Cool Web Sites
by Don Singleton
Tulsa Computer Society
From the October, 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
Where do we come from? What happened when the universe began? What can we learn about the beginning of our species or our planet? This gorgeous project tells the stories of six major research facilities using everything from Webcast interviews to articles to photos. Get to know CERN, the Hubble, Antarctica’s McMurdo, Las Cuevas (a joint project between Belize and the UK), Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and the astrobiology research center at Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory.
We agree that there are usually too many of them before feature films these days, but we still enjoy a well-made movie trailer. (Often we enjoy a well-made movie trailer more than we enjoy the shoddily made movie.) This site has loads of previews from movies past and present
Here’s a good idea for giving in the Internet age: Lists that function as the charitable equivalents of wedding gift registries or memorial baskets. Compile a list of charities to which you’d like money to be given, and WGA makes that possible by managing the donation process for you. You can also keep your own givelist to help keep track of charitable donations (you’ll thank us when tax season rolls around and WGA has a list of your gifts all ready for you), and the site offers tools for parents hoping to encourage their children in the habit of benefaction.
Never voted? Used to vote but haven’t in the last few elections? Pal, this is your year. This project aims to get people to the polls, which of course means getting them registered. (Registered as what? That’s your business. This is a non-partisan effort.) Find out how to get yourself registered wherever you are; if you’re already participating in the democratic process, you can volunteer to help.
As NASA laboriously makes its way toward the spring-2005 launch target for the shuttle program, the Stafford-Covey Task Group, which is helming, the effort has been very good about making information available to the public on this site. Check here regularly for information on what the task force has discovered and exactly what NASA’s going to have to do to get right with the watchdogs.
Get your friend Sally that potato salad recipe you promised her even if you’re too lazy to pick up the phone; share the news of your work promotion without e-mailing your entire address book. Multiply.com presents a new way to communicate with family, friends, and friends of friends. Members create your own Web page which can include photo albums, a journal, reviews of your favorite and least favorite restaurants or movies, a recipe book and a calendar of your schedule. Your list of contacts will connect you to close friends and, by degrees of separation, to everyone they know. Membership is free.
One of the geniuses of our time makes himself accessible through this Web site, just as he made the laws of the universe to laymen (or motivated laymen, anyway). This personal, at times humorous, site offers insight into both his life as a world-famous physicist and as a private man. Links to Hawking’s lectures -- enhanced with colorful diagrams -- will interest experts as well as those who didn’t quite get past Introductory Physics 101
There’s no more effective way of killing time waiting for service in a slow restaurant than a few games of Twenty Questions with your companions. It can’t guess specific people, but it easily figured four out of five challenges in recent testing, including such stumpers as Duct Tape, a Candy Cane, and Regret. (Editor's note: If you are currently blowing off work, you may have firewall issues with this site, but check it out at home. It's worth the wait.)
Ever eaten at a well-reviewed restaurant and wondered what the heck the critic was thinking (or whether s/he’d actually brought a sack lunch that day)? Ever watch a terrific neighborhood spot fail for lack of new customers, even though the regulars adored it? Do your part, savor-savvy soldier, and write up your own reviews at this site, which has the potential to be a Zagat for the rest of us. Eleven metro areas are available for sharing opinions on restaurants, coffeeshops, bars, bookstores and (yikes) restrooms. Covers Manhattan, Boston, Brooklyn, Chicago, London, Los Angeles, Paris, San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, Washington, DC.
We don’t know how your week went, but ours was severely taxing. Let us be frank: We are tired. Or, put another way: We' As much how much renio one extends for l'interno as this reason and tired he is and dumb. Huh?, you say? Meet the Lost In Translation page, which passes perfectly reasonable English statements through Japanese, Chinese, Korean, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish auto-translators – handing you back a sentence that sounds like five days’ worth of exhaustion and summer flu talking.
