BREAKING SURF
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| Beginners, Experts, and CSS |
| Japanese Ice Cream |
| Chiloe, Chile |
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| Roads of Upstate New York |
| Art and Form from the '40s to the '70s |
| The Letters of van Gogh |
| The Golden Age of Cartooning |
| Phonecam Art |
| Queer Music of the '60s, Not That There's Anything Wrong with That |
| Robert J. Lang Origami |
| Netsurfer Recommendations |
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| Book Hooks |
| News You Need but Won't Get |
| Homemaker's Blog |
| More Than Slightly Odd Kids' Stories |
| Amphibious Wonders |
| Origins of the Non-PBS Kind |
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| LETTERS TO THE EDITOR |
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BREAKING SURF
SpaceShipOne Wins Ansari X-Prize
Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne made a successful pair of flights in its formal attempt to capture the Ansari X Prize. With this week's second launch the craft met the formal requirement for two 100-km-high suborbital flights required for the Scaled Composites team to capture the $10 million prize. The project Web site has video of the flights from many angles, as well as photos of the jubilant team. Meanwhile, British billionaire Richard Branson is teaming up with the SpaceShipOne team and backer Paul Allen to try to offer passenger flights within two to three years through their newly formed Virgin Galactic venture. The trips will cost about $180,000, according to a BBC article.Scaled Composites: http://www.scaled.com/projects/tierone/video.htm
Virgin Galactic: http://www.virgingalactic.com/
BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3693020.stm
US Releases New $50 Bill into Circulation
This week, the US Federal Reserve started circulating a redesigned $50 bill. This is part of the ongoing redesign of US currency to make it more counterfeit proof. Last year, the Federal Reserve released an updated $20 bill with many security features similar to the new $50 bill. Currently, about one in 25,000 of the $50 notes in circulation is counterfeit. The US Bureau of Engraving and Printing has a press release and various well thought out materials about the new $50 bill on its Web site, including an "interactive $50" Flash presentation that shows all the security features to keep an eye on when you get one of those notes.http://www.moneyfactory.com/newmoney/
The 2004 Ig Nobel Prize Winners
One of our favorite events of the year is the annual announcement of the Ig Nobel prize winners. This year, the ceremony honored important new work in the areas of suicidal country music, hula-hoop technology, the health implications of the Five-Second Rule, and - to our mind, this year's overall winner - the intriguing phenomenon of the invisible gorilla. The Igs do not overlook non-traditional scientific disciplines, with prizes also awarded for work on religious outsourcing and nude historiography. As ever, the Ig Nobels call attention to vital areas of modern research, with which it behooves us to become overly familiar.http://www.improb.com/ig/ig-pastwinners.html#ig2004
Photographer Richard Avedon was one of the best known of modern portrait photographers, famous for shooting not just celebrities but ordinary people as well. He died this week of a brain hemorrhage while working on a series of portraits of people in political contexts. Avedon's portraits are frequently stark, minimalist, black-and-white affairs on white backgrounds, and create mystery even in the most unmysterious of subjects. In addition to reviews and interviews, Avedon's Web site has samples of his most recent work in advertising and portraiture, including recent portraits of Presidential hopeful John Kerry and his wife Teresa Heinz Kerry. PBS has a brief biography with links to more of his work and online exhibits. Amazon has "Richard Avedon Portraits", a book representative of some of his best work.
Avedon: http://www.richardavedon.com/
PBS: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/avedon_r.html
"Richard Avedon Portraits": http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0810935406/netsurferdigest
Fans of machinima, films made using video-game graphic engines, are well acquainted with Rooster Teeth Productions. Their "Red vs. Blue" series is widely acknowledged as consistently one the funniest and most entertaining machinima series on the Net, well worth spending bandwidth on. This week, Rooster Teeth debuts a new project called "The Strangerhood", which uses the Sims 2 game engine. The recently released Sims 2 lets the Rooster Teeth team take advantage of the game's first-rate graphics and character generation to create more dynamic and visually pleasing films than "Red vs Blue", which is based on Halo 2. "The Strangerhood" site has a trailer for the new series, which looks uncannily like the opening credits of "Friends". We suspect it's only a matter of time before the Rooster Teeth guys are snagged by the Hollywood meatgrinder. Based on their "Red vs. Blue" track record, and if the preview trailer is anything to go by, you'll definitely want to hang around "The Strangerhood". And we predict superstardom for Tovar.
