Cool Web Sites
by Don Singleton
Tulsa Computer Society
From the January 2004 issue of the I/O Port Newsletter
Including links previously reviewed at
http://www.educationindex.com/index.html,
http://www.komando.com/,
http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/arch.htm,
and http://marylaine.com/neatnew.html
From 1995 to 2000, the Early Manuscripts Imaging Project carefully scanned in 80 major early manuscripts held by institutions associated with Oxford University – the kinds of items classics majors would give their little toes to be able to inspect closely, even if only behind glass and surrounded by guards (which, alas, is how these things tended to work pre-Net). The scans are now in the care of the Oxford Digital Library, which is rounding out the collection and making them available to the public. Page through and think about how long these beautiful pages have survived compared to, say, the one you’re reading right now.
The concept of the "beauty pageant" is one that we constantly reinvent in this culture, going from simple looks-and-figure competitions to programs stressing the entrants' achievements beyond the makeup mirror; a look at the winning contestants through the years shows that our ideas about beauty itself have also changed dramatically. All those changes reflect who we are and what we think is important. So it's both up-to-date and terribly retro to put on this virtual beauty pageant, one that claims to be seeking a representation of that which the Net holds to be a true standard of beauty. Fine, and we'll certainly be curious to see how it turns out, but won't it be more interesting once the "contestants" can do somethng besides look good?
William Wu has been collecting riddles — most of them asked during the course of job interviews at tech companies — for about a year and a half. We're quite impressed that those contributing to his list even survived hearing some of these questions, many of which require a combination of true tech skill and good creative thinking. Test your wits (to this end, Wu has thoughtfully sorted the collection by difficulty level), but don't look for answers here. The interviewer asking about the best mathematical formula for creating the perfect mix tape wasn't exactly quizzing applicants for SAT purposes — the whole point is to get your brain out of the box.
You read the news accounts from Iraq — you still read them, right? — and whatever your feelings on why we're over there or how things are going, you've got to admit that the vast majority of America military folk are decent people attempting to do the best possible job in a tough, tough environment. This Army site covers some of the acts of heroism that might not have gotten your attention or gained the front-page headlines. We're particularly pleased to read a story about another young woman named Jessica — one whose enlistment seems to be going much better than did that of PFC Lynch.
This Library of Congress project presents 253 published narratives from Americans and international visitors traveling around the country, along with those memoirs contained in the 32-volume Early Western Travels 1748-1846. Some authors are famous, some ought to have been, but these writings make for a far more interesting view of America’s history than we remember getting in school.
This site, put together by the staff of the Columbia Journalism Review, can tell you exactly which companies own which newspapers, magazines broadcast outlets and more. For instance, if you search on USA TODAY, you'd see that the parent company is named Gannett, and that Gannett owns various other newspapers, TV stations, and other businesses. A spate of clicks on this site can teach you a lot about American media in the 21st century.
The grid! What is it? It's a service for sharing computing power and space for data storage, which with let the people of Earth yoke their computers together to solve big problems like cancer and smaller problems like, oh, pretty much everything else. Where did it come from?! The minds of many scientists; the site that tells you about it all comes from CERN, the same folks who brought you the Web. What sort of projects is it involved with right this minute? Check this easy-to-understand site and see for yourself.
Anyone who’s ever listened to kids make up unbelievably arcane rules for a game they’re playing understands that children are indeed apt to have an affinity for the legal system. This site, put online by the Arizona Foundation for Legal Services and Education, attempts both to give place to learn about the law (in general and as it applies to them for, say, curfew laws) and to tell stories from peers who have tangled with it as offenders or victims – along with a few less serious items, like a truly smart-aleck 8-Ball.
As fans of Kasey Casem know, there's something sweet about a long-distance dedication over the radio. During her Navy husband's recent deployment in Iraq, Rose Larsen discovered that a number of American military families were calling the British Forces Broadcasting Services — the only station military units were picking up in the Middle East — to dedicate songs to their loved ones. Larsen took on a prodigious amount of Internet, military and music-industry red tape to develop this site, which streams songs and their dedications to our men and women Over There (free of charge to military family and friends). We love the Webcast, and we're utterly in awe of Ms. Larsen's organizational skills.
It's a sad fact of media life that all too many of the people involved in the business are very much the same — same educational background, same socio-economic status, same general age group, even (much too often) the same basic shade of peach. One of the Net's best aspects is getting other voices into the mix, and the Harlem teenagers putting out this fine site, which has everything from fashion to science to opinion pieces to coverage of local activism, are most certainly a blessed addition.
