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| It Helps Being in the Know |
| Cloud Forest Alive |
| Botany Encyclopedia of Plants and Botanical Dictionary. |
| Jane's Information Group |
| Netsurfer Recommendations |
| Exploring Here, There, and Everywhere |
| Tick, Tock, Mr. Spock |
| Astronomy lessons: 161, the solar system |
| The Periodic Table |
| Atlas of Human Embryology |
| Classifying Specimens |
| Mendel's Paper (English - Annotated) |
| Osteogenesis Imperfecta |
| Echinoid Home Page |
| US Census Tiger Mapping Service |
| Forensic Art |
| Wladyslaw Jan Kowalski's Eclectic Interests |
| Above Top Secret - Uncovering Government Conspiracies |
| BOOK REVIEWS |
| LETTERS TO THE EDITOR |
| Contact and Subscription Information |
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| Netsurfer Digest |
REVIEWERS' CHOICE
Is there a Mrs. Swamp Thing?
Co-Citer: http://cogitum.com/co-tracker-text/more.htm
Atomica: http://www.atomica.com/solutions_products_pc.html
EARTH SYSTEMS
No matter where you go, there you are
http://www.cloudforestalive.org/
Botany Encyclopedia of Plants and Botanical Dictionary.
It's that gardening time of year again in the Great Muddy North, and everyone would like to know why things aren't quite coming up the same way that they're pictured on the seed packet. Whether it's brown or yellow, wilted or withered, eaten or infested, there's likely to be information found at this site to instruct you in what you should do - 'though probably next year. Most common varieties of indoor and outdoor plants, flowers, vegetable, shrubs, and trees are listed here by common or botanical name. There aren't many pictures to help you find what you're looking for, so some scanning of the encyclopedic entries may be in order. So, tomatoes … under fruits or vegetables?http://botany.com/
COMPUTING AND ENGINEERING
Open the pod bay doors, Hal
http://www.janes.com/index.shtml
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Battling the Elements: Weather and Terrain in the Conduct of WarASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away
Exploring Here, There, and Everywhere
The Exploring series of software from NASA is free. No ads, no nags. Free. This is something you don't see every day and it's refreshing. The software itself is getting a little long in the tooth - heck, it even runs on Windows 3.1 - but there's a lot of fun and learning to be had. The download is a bit hefty at 4.4 MB (oddly, each and every program here is listed as being 4.4MB), so if you're using a dial-up connection it may take a while. The installation is simple and went without a hitch on our test machine. Exploring the Earth software uses NASA and NOAA satellite images to teach vocabulary and basic science concepts. For the most part the activities are actually a series of quizzes. At startup, you set a timer and as you progress through each quiz your score is tallied. You can turn off the timer if you want to, but where's the fun in that? Exploring the Sun is similar, but with more material and a few different activities. The photos used are great, and the lessons informative. There are nine programsMain: http://pcsinspace.hst.nasa.gov/space/
Sun: http://pcsinspace.hst.nasa.gov/space/sun.htm
Earth: http://pcsinspace.hst.nasa.gov/space/earth.htm
Do you remember Joe Friday's obsessive (not to mention wooden) clock-watching? We've sure come a long way from there to Roddenberry star dates. The question, though, as we get further from 1950s Los Angeles, is this: How do we measure time in absolute terms (well, to the extent that time is absolute, anyway)? Don't look at us. We have trouble remembering which Canadian province doesn't bother with daylight saving time. How would we synchronize two watches, one in Joe Friday's Los Angeles and the other on, say, the Klingon home world. Sidereal clocks are the answer, telling time as they do in relation to the stars. Forget all those countless PC clocks that can only dazzle you with a few colored pixels and the occasional synthetic voice. RadioSky offers the answer to the Los Angeles/Klingon time difference with a downloadable clock that looks to the stars to calculate the local mean sidereal time. Familiar story: You'll need a PC running Windows.