"The Strangerhood": http://www.strangerhood.com/
"Red vs. Blue": http://www.redvsblue.com/
A Scientific Picture Is Better Than a Thousand Words
Science is one pursuit that proves the old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words. Science Magazine helps out, with some wondrous examples of scientific visualization, the winners of this year's NSF visualization challenge. These images are not only visually striking, but also rich in information otherwise inaccessible. Especially intriguing are the images of the DNA helix and the remarkable diagram of Mt. Etna. These sites are best seen on a high-resolution screen. Click the Slide Show link to the right of this summary for the images.http://www.sciencemag.org/sciext/vis2004/show/ssintro.shtml
Business Week recently paid tribute to tech pioneer Douglas Engelbart, still going strong at 79. Technology Review addresses the other end of the age scale with its fourth list of the 100 top innovators under 35 in computing, nanotechnology, and biotech and medicine. The featured young people emerged from a winnowing process that involved compiling lists of potential candidates and careful review by a panel of experts. Each category includes an extended write-up of the top few plus short notes about many others. Here you'll find the Trotts of Moveable Type fame and David Brussin, who found a way to build antispam technology right into routers. The list also includes Ali Hajimiri, who squeezed an entire radar system onto a single chip, and Robert Drost, who is replacing circuit wires with electrical fields. The selected innovators come from many different countries and have widely varied backgrounds. Together, they provide a breathtaking look into technology's new frontier and a useful mine for new ideas and the key people behind them.
http://www.techreview.com/articles/04/10/tr100_1004.asp
The Amazing Bandwidth Cost of P2P Traffic
CacheLogic makes software that analyzes peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic for large ISPs. As part of its marketing for a P2P traffic-monitoring tool, the company released a report that included a six-month snapshot of global P2P traffic trends. While this is marketing CacheLogic designed specifically to promote its products, and should accordingly be taken with a grain of salt, it still does provide some data on just how much bandwidth and money global P2P traffic is sucking up. It turns out that it's a lot. In fact, P2P has overtaken Web traffic as the biggest user of bandwidth on the Net, costing broadband ISPs roughly 100 million Euros per year. The data also reveal that the once-dominant FastTrack P2P network (the one Kazaa accesses) has lost market share to BitTorrent and eDonkey. Furthermore, it's not all about MP3 music files - most of the traffic consists of huge files, most often movies on the order of 600 MB or more. CacheLogic's Web site has a press release and a nice slide show with all the statistics.http://www.cachelogic.com/research/index.php
PayPal Takes Issue with Some Issues
PayPal picks favorites, from the look of things. The online-payment company told the owner of the TalkLeft political site that a link to a "begeading video" (the issue is actually "beheading", but at least the warning wasn't boilerplate) violated its acceptable use policy. Some argue that this is a censorship issue more than a violation of terms of service. Others believe that it's a ham-handed approach to serving the US political right-wing. Conspiracy theories abound, but some of the arguments presented in comment posts actually make sense. Put on your chest waders and prepare for an experience.http://talkleft.com/new_archives/007988.html#007988
The latest Pew report, "How Americans Use Instant Messaging", tells us who uses instant messaging (IM) and what they use it for. Pew found that 42% of Internet users also use IM and 12% use it daily. The most fervent IM users are - surprise, surprise - young people, and are more often female than male. Most users IM with relatively few people - typically five or fewer. Unexpectedly, increased Internet experience doesn't correlate with increased IM use. AOL's proprietary AOL Instant Message leads the IM field in number of users, and the company's free AOL Instant Messenger is nearly tied with Yahoo Messenger in the public arena, although Yahoo dominates in the work environment. MSN Messenger finishes a distant third, surprisingly. Pew provides intriguing and revealing details about how IM works, what users do with it, how usage varies among different age groups and IM use at work. Overall, the report is a fascinating look at a medium that has gained an enormous following, to the point that 24% of IM users use it more often than e-mail.