You sort of suspected it wasn’t a matter of point-and-click, but this fine site from the European Space Agency (the other entity responsible for the Hubble Space Telescope) explains the five steps necessary for bringing us the gorgeous images we’ve been enjoying all these years. Any competent Photoshopper will recognize the steps in the process, but it’s still impressive seeing the raw data thus transformed.
So you are at a “nice” restaurant with your new boss and all you can think about is why on earth are there are so many forks on the table. A refresher course in etiquette is in order here. This humorous “So You Wanna Improve Your Table Manners” guide sorts through all those things mom told you (and some she didn’t) to make finger bowls and caviar forks seem not quite as daunting. And please, no elbows, dirty silvberware or pet monkeys on the table.
This site provides a great introduction to the astonishing resources of the Library of Congress for kids, and a nifty quick dose of trivia for adults. Check out the brief but entertaining “exhibits”: Amazing Americans, Jump Back In Time, The States, America At Play, and See, Hear and Sing. You’ll discover all sorts of wonderful little factoids, with great illustrations and a friendly, non-academic writing style
When it comes to choosing and moving into a new home, some folks have enough on their plate just making a decision and getting relocated. Others, however, prefer to stay on top of every aspect of the process (including the real-estate agent’s fee). If you’re up for one of life’s biggest do-it-yourself projects, this free downloadable booklet can help you set up a team and a strategy for making the deal you want.
The head of the Federal Communication Commission should be a natural for blogging, and Michael Powell has indeed stepped up to the plate. His very first post is now available at AlwaysOn, and he promises to make a habit of airing his thoughts; as the FCC wades into turbulent waters over everything from digital broadcasting to the Nextel spectrum buyout to Howard Stern, we’re be eager to read what’s on his mind.
The RIAA’s lawsuits against peer-to-peer file sharing may not scare you, but this site should: Blogger Rick is posting an ongoing list of things he’s retrieved from the usual share services. We’re not talking the latest Britney single, either, but password files, bank statements and financial information (with enough data to cause trouble), personal photos of the sort you don’t normally want circulating, and so on. A chilling compendium.
The athletes currently making their way to Athens need good nutritious food that’ll keep them operating at peak levels, and this site from the American Egg Board has information on all sorts of options available to the assembling throng. Five of our most promising contenders share their advice on eating for top performance, and a nifty timeline shows how our thinking has changed on one food in particular.
Ladies! Gentlemen! Children of all ages! This Milwaukee-based organization is a serious organization dedicated to fun and the true history of the clown’s art around the world. Find out which 67 masters of the clowning arts have been inducted into the Hall of Fame since its founding; learn about the various types of clowns and the history of clowns in ancient and modern times, and read up on the organization’s work with current clowns (as well as their ongoing efforts to find a permanent home for the non-virtual Hall).
Most Americans grew up, whatever our socioeconomic circumstances, saying we were “middle class.” Not likely, friend. Not only is America the land of a thousand class distinctions, your office or school – even your home – is likely to exhibit a few. PBS knows they’ve got a winner with their latest documentary and companion site; they’ve even gone to the trouble of putting up a full transcript along with the usual great content (including some truly eye-opening games)
Beautiful and haunting, this British site documents the children who over the course of 30-plus years came under the care of The Children’s Society. During the period between 1881 and the end of the First World War, the organization then known as the Waifs and Strays Society tended over 22,000 youngsters who had no parents (or whose parents were incapable of providing care). Over 150 cases are fully documented online and there are excellent games and other resource materials to engross you.
Love live music? Want to download a bunch with no legal ramifications? Our heroes at the Internet Archive are making it possible, not only offering server space for recordings of live performances but reaching out to bands that might be willing to contribute such recordings for general enjoyment. (And yes, bands are willing; in the words of Mountain Goats member and all-round good egg John Darnielle, “file sharing never did anything wrong by me.”) Enjoy and, if you’re a performer, please consider contributing as well.
