So the other night, I’m watching Bill Engvall’s 15° Off Cool. [Happy 50th birthday a few days early, fella.] In it, he mentions the AMC Gremlin. I realized that I knew nothing about it, so I fired up Wikipedia. I sorta vaguely knew about American Motor Company’s history, but I learned a lot more of it. And no, I’m not going to say that I followed the rabbit trail of George W. Romney, father of Mitt. No, I went through Georges Besse straight on through to him being assassinated by Action Directe.

Yep, from Bill Engvall to Maoist rebels in six leaps. Man, I love the Internet.

Here’s today’s WikiBinge [thanks for the term, Brad]:

• Quincunical maps are “a conformal map projection [s] (except for 4 points where its conformality fails) that presents the sphere as a square.” Pretty interesting stuff, if you’re interested in map projections, as I am. [Picked up from the article on quincunxes, which I linked into from Angkor Wat after a mention of the temple on ABC World News Tonight with Charlie Gibson.
• I've spent a fair amount of time reading Antarctica-related articles lately. It really made me wonder if Emilio Marcos Palma had ever written a book about being the only child of Antarctica, but it seems that he hasn't [on Amazon.com, anyway]. I was also quite fascinated by the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition—enough to want to read a book on it, perhaps—and Lake Vostok. Any lake that’s still liquid at -3°C because of massive pressure from glacial ice above and geothermal heating below is wicked cool, regardless of what implications that has for life on Europa. “ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE.” Come on … never tell engineers, “Don’t do this.” We’re gonna poke it with a stick, man.
• My senior-year high school roommate Jason sent me a friend request on Facebook today, and after accepting it, I found that he was at SUNY-Stony Brook. Hell, I didn’t know where Stony Brook was until I looked it up. I look at those median family incomes and go, “Man. Too rich for my blood.”

May you get sucked in for a good hour or two as I have.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and it seems like a fun thing to me: posting about the things that have interested me while noodling around on Wikipedia. So, hey … new category. Here’s the first installment:

• Falls Church, Virginia is the smallest city in the United States, in terms of surface area. Yes, 10,377 people lived in 2.0 square miles at the time of the 2000 Census. I mean, that’s not Manhattan-level population density, but it does make one think. You could reasonably walk the perimeter of the city in a hour or so, and … yeah.
• There are 3,077 counties in the United States, an average of 62 a state. There’s only one state with 62 counties—New York. Since when is New York average in anything?
• Jeff Tweedy sings, “It’s hot in the poor places tonight.” What are the poorest places in the United States? As someone who has lived in the twin states of Mississippi and Alabama for the last 16 years, I figured that plenty of places in those two states would be high on the list. I was wrong; South Dakota has four of the five-poorest counties in America. All four of those counties have, as you might expect, Indian reservations. Starr County, Texas, on the Mexican border, is the poorest U.S. county without a reservation in it. Mississippi’s first listing is #17, and Alabama’s is #27.

Unlike most of my Wikipedia excursions, I can actually remember how this one got started: I asked myself what the major metropolitan areas were in the Mountain Time Zone. Seeing that two Texas counties were in the Mountain Time Zone, I then got interested about counties, and … well, there it went.

What’ve you been looking at on Wikipedia lately?