We’ve previously featured Mexico’s giant flags but this is the world’s largest unsupported flagpole in Jordan. Narrowly beating the previous record holder in UAE, the flagpole is 126.8 metres tall, is illuminated at night and can apparently be seen from as far as 20km away. Basically, it’s very big.

But it’s not that big! The world’s tallest supported flagpole is on the border of North and South Korea and towers over the land at 160m. Basically, it’s very, very big.

Thanks: Jerry Mills & Me

Check out this cool (and very chirpy looking) globe/man thing on a roof in Tokyo. He appears to be wearing a busboy’s hat… or is it… a manhole cover?

There’s some characters on the roof too, but unfortunately Japanese is all Greek to me, so it’s over to you guys to shed some light on this odd little dude!

Thanks: For nothing.

Inspired by the National Geographic Photo of the Day last week, I went looking for Minneapolis’s Spoonbridge and Cherry sculpture. Unfortunately something got lost in translation.

The story wasn’t much better on Windows Live Local, or Yahoo! Maps Beta who both use exactly the same image (the traffic on the roads is identical), but interesting to see how differently the other services handle compression of the images. Google actually looks pretty poor in comparison to both of the others.

Anyway, I was disappointed not to be able to see it better, so here’s the giant spoon and fruit courtesy of National Geographic.

Thanks to National Geographic and Norton Lam.

Surrounded on three sides by mountain ranges, this is the eerie and desolate Dugway Proving Grounds, a large-scale biological and chemical agent testing grounds south of Salt Lake City, Utah. The US has tested all sorts of nasty things here over the last 65 years including flame throwers, chemical spray systems, biological warfare weapons and toxic agents.

Encompassing around 32 3200 km², there’s a large area of high-resolution imagery to the east which contains various empty structures including this spooky-looking thing.

Here’s some links for you: The Dugway Official Site, some ground level photos of the area and of course the obligatory Wikipedia page!

Thanks to Phillip Lockwood-Holmes and Matthew.

Here’s a neat trick – this is a satellite photo of the great lakes, the largest fresh water lakes in the world etc, etc.

Now if you click to the great lakes and them zoom in step-by-step you’ll arrive here:

which are the tiny-great lakes! Cool, huh?

Thanks: Tristan