facial follicles can be seen in the gallery of previous champions.

Italian artist Guido Daniele is known for his creative body painting, and his creations of realistic looking hand animals are truly impressive. I particularly like the elephant shown here, because the texture of the skin adds even more realism. For more good examples of his technique, visit galleries one and two of his animal hand art, or visit his homepage to take a look at other types of art.

There are a lot of sources for information about current movies and entertainment, but the field is narrowed when you are searching for news about what’s coming. A good resource for that kind of information is I Watch Stuff, an entertainment website specializing in projects which are in their early stages and consequently still below the radar of Entertainment Tonight, People Magazine, and USA Today Life Section. I used to read Premier magazine for similar information, but they unfortunately stopped printing their magazine and started sending me Us Weekly which turned out to be a completely unsuitable replacement. They do still maintain a website, but I find I Watch Stuff to be more interesting and less sensational.

Art is great for it’s meaning, and sometimes for it’s sheer frivolity. Most of the sculptures in this list of 33 weird statues and sculptures around the world fit into the latter category, though some of the examples have arguably deeper meanings. Pictured here is a local favorite which the blogger left off of his list. The Spoonbridge With Cherry is located in the Sculpture Garden near the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

The original author calls these the 19 best ads he has ever seen. I’m not sure if I would go that far, but there are some clever campaigns in this post at uaddit.com. Pictured here are paper cups with noses printed in such a way that you could test out how they would look and call the listed plastic surgery center to make your favorite one a reality. Other entries are good too. I like the Playboy Magazine Cover beach towel with only the model missing. A good-looking woman just needs to put on a bikini and lay down on it to complete the picture. The MacBook Pro and Leica camera ads are also good examples of eye-catching advertising.

Despite the mistake prone URL, cl1p.net has a good service to provide. By creating a short-lived website, you can easily copy and paste text and small files between two different computers using the site as a temporary clipboard. I have often used gmail to a similar end, but in certain situations this might be a better solution. The directions are simple:
1. Create a URL just by typing it into your browser. For example: www.cl1p.net/mystuff/
2. Paste in anything you want and hit “Save”
3. Visit the same address on a different computer to gather whatever you stored

Fine art, master artist, and Crayola Crayons are not usually closely associated, but Don Marco bills himself as the Master Crayon Artist, and you can see from the self-portrait shown here that it is pretty impressive work. Don grew up in Northern Minnesota, and he started coloring with crayons in early childhood like most of us do. The difference is that he never stopped, and when he retired he took it to a new level, creating fine art drawings with Crayolas. Browse through the gallery for a very interesting glimpse of what he can do.

Demographic information is something that we in the U.S. are very good at collecting. The national census every ten years collects enough data about citizens to keep analysts busy until the next one comes along. Much of the data is in the public record, and Zipskinny.com has put together a website to help us digest and understand it. See how your zip code stacks up against the neighbors, or try out some other interesting comparisons. Since they are in close proximity, I found the comparison of Compton CA (90222) to Beverly Hills (90210) pretty interesting.

Though the Photoshop skills required to pull this trick off believably are enviable, the end result is downright creepy. Check out the entries in this Photoshop contest titled “Double Vision Pictures” at FreakingNews.com. At first it seems like something isn’t quite in focus, but then when your eyes adjust, you realize that it is just downright strange. Some entries are definitely better than others, but almost all of them are enough to give you the shivers.

The dark roasted blend blog has a collection of the world’s most interesting bridges. There are actually so many entries that it was broken up into part 1 and part 2. One of my favorites is the Nanpu Bridge over the Huangpu River, located at the South Dock in Shanghai, China. I wouldn’t be too happy about having that much concrete right in my backyard, but the picture of the bridge at night does look impressive.