R comes with a lot of datasets, some with the core distribution and others with packages, but you’d never know which ones unless you went through all the examples found at the end of help documents. Luckily, Vincent Arel-Bundock cataloged 596 of them in an easy-to-read page, and you can quickly download them as CSV files.

Many of the datasets are dated, going back to the original distribution of R, but it’s a great resource for teaching or if you’re just looking for some data to play with.

You know those songs that you love so much that you cry because they’re over? Well, cry no more with the Inifinite Jukebox by Paul Lamere. Inspired by Infinite Gangnam Style, the Infinite Jukebox lets you upload a song, and it’ll figure out how to cut the beats and piece them back together for a version of that song that goes forever.

With The Infinite Jukebox, you can create a never-ending and ever changing version of any song. The app works by sending your uploaded track over to The Echo Nest, where it is decomposed into individual beats. Each beat is then analyzed and matched to other similar sounding beats in the song. This information is used to create a detailed song graph of paths though similar sounding beats. As the song is played, when the next beat has similar sounding beats there’s a chance that we will branch to a completely different part of the song. Since the branching is to a very similar sounding beat in the song, you (in theory) won’t notice the jump. This process of branching to similar sounding beats can continue forever, giving you an infinitely long version of the song.

I’m not sure what these digitally rendered Lego blocks by JR Schmidt represent, other than the geography of New York, but the image sure is pretty. This may or may not also have to do with me loving everything Lego.

In a beautiful rendition of the galaxy, Google visualized 100,000 stars, starting at the sun and out to a view of the Milky Way. Start with the tour, which takes you through an overview of what there is to see, and then explore on your own. Specifically, once you zoom out over four light years away from the sun, you start to see other known stars. Click on the labels for information and a closer look at what looks like flaming balls of lava. [via @pitchinc]

Since 2000, the Hewlett Foundation has made over 7,000 grants summing $3.86 billion, to support communities around the world. Periscopic broke it down by area and amount. Each section is a heat map with years on the horizontal and amount on the vertical. The darker the shade of green, the more grants given that year for the corresponding amount. Click on a rectangle, and you can see the details of any individual grant. [Thanks, Kim]

RStudio, the folks behind the IDE for R released last year, continues to expand their offerings for current and future R users. Shiny is RStudio’s most recent release, and it aims to make R web applications easier to make and share.

The main advantage is that you can create user interfaces that show R output, without HTML and JavaScript. There are essentially two parts to each app that you write: the client and the server. You load the Shiny package, create a client and server, and you’re off to the races.

However, don’t get too excited about R on the Web yet. The apps are meant to run locally, so to share an application with someone, you have to send them the code for them to run on their own. RStudio is working on a paid service that lets you host your apps online. Or, because Shiny is open source, you can try running it on your own, if you like.

If you go to the Facebook page for Mitt Romney, note the number of likes, wait a few seconds, and then refresh the page. The number of likes is decreasing fast enough that you can see the change over a short period of time. Disappearing Romney charts the change in real-time.

Tick, tick, tick.

See also Who Likes Mitt, with the quick API hack on github. [via @moebio]

Meta. Is it people’s interest, or is it actually 50 percent of statistics in the news are worthless numbers that were plugged in to make a story sound more factual?

I knew things were bad, but I didn’t know they were this bad. Obama has his work cut out for him. [Thanks, @adamsinger]