Those three little piggies have nothing on Glen Hunter and Joanne Sokolowski (and their son Gil), who are entering their second year of dwelling in a house constructed from straw. The couple has chosen to live off the grid (that is, without utilizing the electrical, water, sewer or gas systems) in a home powered mainly by the sun. It's a beautiful domicile, and whether you'd like to emulate their path or just wonder what it's like to live that life, you'll enjoy their ongoing blog.
To some of us, the most appealing concept in wearable computing is the temporary glove ours would form if we'd finally just put our fist through the monitor of the wretched thing. Patient, more forward-looking souls are in charge of the styleborg blog, which catalogs developments on the wearable-tech front. Electronic fabrics? Jeweled eyeball implants? Hats with LCD screens on poles above one's head? Not all of these creations are destined to reach your closets, but it's fun to see what's afoot.
Serious mania leads to serious sites, it seems: This incredibly specific map of the Simpsons' hometown is so meticulous it has been added to Harvard's digital-map collection. (Not bad considering we don't even know what state Springfield is in.) Zoom in on areas and streets to check out what's where and to savor the names of the incidental Simpsons locales, surely one of the small joys of regular viewing.
Writers being naturally geekish about words, we're having a fine time here this week with WordCount, which does for words what The Secret Life Of Numbers (featured recently on these pages) did for digits. The site knows the 86,800 most frequently used English words as deployed throughout a 100-million-word selection of documents representing, according to the British National Corpus, a cross-section on current usage. For instance, did you know that "inveigle" is the 72,615th most-used word in the mother tongue?
For those wishing they could do more to support the good and decent members of our armed forces (and no matter what your views on the war and its aftermath, our troops need your support), this site's the place for information on supplying our soldiers with needed basics such as medical supplies, t-shirts and socks, toiletries, sunglasses and so forth. Find out what's needed and how to send it, and hook up with special discounts that'll stretch your patriotic dollars as far as possible
They literally wrote the book on validating world records, and since the fine people at Guinness have just recognized technology, certifying Cisco Systems' CRS-1 as the highest capacity Internet router (92 terabits of throughput), we thought we’d return the favor. This site has every significant tidbit of information you could ask for on record-breaking feats, facts and freaks of nature, as well as information on making and tracking your own record attempts. Could you be the next Tom Comet? (For those who don’t know, Tom holds the record for chainsaw juggling – yikes!)
We’re fascinated by reports that a Great Lakes diver may have discovered the wreckage of the Griffin, the first European decked ship to sail the upper portion of the Great Lakes. The Griffin went down on its maiden voyage in 1679, which says plenty about the treacherous nature of the waters in that part of the world. Find out what it takes to sail them at this excellent museum site, which has everything from virtual tours to shipwreck tales to a very pleasant live Webcam.
This useful site has pointers to death notices in newspapers all around the country. It also lists the obituaries run in the Associated Press and, separately obituaries for prominent folk and for those killed in accidents
Some of you may have been following June’s sad Bloomsday saga, in which James Joyce’s grandson was so concerned about protecting his profits from his grandfather’s book (Ulysses) that he undermined celebrations that would have attracted new readers. Those familiar with the 12-volume Jewish Encyclopedia (published 1901-06) have taken a longer-ranging view of copyright issues, putting the entire text online and encouraging folks to read the work and, if possible, to help update the 15,000-plus entries. It’s a fascinating read and a worthy solution to the never-ending problem of getting folks to read books beyond what’s on the currently bestseller lists.
If you’ve been following the news about Patrick Holland, you know he’s the gutsy young man who obtained a “divorce” from his birth father, who’s serving life without parole for the horrific slaying of Patrick’s mother. Patrick now lives with Rita and Ron Lazisky, friends of the late Liz, and together they’ve constructed a touching site that tells her story
Amuse yourself with silly things other people think, and wince when you realize that some of your own beliefs are also represented in this fun compendium. Read up on actions thought to cause good luck, bad luck, card luck, stage luck, housing luck, love luck, and so on through the events of your life.
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Tulsa Computer Society 10/01/2004
Don Singleton, President