We love soup, and we love the Soup Lady’s recipe-laden plog (as in “soup+”blog” – come on, humor her), both for the recipes we believe we could follow and for the ones that simply leave us misty-eyed with soup lust. Every so often she’ll throw out something scary, like that recipe for Velveeta Fudge, but just reading the ingredient list for Cashew and Pineapple Soup or Three-Bean Chili Con Carne (prefaced with a tart note that the recipe “is not meant to be an endurance test for some chuck-wagon wannabes; if your aim is to break out in a sweat, take a schwitz”) makes everything all right again. Thank you Soup Lady!
Ever seen the David in person? Interested in how artists and computer scientists render three-dimensional objects onscreen? Either way, check out this stunning repository of Michelangelo's work rendered in lovely 3D, online for your aesthetic and intellectual enjoyment at absolutely no cost. (You'll have to download a little viewer, but that's free too.) This project has taken $2 million and well over 9,000 work-hours of effort to develop for the enjoyment and edification of scholars and the general public. Once upon a time there was more such generosity online; we miss those days.
Pick a number between 1 and 100,000. Why did you pick it? What does it mean to you? What does it mean to others? This Java application collects data from certain popular search engines and from it derives an idea of what numbers are popular (that is, much used). The single-digit numbers are a big deal, of course, as are culturally significant digits like 202 (the Washington DC area code), 501 (the trousers), and 1776 (we're not explaining that one) — the application will even explain why some numbers appeal as they do.
Some people try to blame their personal shortcomings on their parents. Some claim their flaws as features. As for us, we tell folks we’re following in the footsteps of the Bard, and the results of this simple quiz have bolstered our argument. Of course, the truth can be painful; we always thought of ourselves as afflicted with a frankly stifling sense of personal honor, but our unfortunate resonance with Titus Andronicus forces us to admit that we're less Brutus and more, um, brutal.
Biology students young and old will enjoy this energetic site, which features plenty of information and interactive demonstrations of various animal and plant cells and cellular organisms. There's plenty of gorgeosity afoot on the microscopic level; we were particularly taken with the colorful Crystal Gallery, in which biological samples placed between special polarizing lenses reveal an other-worldly beauty.
As in Kevin, not as in pork products. If you've ever looked at your bookshelf or CD rack and wonder how one person could enjoy such disparate things, this is the site for you. Give the Baconizer any two books, CDs, films or the like, and it'll determine for you how many degree of Bacon-esque separation there are between them, as determined by the always-amusing Customer Affinity stats at Amazon (that is, the thing that tells you that folks who liked Book A also liked B,C, D, E, and F).
Gullah – the lovely Creole English of the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia – may be a dying speech, thanks to the crushing cultural force that is television. But all is not lost, and with luck generations to come will still have a toehold in the vernacular thanks to sites like this, which narrate various folktales in both English and Gullah – allegedly for your kids, but we won’t tell if you settle in for a few stories.
Ever wondered if the march of Science doesn't take a wrong turn now and then? Proof lies here, with documentation of everything from alchemy to "mechanical television" (diagram included) and galvanism (involves electricity and corpses, not for the squeamish). The overly adventurous should start reading at the bottom of the page; that's the part with the big honking disclaimer that says, in essence, you'd have to dumber than the guys on Jackass to try most of this at home.
Simple and to the point, this site delivers tips for players looking to polish up their game. Run by a group of former pro players, it offers tips on shooting, passing, dribbling, strategy, skills and more, with great specifics on not only improving your mechanics but developing the heart of an aggressive, conscious team player.
Turns out it’s pretty simple: Get a DNA sample from a thylacine, an extinct species of Tasmanian tiger; insert the genetic material in an egg donated by a member of a similar (but extant) species; implant the egg into a suitable donor mammal, and presto! – slicker than sea monkeys, you’ve resurrected a lost creature. Obviously we cooked this little biogenetics experiment up right here in the office, but you’re free to try your hand at the process on this easy-to-understand Web site.
They say that Venice, the beach community in Los Angeles, is to L.A. as L.A. is to the rest of America: thrilling, glamorous, bizarre and treacherous to the unwary. Look back 83 years and you'll see that the atmosphere was the same but that the area itself has changed dramatically. Enjoy this well-mapped collection of vistas and imagine how much fun our great-grandparents must have had frolicking at the edge of the country.
