Packing 26 songs and 98 years of history into a few short minutes, this video by cdza investigates the role of whistling in popular music. There’ll be some familiar riffs, like those from the Black Keys and Beck, but a few surprising tunes pop up as well. Can you name all those famous whistle-breaks?

In reality, Jacob Fleisher is a successful screenwriter, but in this short video he does a great service to humanity by auditioning for every sci-fi character ever. In doing so, he also runs through just about every single sci-fi trope in the book. The only ones I think he missed would be “it turned out we were the real monsters after all,” or maybe a shaggy-God type scenario. Still, a lot of fun.

For our India-based readers and fans of Indian television, it’s a great day as YouTube has announced that they’ve reached 19,000 episodes from over 300 Indian TV shows. The shows, which cover six different languages, have been organized into a localized page for viewers in India but can be found here by anyone curious about taking a look. With hundreds of shows to choose from, you should have no trouble finding something to watch.

You know when the modern patron saint of astronomical sciences Neil deGrasse Tyson says something is a must-see that it’s a big deal, and it’s hard to get much bigger than a scale model of the entire universe. Well, not everything in the entire universe, but a series of new and familiar touchstones that really put the scale of everything into context. And I do mean everything: The flash presentation created by Cary Huang starts with strings (no, these kind) and ends with “the observable universe.” Getting from beginning to end does take a bit of time, but it’s well worth the trip. After all, space is big. Really big. 

It’s official. There are no Sudoku puzzles with 16 clues or fewer, and it took about a year to figure that out. Gary McGuire and his crew at University College Dublin were the ones who spearheaded the campaign to find an answer to this eternal question and wound up solving it with brute force. Well, brute force, a little ingenuity, and 7.1 million core-hours of processing time on a machine with 640 Intel Xeon hex-core processors.

It’s hard to imagine a world without YouTube, as the video sharing service has entirely changed how we take in content on these wide interwebs. That’s why the service’s year-end retrospective covering the most popular videos of 2011 is so fascinating, as it features many of the vital videos that came to define this year. And that’s both a good and bad thing.

Power Rangers was always pretty silly with a side of incredibly awesome. I remember the heady days of sneaking around to watch it at my friends’ houses behind my parents’ backs, and now, I suddenly remember that Power Rangers was totally amazing. Apparently, for the 35th anniversary of the franchise, there was a Super Sentai (the Japanese series from which Power Rangers is derived) movie release that features an opening scene with the Power Rangers, all of them, in a fight that is obscenely epic (and also pretty silly). Suddenly, I would really like to play a Power Rangers RTS.

Prepare to drown in awesomeness.

Growing up in the mystic Michigan peninsula as I did, I’ve seen more than my fair share of alarmingly large flocks of birds. However, I’ve never seen anything that compares to this murmuration, which twists and turns through the air as a living ocean wave. Though starlings are tiny and harmless on the ground, seeing that many in the air makes me a little nervous.

Thankfully, I can watch these acrobatic starlings from the comfort of my own home thanks to the intrepid camera work of Sophie Windsor Clive. Head on past the break for a video.

Back in 1981, IBM launched the world’s first personal computer. Loaded with an Intell8088 processor and 16k of memory, it helped put everyday people in front of computers and started bringing high-technology into the home. We’ve come a long way since then, through various revolutions and bubbles, and what a journey it has been.

To celebrate these glorious three decades of personal computing, PC Mag has put together this timeline of major events in personal computing. It doesn’t cover everything, certainly, but it’s an interesting collection of the events that brought us to where we are today. Be sure to note the adjusted prices for some of these machines, it certainly makes me a lot happier about what I paid for my netbook.

Check out the full version below.

Yesterday, Aaron Swartz, former co-owner of Reddit, was arrested for downloading upwards of 4.5 million articles from the JSTOR academic archive, willfully evading MIT’s attempts to stop him. The charges, according to Ars Technica, allege that Swartz “unlawfully obtain[ed] information” and “recklessly damag[ed]” a protected computer. Considering JSTOR is an academic, electronic library and most schools pay for unlimited access, these charges straddle a weird line between Swartz’s potentially authorized uses and his suspected unauthorized intent.

David Segal, an executive from the advocacy group Demand Progress that Swartz helped found, likened the charges to “trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library.” While this may technically be the case, Swartz’s methods of downloading this articles were decidedly suspicious, and clearly, defiantly against the wishes of MIT.