http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/133/report_display.asp
Practices of Computer Security
Computer security is a largely undervalued part of the computer industry. No matter how much people complain about the issue, they refuse to allocate the corporate resources to deal with the problem. Witness the entire problem of securing Windows servers. CIO Magazine has a detailed examination of the problem of computer security and outlines the six best practices of computer security. The article draws upon an extensive survey that revealed that while attacks are up this year, downtime is down, as are losses. The graphics are the core of the story and well worth examining as you skim the text.http://www.cio.com/archive/091504/security.html
MirrorDot: Alleviating the Slashdot Effect
When a story is posted on Slashdot, millions of netsurfers descend on any site linked in the Slashdot story. Often, all this traffic brings down the sites' hapless servers and renders it inaccessible in what is known as the Slashdot effect. MirrorDot is the latest attempt to deal with this problem. "When Slashdot posts a new story, MirrorDot automagically parses the story and mirrors any linked pages," claims the site. As you can imagine, that takes a lot of bandwidth, and accordingly MirrorDot asks for donations and, more to the point, features Google ads. Despite MirrorDot's altruistic protestations, the presence of those ads may make MirrorDot an ingenious attempt to harness the power of Slashdot to actually make money. Clever. You can read the comments of the site's creator, Jay Jacobson, in a Wired article.MirrorDot: http://www.mirrordot.org/
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,65165,00.html
Google's ad policies are coming under increasing scrutiny now that the company has gone public. Google isn't alone in having rules about the ads it carries - every media company does, in order to maximize revenue but maintain brand image and not offend too many customers. Google's ad revenue generates almost all its nearly $1.5 billion in annual revenue, and its policies affect a lot of customers. Google provides only a broad outline of its ad policies on its Web site but the San Francisco Chronicle took a closer look. The paper reports on Jerry Vasilatos, who found out the hard way that dissing the President is a no-no. Vasilatos claims plenty of similar ads are still working; Google admits it has a big backlog to review. What other ads are forbidden? Guns and booze are out, but porn and escort services are OK. Ads about abortion are also fine so long as they don't contain religious references. Not surprisingly, ads for illegal substances or paraphernalia aren't allowed and the company is particularly vigilant about ads for Scientology. It also watches for references to trademarks, spurred by recent lawsuits. If you want to play in Google's arena, you have to toe the line.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/08/09/BUGAD835EP1.DTL
Why Is Google News Still in Beta?
It's been three years since Google launched its news listings and search engine, yet Google still marks the site as beta despite the fact that the site works quite well in its intended role as the repository of all breaking news on the Net. So why is Google News still in beta? A brief article in Wired speculates that the problem is not technical, but legal. Notice that Google News displays no advertisements. If Google were to start pushing the commercial nature of Google News, it might run afoul of copyright law for using all that indexed content from other news sites in a commercial venture. The article notes that Google has already run into legal troubles over similar content issues in Europe and China.Google News: http://news.google.com/
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,65106,00.html
Two in the Pink and One in the Stink
The so-called shocker is a modern obscene hand gesture, although if you're over 30 or so, you probably don't know about it. Neither did the administration of Hanover High School in Pennsylvania. Some four years ago, 34 of the school's students displayed the shocker in their yearbook photos. Rotten.com's story describes the plight of an embattled principal who stood upon principle, and his fight with students and parents who disagreed with his position. Ultimately, the principal resigned, citing lack of respect by the school board and others, and has since moved on to greener pastures. This is a tale of the escalation of a minor incident into full-scale war, and the casualties that can occur.http://www.rotten.com/library/language/the-finger/shocker/
The Cream of the Cream of the Wealthy Crop
Once again, nobody at NSD made the list of the 400 richest Americans. Warren Buffett and Bill Gates remain on top, followed by Sam Walton's clan. Forbes does a good job of making this list enjoyable, but the real message is that all these billionaires are different from the rest of us. The Google co-founders are now on the list, as is T. Boone Pickens; Michael Eisner is off. If you're using Firefox, you have to turn off the pop-up blocker to view these pages. Firefox might be trying to tell us something about looking at what is, at best, soft-core financial porn. Of course, should we make the list next year, the list will magically transform into a public service. Wealth is always better when it's your own.http://forbes.com/home/forbes400/2004/09/22/rl04land.html
A lot of music is created by sampling prior works. Apparently, this is OK if it involves playing three notes previously compiled, but is not acceptable when electronic sampling is used. The US Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals slammed NWA for taking three notes from a Funkadelic guitar riff, reversing a lower court ruling. One Web site, Three Notes and Runnin', takes the samplers' side on this issue and is soliciting 30-second songs made from the sample in dispute, although the three notes can be - and have been by some - modified beyond recognition. We don't care to listen to any of the submissions a second time, but some of them are less grating than others.
