Yahoo! Picks - bringing you the best of the Web since 1995

Jonathan Harris, creator of such stylish charts of the Web's emotional and intellectual life as Lovelines, 10x10, and Phylotaxis (and—disclaimer—the Yahoo! Netrospective), now relates his own experience spearing two whales with Inupiat Eskimos in Barrow, Alaska.

The "experiment in human storytelling" unreels like a lush, cinematic sequence. Using a camera on "plodding sequence," Jonathan documents the trek through photographs taken every five minutes. The taxi drive to the airport and the long flight west set up the astonishing vistas of snow and sky; the appearance of the whales; the long haul of the beasts on to the ice; and the ruddy, warm faces of Jonathan's Inupiat hosts.

Skip ahead or shift backwards using the bar graph or various modes at the bottom of the screen. (Need more evidence of Jonathan's design finesse? Check out the "pinwheel" option.) If you don't want to dive in to the photos immediately, explore the endeavor's highlights and interface. Jonathan's statement relates his intent to craft a modern chronicle of this ancient hunt. He succeeds, superbly.

In 1983, before the baby dangling and the pajama perp walk and the horrifying allegations in court, Michael Jackson performed "Billie Jean" at the Motown 25th anniversary celebration—and looked sublime. For 5 minutes and 35 seconds (and 10,060 frames of video), he glittered and jittered and introduced the world to both the Moonwalk and the fashion potential of a single white glove. Now, the White Glove Tracking project is deep into a collaborative effort to "isolate just the white glove from this moment in pop-culture history." Don't ask why—they're not saying. Just lend a helping hand to isolate a frame or two. Hey, if NASA can harness the power of "volunteer science" for its Mars Clickworks experiment, White Glove Tracking can do it for the Moonwalk moment and the white glove's grand style statement.

Created by the artist Miltos Manetas, this site doesn't really have anything to do with the famous painter. But if you jerk and jiggle and click your mouse at random intervals, you can approximate a two-dimensional mélange of color and shape reminiscent of the abstract expressionist's style. And that's all you can do—try to draw anything besides the algorithmically-prescribed multicolored blotches and lines, and you'll wind up with the kind of pre-K Crayola masterpiece even a mother might not hang on her refrigerator. Aside from the obvious fun of engaging in what less-cultured commentators might call "scribbling," the site provides, to get all Zen for a moment, an excellent opportunity to revel in process over product. Because, after spending, oh, 45 minutes creating a perfect harmony of form and hue, we could not figure out how to save or print it. But the chances of our investing 45 minutes in the site again today? Very high.