Review some of the sensible advice you heard as a child by listening to these super-short performances of some of Aesop’s famous fables – fun, certainly, and perhaps even a good refresher course.
Even in blogland, most of the stuff you read has only a few links in each paragraph. But our human minds, when left to wander, will associate their way through a nearly infinite array of links, connections, and semi-random memories given even just a word or two to start with. This collaborative site operates a bit like that, linking virtually every word to another page of thoughts inspired by that word. Participate or simply meander around a place that feels a bit like the collective unconscious
It’s not that geeks don’t know how to dress up. (Some of us are very snazzy when we want to be, thank you.) It’s just that T-shirts with silkscreened logos are an important tribal signifier for geeks, no less so for us than for music fans who never saw a concert merch table they didn’t like, or fashionistas who can tell a Chanel bag from a Canal Street knockoff at 100 paces. This great site lets proud owners send in a photo and a story. Catch us in the right mood and we’ll say this is the best Net-history site going right now.
Check out this great multiplayer “investigation” from our friends at Australia’s Questacon. You gather a group of 2-4 players; they’ll give you clues, data, forensic analysis, police-interview footage and surveillance video sufficient for a group of smart folk to deduce how that body came to be on the premises at Questacon. Absorbing CSI-type stuff.
A simple (though multifaceted) art project with a profound truth at the core: Whatever our hyper-consumerist culture tries to tell you, you're wonderful just as you are right this minute. The proprietors are eager to hear from potential collaborators or the simply curious, though they emphasize that it's fine if you forget all the theory and simply enjoy the message.
That’s ‘hack’ in the ancient and correct meaning of the term – an ingenious exploration of and tweak to any system, computer-based or otherwise – rather than ‘hack’ in the ooh-scary-bad-people sense. This great blog-based site features the achievements of the former, documenting elegant hacks to everything from TiVo to iPod to old-style cameras. Serious fun to be had here for the right kind of person.
Fans of Sandman will remember the library of the Dreaming, where all the books that never existed were shelved. We're hoping to get on staff there any day now, but in the meantime we'll enjoy this fascinating list of book that only exist within other books. We have titles, we often have authors, we occasionally know a great deal about their contents, but you can only read them inside your own imagination.
The media does a great job of hyping a celeb until the masses are begging to be rid of him or her. However, after a while, we (ashamedly) miss them. We pity the fools -- ourselves -- for losing track of people like Mr. T, Steve Urkel and Monica Lewinsky. Fortunately, the Web will provide. Search for childhood stars, musicians, crooks and old pop stars and find out what they are up to here – and see which current flavors are apt to be tomorrow’s has-beens.
A recent poll in the US indicated that over half the population of the nation would support taking civil rights away from fellow citizens based strictly on their faith in God – if that faith happened to be Islam. That’s chilling and, we hope, more indicative of a poorly presented poll than of true venom and hatred across that much of the USA. (Seriously, half of us cannot be that knuckle-draggingly stupid. That’s just not acceptable.) To that end, we’re all for anything that helps people of goodwill to understand each others’ differences, and this thoughtful, engaged site is particularly recommended for non-Muslims who hope to comprehend the beauty, faith and decency of a religion with which too many Americans are still unfamiliar.
Our friends at PBS deliver another winning site, this one in support of their Cyberchase kids’ show. Follow the adventures of the Cybersquad, Dr. Marbles, Motherboard and the rest, catch Webisodes you may have missed, and – now – go on Cybersquad-style scavenging adventures online in the Quest area. Lots of fun for young fans of the show
And well you may ask. The proprietor of this fascinating blog posts photos of unusual objects and invites visitors to speculate on what they might be, posting the answers to each set a week or so later. This blog’s truly worth exploring, as many of the photos are truly beautiful in unexpected ways (as well as challenging).
This site presents a passport-sized photo of a man and asks you, the visitor, to say what you believe he thinks of you. The “answers” are displayed below, and they’re remarkably detailed considering how very little the writers had to go on. What will you add to the page?
San Antonio Express-News journalist Macarena Hernandez had a crisis of faith in her chosen profession last year after a writer at the New York Times plagiarized her work. Her editors wisely gave her a bit of time and space to consider her options, during which period she worked to tell the story of her family’s emigration from Mexico and her own path from child migrant labor to college and beyond. The result – this excellent series – is a marvelous read and gives us great hope that Ms. Hernandez will choose to stay with the profession, as we need her greatly
At a loss for keeping the children busy? Need ideas for a class project? This site can help parents and kids build some excellent science-related toys. There are directions for building dozens of items with detailed explanations of the concepts behind each toy; scientifically speaking, the toys are sorted into nine fields of knowledge, and each includes further resources for learning the principles involved.
Lionel's site is everything one might hope for in a model-train resource, with plenty of guides, glossaries, videos and photos. If you think of the avocation and its gorgeously detailed vehicles as something from the "choo-choo" era, stop by and prepare for a tremendous surprise
Tech-industry observers will remember Richard Posner as the Seventh Circuit judge who attempted to get Microsoft and the U.S. government to the bargiaining table to mediate their well-known antitrust suit. He and fellow University of Chicago professor Gary Becker (he of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Economics, of course) are doing a collaborative blog that discusses a variety of social, legal and economic issues. It’s fascinating to watch they two bounce ideas off each other.
MTV "Made" meets "I want a Famous Face" and a touch of "The Swan” – this site is the perfect combination of humor and self-flattery. The pictures posted hardly favor the A-List celebrities like Sarah Jessica Parker and Michael Jackson. Barely Halle Berry, a sprinkle of Britney Spears and a margin of Madonna will have you questioning who you resemble. Can you pass? Can you do it without making some of the ridiculous faces we see here (e.g., pooched-out lips a la Angelina Jolie)?
We owe a lot to the meteorologists and tornado chasers who have dedicated their lives to understanding storms — tough work and occasionally highly dangerous. This fascinating site, by chasers and for chasers, carries you through the excitement of tornados and thunderstorms via the camera lens — colorful cloud formations at sunset, intense lightning strikes and tornadoes whirling across the plains. The shots, both frightening and beautiful, capture the essence of summer's worst storms.
You’ll need a respectable amount of bandwidth to appreciate this site, which uses video and morphing techniques to slow things down that are fast, speed things up that are slow, and uncover what happens right in front of our eyes but beyond the range of human vision. Red Hill Studios has opened up this collaborative project to the entire Net community. The results: time-lapse photography of a woman’s body changing through pregnancy, the fog lifting over a forest, the cat lapping up milk.
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