Just point your Web browser to The Scale of the Universe and zoom in to see the smallest object in the universe (quantum foam with a Planck length of 10^-35m), or out to see the estimated size of the universe (10²⁶x9.3m).

Get this: The largest known star in the universe? VY Canis Majoris at 10¹²x3m is big enough to fill most of the distance between our sun and Pluto. That’s frakking huge. Zoom in and you’ll see that your eye lid is only slightly thicker than a single salt crystal, but that’s still substantially thicker than a human hair.

OK, enough talk. Go check out The Scale of the Universe. And why does everybody keep looking at my pants?

Stephen’s map visualizes the distance between McDonald’s restaurants for the continental United States with glowing orange lights. The brighter the lights, the closer the restaurants are.

While the sheer density of McDonald’s locations in the U.S. is staggering, I was equally impressed with the technology that went into whipping up this map. Stephen was able to get ahold of the raw data from AggData, massage a CSV file with some coding magic, and build a map that shows there are plenty of places all over the country for people that think they really do deserve a break today.

That said, there’s a frakking ass-load of McDonald’s restaurants in the U.S. I can only imaging what the map would look like if it also included all the Burger King, Wendy’s, Chik-Fil-A and KFC joints, too.

Holy crap. I think my arteries are clogging just thinking about it.

Aside from the brain-scrubbing videos, YouTube rocks. It’s packed tight with entertainment, training, video blogs, promotional videos and more. You can’t ask for a better deal as a viewer: YouTube rocks.

For the people providing all that tasty content, YouTube’s ultra easy-ness means that you don’t need a rocket science degree to figure out how to get your message, entertainment, or drunk videos out to the world. So what’s not to love?

It’s the branding. Every time someone views a video you upload, they see the YouTube logo — great branding for YouTube, but not so much for you because your content is branded as YouTube and not just you. That’s not a big deal to everyone, but if controlling your brand, even if it’s a video podcast, is important to you, then it’s time to pay attention to your branding. Viewers should remember your logo, and not YouTube’s logo.

If I’m going to steer the brand conscious away from YouTube, the least I can do is offer some alternatives. How about Vimeo or Viddler. I especially like Viddler because they make it easy to embed your own logo in your videos, but both offer simple ways to add video content to your own site.

Here’s a great example of controlling your brand: Don McAllister’s ScreenCastsOnline. I don’t know who hosts his videos, and it doesn’t matter. Everything carries the ScreenCastsOnline brand, and there’s never any doubt who is in charge of the content.

Of course, there’s always a trade off because life sucks that way. In this case, the trade off is that while you have more control over your own branding, you’ll probably have to work harder to get people to find your work. YouTube is pretty much ubiquitous, so that’s where everyone goes first when they want to find a video. Yeah, I do it, too.

Think about who gets the branding benefit from your hard work. It might be YouTube, but it could be you.

And now I’m heading over to YouTube for some 2 Hot Girls in the Shower time. No, it’s not what you’re thinking. Get your mind out of the gutter.

It’s true: The Big Bang Theory totally rocks and I should have started watching it sooner. But that’s not the point. The point is that those guys at Apple are frakking smart and anyone that’s worried the little Cupertino-company-that-could will lose relevance now that Steve Jobs is on a medical leave of absence needs to take a big step back and look at the bigger picture.

Let me illustrate. I’m given season one as a gift. All I have to do is click a link in an email to open iTunes and start downloading all of the episodes. When I’m ready to start watching, I plug my MacBook Pro into my TV and even though everything works easily and just as it should I immediately get why people that have an Apple TV love it. The Apple guys already have me contemplating a new Mac hardware purchase.

I don’t start the episode by pressing keys on my Mac. Instead, I whip out my iPhone and start tapping away with Apple’s own Remote application. Now I’m starting to feel like I’m an Apple commercial, but it gets even better.

Between episodes I realize that I really like the show’s theme song — not a big surprise since the Barenaked Ladies have always put a smile on my face. I fire up the iTunes Store app on my iPhone, do a quick search for the theme song, download it and start listening to it in under a minute.

The point is that Apple gets how to fit all the pieces together and make it easy to get and use music and video, and they know how to design the devices and software that tie all the parts together in a way that makes you want to use this stuff. They pulled all this off in a compelling way that no other company has been able to match so far, and they did it in a way that makes people feel OK about spending money — well, relatively OK. There’s only so much one company can do when the recording industry and the RIAA are involved.

OK, one little rant: Music and video download prices are still higher than they should be. Someone really needs to turn the oxygen flow back on for these guys and help them see that their 100 year old ideas on recordings needs to go. It’s a new world, people. Welcome to the 21st century.

Now to head outside and see if Apple TVs grow on trees.