http://www.downhillbattle.org/3notes/
ONLINE CULTURE
If you surf, you collect URLs or bookmarks. It's the way nature works. Heavy-duty surfers recognize that the bookmark managers built into browsers are so, so lame. Fortunately, there's a wealth of third-party URL managers. One of the interesting new managers is a Web-based URL manager at Del.icio.us, which might be the coolest domain name we've ever seen. (Creator Joshua Schachter's e-mail address domain, burri.to is a close second.) Del.icio.us is free, at least for now, and it's easy to use. A provided "bookmarklet" makes saving bookmarks from your browser easy. Where this site breaks the URL-manager mold is in its ability to allow anyone to see any list of bookmarks and to aggregate them into meta-lists by popularity, date, or topic. There's a social context here, and it's a neat idea. You can search everyone's list for specific topics or keywords or simply view composite lists of the most popular or most recently viewed URLs. This site is just delicious for the adventurous surfer.http://del.icio.us/
Maybe you've been meaning to infuse your pages with cascading stylesheets (CSS) but you aren't sure where to start. Maybe you're a pro at the CSS thang and just need some inspiration. Either way, check into Stylegala and you're sure to get some fresh ideas. Stylegala encourages submissions of sites for review and the ensuing discussions of other and better ways to design. It's a thriving community of outside-the-box thinkers who are still hoping to make their designs usable by the masses.
http://www.stylegala.com/
ONLINE TRAVEL
What do you get when you cross oysters with ice cream? Oyster ice cream, of course. Welcome to the Wacky World of Japanese Ice Cream (and its sequel, the Wackier World of Japanese Ice Cream. While the Japanese are famous in the West for their innovative and often bizarre gustatory creations - "Iron Chef" is essentially a cooking show in Japan and a competitor for "Fear Factor" in the US - these certainly take the cake. If you think oysters top the list of wacky ingredients, oh, oh, oh... - do you ever have another thing coming. Here's a list of starring ingredients to get your stomach churning - try horseflesh, fried eggplant, and fish and brandy, for starters. Baskin-Robbins has nothing on the wildly exotic flavors flying out of store freezers in Japan. We suspect the taste sensation of these flavors would resemble what we experienced trying garlic ice cream at the Gilroy Garlic Festival: Mmm, creamy, sweet, not too bad - urk, there it is. Bleah. Spit. Wipe.Wacky: http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp/photospecials/0207/ice-cream/1.html
Wackier: http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp/photospecials/0406/ice-cream04/00.html
This Flash presentation on Chiloe, an island about two-thirds of the way down Chile, starts with a nice look at a subsistence fisherman and music that doesn't hurt the ears. The inhabitants are largely subsistence farmers, fishermen, and craftsmen. In celebration of the upcoming Chilean bicentennial, the government plans to build the longest bridge in Latin America, in order to join Chiloe with the Chilean mainland. What could possibly go wrong? A record of ways of life that may soon disappear as a result of this project is preserved here.
http://www.chiloestories.org/index_swf.html
Older friends and family are always telling us that there's no sense of community in the world these days. They regret the erosion of the spirit that used to encourage neighbors to help out when needed, or that prompted street parties and the kind of security for children that is fast disappearing. Equally, there's a new type of friend and support network arising on the Web between geographically dispersed individuals who may never meet each other in person, yet swap advice and even love along the cables of the Internet. I-neighbors bridges the gap, letting Americans and Canadians meet their geographic neighbors in cyberspace rather than on the pavement. You can find locals with similar interests, advertise local events, organize a car pool to save cash, and even find a reliable plumber. Chats on the street corner may have to move to the nearby Internet cafe.
http://i-neighbors.org/home.php
Homesick for Oswego or Buffalo? Let J.P. Wing's Upstate New York Roads Site take you back to days of sitting on the interstate in traffic, mulling over road signs. It's clearly a labor of love; there's more road information on here than you could shake a flare at. The Oops page is an amusing nitpicker's guide to roads in upstate New York, including a misplaced 404 (go figure), but Unique Features has been "coming soon" for at least a year, so we ain't believing a word of it.