This site most definitely has a point. The folks at Oxfam have put together this absorbing choose-your-own-adventure-style site, in which you'll be asked to make the decisions that millions of people face every day. What's the adventure? Making sure you and your family don't starve to death. Can you contend with the choices faced by a Central American coffee grower, a Cambodian widow, a mother in Mozambique, or will malnutrition, disease or corrupt officials take you out first?
Those of you who don’t like the weather of winter are going to hate this idea: an art show coming together in Lapland celebrating ice and snow as a medium of expression. We’re not talking snowmen or snow angels, either – architects and designers are congregating to build sculptures and installations up to 8 meters high incorporating video, light and sound. For those of us not planning to make the trek to Finland, check with the site for a kids’ interactive exhibit and other goodies as we approach the grand opening, slated for next March.
If this were a joke, the punchline would be "the family jewels" — or perhaps "Soylent Green." But LifeGem is, we are assured, the real deal, creating brilliant diamonds from… well, you, or a loved one, or even a cherished pet. Diamonds are after all made of carbon, as are humans; after you've shuffled off this mortal coil, suggests the company, why not turn it into something sparkly? It's certainly not an ending for everyone, but we guarantee this site will get you thinking.
Leaving the concerns of our petty planet behind, we turn to listen to the sounds of offworld entities – radiowave bursts, mainly, though much of it is as synthesizer-swirly as any Hearts-of-Space could hope. If you have a fondness for the images of space retrieved by the Hubble and its ilk, let this offering by the University of Iowa give your ears something to enjoy as well.
Kennedy was a charmer. LBJ was possibly the most gifted employer of profanity ever to inhabit the Oval Office. And Nixon... well, we all know how clandestine taping worked out for Dick. This terrific site looks at the first three US presidents to secretly tape conversations in the Oval Office using bugs in the room and on the phone lines. The hour-long radio documentary based on this material can be streamed from here, or you can delve into the source material itself. (There's even a fine sample of LBJ swears directed at the racist George Wallace, then-governor of Alabama — a man who surely would have tested the curse-creativity of any Commander-in-Chief.)
Couldn't be simpler, couldn't be more useful: Give this search a drug-related term — anything from scientific nomenclature to street names — and it'll return narrative descriptions, physical symptoms of use, physiological and long-term effects, withdrawal and overdose symptoms, and more. Write this URL on the wall next to your medicine chest.
The University of Virginia owes Thomas Jefferson a great deal, not least its beautiful campus in Charlottesville; our third president founded the school and designed its Academical Village himself. The school, in return, offers this top-notch resource for acquainting oneself with the man: thousands of his papers, the full text of an 1834 biography, an interactive tour of Mr. Jefferson’s architectural work on the campus, and a list of some of the 1200-odd words the Oxford English Dictionary credits to his coinage (belittle, authentication, odometer and public relations, for examples). A rich tribute to a complex man.
Today it is called Veteran's Day, but before 1954 it was known as Armistice Day, commemorating the end of World War One at 11:11 a.m. on November 11. Unfortunately, in this multimedia-soaked era we don't tend to have a lot of insight into events unless we "see" them from an eyewitness point of view. While we wait for a Steven Spielberg blockbuster on the horrors of the war that was supposed to end all wars (or until you happen across your library's dog-eared paperback copy of Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun), you can get a sense of the horrors of the world's first modern conflict from these first-person accounts.
The U.S. Librarian of Congress announced the exemptions that would be made to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the controversial 1998 law that, in part, dictates how consumers are allowed to use such items as DVDs and software. On one hand. if you've got any elderly games of word-processing files lying around, you're allowed to hack them to get them to work — and concerned souls are still allowed to peer into Net-filtering software to figure out what it's screening. On the other hand, the Librarian says that you can be forced to slog through any number of commercials before the movie on your DVD plays, you have no right to play CDs on your PC, and too bad for you if you like buying your foreign DVDs in foreign countries. This site can fill you in.
Oh, the heck you do. Those of you who have refrained from converting your name into the ASCII mishmosh so beloved of certain contingents in the gaming and hacking communities are encouraged to resist the urge to go “leet” for as long as necessary. GameSpy has a little fun with the fashion.
For more information on the Tulsa Computer Society click here
Tulsa Computer Society 1/01/2004
Don Singleton, President