http://www.upstatenyroads.com/
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Art and Form from the '40s to the '70s
Beyond Geometry is an in-depth and multimedia survey of how the styles and substance of art have transformed themselves in four decades. This online version of an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art examines trends, forms, and ideas in art over the course of the pre-post-modern era between the end of World War II and 1979. One unusual feature portrays the questions, answers, and examples that modern art demands of those whose aesthetic background is limited to more traditional forms. Make sure your pop-up blocker is turned off while using the interactive timeline, which links to the extensive lists of artists and works and the glossary. If you prefer your art without all the intellectual baggage, you can simply browse the accompanying thumbnails for close-up still and moving images and explanatory texts. A Web site that's as much fun to use as it is educational, Beyond Geometry is an outstanding introduction to the basis of the contemporary art scene.http://www.lacma.org/beyondgeometry/
Vincent van Gogh is perhaps best known for being that artist bloke who cut off his ear and used a lot of yellow, but if you're interested in seeing inside the head of one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, you should check out his unabridged and annotated missives at van Gogh's Letters and find out what he was thinking outside the paint box. Amazingly, the site's search engine doesn't turn up much on the topic of ears, but given that the site spotlights key issues such as mistresses, depression, and nightmares, we can draw our own conclusions. Art historians will love the letters in which van Gogh discusses his techniques and work. Psychologists will delve into his attitudes towards his parents and the clergy. Medical students may enjoy his descriptions of hallucination, insomnia, and impotence. Van Gogh may not have lived a happy life, but his legacy of art and letters is now comprehensively open for study, if you can decipher his handwriting.
http://webexhibits.org/vangogh/
With the advent of computer animation, the state of cartooning has changed dramatically in the last few decades. The time-honored tradition of hand-drawn cartoons has fallen by the wayside and been replaced with a speedier and more technological approach to animation. Those who relish the manual cartoons drawn for the silver screen, like the classic Looney Tunes animations, will appreciate this site, the Golden Age of Cartoons. The site is devoted to the comics, cartoons, and animated characters from the first half (more or less) of the 20th century. You'll find images and info, discussion forums and news, and lists of related sites. Feature attractions highlight the likes of the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies gang, Tom and Jerry, and Walter Lantz's Woody Woodpecker.
http://www.goldenagecartoons.com/
Phonecams sell well even though they have low resolution of 1 or 2 megapixels, the same as early-model digital cameras. No one in their right mind would use phonecams to create art, but who needs a mind that's always right? SENT: America's First Phonecam Art Show seeks to document the popularity and potential of photos captured by phonecam. In July, SENT held an exhibit with works by invited artists, including Wil Wheaton, and amateur enthusiasts. The Web site extends the physical exhibition with a large online gallery and continues to invite submissions from the public. As the project points out, phonecams are utilitarian. Snap a picture of, say, your date, or baby, and e-mail it in. Image quality is uneven, to say the least. SENT maintains that visual crudeness "lends a distinctive, awkward charm.... They democratize, hack, and deconstruct photography." This iconoclastic assertion shouldn't bother many imaging professionals. Many of the photos in the slideshows here were obviously taken in fun. Wait a few years for technology to improve, though. To us, it's starting to look as though all new cell phones will soon have cameras and many new digital cameras will have phone numbers. In fact, Wi-Fi cameras are on the market already.
http://www.sentonline.com/
Queer Music of the '60s, Not That There's Anything Wrong with That
Chances are, even if you're something of a '60s music aficionado, you have never heard of the Camp Records label. Well, it's time to fill that gap in your knowledge by browsing this site dedicated to "the most outrageous (and queerest) record label of the '60s." Camp released two albums and around 10 singles in the early to mid '60s, of songs mostly by uncredited artists or artists with obviously fake names such as Byrd E. Bath and the Gay Blades. A few singles, however, credit one Rodney Dangerfield. You can listen to audio of the complete Camp Records output here, though it has to be said that high camp humor rather than a satisfying musical experience is the order of the day. Also, there are hilarious scans of album and singles covers here, as well as ads from the gay magazine Vagabond.http://www.queermusicheritage.com/camp.html
Origami means folding paper. No cutting or other stuff, just folding to create compositions. How you manage to create such works by simply folding paper is more than a little mysterious - it's downright unsettling. Take a look at some of the astounding work at Robert J. Lang Origami and try to figure out how you could replicate it. Even the simplest of designs escaped us.
http://www.langorigami.com/Art/artmain.htm
BOOKS & E-ZINES
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Items our staff likes and you might too. Click on the image or title to order at a hefty discount from our affiliate Amazon.com, and send a few pennies our way as well.
For more selections, check out: Netsurfer Books: http://www.netsurf.com/nsb/ Netsurfer Library: http://www.netsurf.com/nsl/ |
The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker (Book & CD Edition)
Running Money: Hedge Fund Honchos, Monster Markets and My Hunt for the Big Score
The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World
Star Wars Luke Skywalker FX Blue Lightsaberhttp://www.themorningnews.org/
Once past the superficialities of cover art, the best way a novel grabs a reader is with a catchy first sentence. Opening Hooks collects memorable opening lines. You can sort its entries in various manners and rank the beginnings. One thing we wish the site had is a filter on the ranking mechanism to ignore any submissions which had fewer than, say, ten votes. In the site's current set-up, a single vote of 5 out of 5 ("This is my favorite book because I wrote it") can unfairly rank a beginning higher than "When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin." Franz Kafka's first line rates a mere 4.29.
http://www.openinghooks.us/
Big media can't cover all the news, and have to decide daily what to include and what to exclude. The San Francisco Bay Guardian (SFBG) has an article called "Censored!" that decries mainstream news coverage and offers ten stories that ought to be covered. "This list," author Camille Taiara states, "speaks directly to the point FCC critics have raised: stories that address fundamental issues of wealth concentration and big-business dominance of the political agenda are almost entirely missing from the national debate." Yes, the SFBG is an alternative weekly and Taiara's top gripe is wealth inequality, but they do have a point. You get the same news from network TV, cable TV, and the mainstream press. News media can seldom afford to offend advertisers, consumers, or ownership, so the trend continues with no end in sight. Sleepers that deserve attention include high levels of uranium in soldiers and civilians, the giveaway of natural resources, and sale of electoral politics. Unfortunately, neither Taiara nor SFBG indicate whether they have plans to expand on the article. Perhaps they're resigned to the allure of more personal fare provided through fairly prominent links to restaurants and nude beaches at the top of the page.
http://www.sfbg.com/38/49/cover_censored.html
Blogs abound these days, and too many spew geek angst. Struggle in a Bungalow Kitchen is a refreshing, simply designed page of insights into the life of a stay-at-home mother as she struggles to "find peace, proficiency, and satisfaction in the kitchen." Fortunately for readers, the author doesn't just talk about cooking, although her fascination with culinary skills, tools, and Julia Child is well documented. Instead, her blog has expanded to include musings on just why people love Ikea, how stores push their credit cards at you, or how an old stove in her child's kindergarten reminds her of her grandmother. There's no political ranting or needless self-advertisement here, just good old-fashioned writing crafted with appropriate links and some wisdom on child-rearing and housekeeping when she finds or fails to find it. Her positive attitude to the challenges involved should strike a chord with any parent.
http://blogs.salon.com/0001754/
More Than Slightly Odd Kids' Stories
Kevin Kelm introduces audiences to a darkly satirical twists on some of the world's best-loved children's tales. Read the twisted tales of "James and the Giant Roll of Barbed Wire", "Curious George and the High-Tension Power Line", and the even more twisted Dr. Seuss spoof entitled "Horton Hires a Whore". Each story is accompanied by equally twisted illustrations. If the titles are any indication, these stories are not suitable for children, or even for adults who are easily offended. If you still haven't had your fill of the wickedly wacky Kelm, check out his homepage which offers up an overabundance of inanity.http://www.triggur.org/storytime/
SURFING SCIENCE
Many of us lost interest in frogs when we had to dissect them in biology class. But not we of NSD. Oh, no - we have an unexplainable frog fetish, as long, long, long time readers will attest. Recent reports of apparent links between climate change and dwindling frog populations have brought these amphibians into public focus. While environmental relationships remain under scrutiny, the American Museum of Natural History, which claims to have one of the world's largest collections of frogs, celebrates the animals with Frogs: A Chorus of Colors. The site will increase appreciation of these amazing creatures. Frogs rival spiders in diversity and range. The site has just about everything a teacher could want - lots of photos, a lesson on reproduction, and a virtual poison-frog vivarium. Frog Sounds and Frog Fun Facts may also wake up the class - did you know the wood frog can survive for weeks with 65% of its body frozen? The section on frog research at the museum links to an amphibian database "used by more than 8,000 researchers a month." This site also has a frogcam, refreshed every 30 seconds. We've watched it on several occasions without seeing a frog. Still, this might be a good way to hold a child's attention for a few minutes while you go thaw dinner.http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/frogs/
Where did everything come from? And you may ask yourself, "How did I get here?" You may not find any hard answers here, but you get one amazing journey that ultimately raises even more questions. This isn't one particular Web site; it's a unique assembly of sites offered by the Exploratorium, interlinked by threads such as Tools, or Ideas. However you choose to explore the sites, you'll find that in the tradition of Exploratorium, they are arresting in design and rich in content. Linking the science done at CERN with that being downloaded from the Hubble Space Telescope to illuminate a common goal may seem odd enough, but of course the site doesn't stop there. Linking Antarctica, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and Belize, among other places, may seem far-fetched, but it works. Plan on spending a lot of time, should you visit.
http://www.exploratorium.edu/origins/index.html