http://www.radiosky.com/sidclockdownload.html
Astronomy lessons: 161, the solar system
Even if you aren't a student in the astronomy class of the University of Tennessee (for which these pages were prepared), its topics are an amazing read. Organized to be followed through a semester, the course starts from the bases and history of astronomy, reaching finally out into our solar system. The lectures are easy to understand, offering hyperlinks to other topics, and not boring. Easily navigable, the site lets you follow the lectures in chronological order or jump to topics that interest you most.http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr161/lect/index.html
MATHEMATICS, PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY
42
http://chemlab.pc.maricopa.edu/periodic/periodic.html
MEDICINE, BIOLOGY AND ZOOLOGY
It's alive! It's alive!
http://humanembryology.com/
As with most subjects, there are scads of sites on taxonomy out there in the seething silicon and silica jungle. Still, it would be hard to imagine one that's more useful and nicely annotated than the Guide to Internet Resources for Biological Taxonomy & Classification put up by Montgomery College to assist its biology students with taxonomy assignments. Start with the helpful walk-through provided by reference librarian Sue Raymond, using the catfish as an example. Raymond takes you by the hand and leads you through an illustrative way of dealing with a taxonomy assignment, visiting various websites along the way. Once you understand how to do it, it's on to where to do it. Here the resources are prime, relevant specimens nicely culled from the herd of pretenders, and corralled for our use with short, effective descriptions. Classify this under top notch
http://www.woodstock.edu/students/learn/library/learning_resource_center/taxonomy.html
Mendel's Paper (English - Annotated)
Gregor Mendel was a man of ability. His Experiments in Plant Hybridization (published 1865 and available at this link) laid the foundation of the science of genetics; its predictions based on observation are astounding given the state of chemical microbiology in that day (state = zero point). The results of Mendel's efforts can be directly traced to the recent, complete sequencing of the human genome, and exemplify: (1) The ability of a determined scientist to care for hundreds of pea plants over two years in controlled conditions and meticulously document their characteristics. (2) The ability of reason to overcome speculation, randomness and unknowable causes. (3) The ability of a religious man to have a serious commitment to science. (4) The ability of mathematics to overcome all other branches of science. (5) The ability of a man's neighbors to put up with seemingly mad experiments. (6) The ability of a science teacher to continue teaching without having ever passed the teachers' licensing exam. (7) TheMendel's Paper: http://www.netspace.org/MendelWeb/Mendel.html
Java applets: http://www.execulink.com/~ekimmel/mendel1a.htm
If everything you know about osteogenesis imperfecta comes from the film Unbreakable, count yourself and your family grateful. Osteogenesis imperfecta, a relatively uncommon condition, has gained some exposure as the disease that afflicts Samuel L. Jackson in that movie. What is osteogenesis imperfecta, beyond a critical plot point? It's a genetic disorder that causes bones to fracture easily, without apparent cause. The disease affects an unknown number of people in the United States; estimates put the population of sufferers there rather inexactly at anywhere between 20,000 and 50,000. A precious tool for learning more about it (and all medicine-related topics) is the MEDLINEplus site, from which you can retrieve all kinds of information. Take note. MEDLINE is a venerated source of medical information, with a reputation established well before anyone ever heard of hyperlinks. Our reviewer, himself a cardiac surgeon, judges MEDLINE to be among the very best sites for health-related information.
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/osteogenesisimperfecta.html
Boasting around 800 extant species and found in almost every major marine habitat from the equator to the poles, sea urchins (or echinoids) are surprising creatures with unusual skeletal structures and startling methods of defense that can make some species dangerous even to humans. In addition to a detailed portrait of the group, including an evolutionary history (the oldest echinoids are approximately 450 million years old), this solid website from the Natural History Museum in London, UK contains a large section on skeletal morphology, with detailed explanations and illustrations, keys to families, a geological history, classifications, and an alphabetical listing of all taxa. The site assumes a working knowledge of invertebrate zoology and is suitable for undergraduate research.
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/palaeontology/echinoids/
ANTHROPOLOGY, SOCIOLOGY, ECONOMICS, AND GEOGRAPHY
All that we see or seem
US Census Tiger Mapping Service
The tiger is a large, unfriendly beast who looks like he might make cool pet, but in reality just consumes a lot of food and gets testy when you interrupt his nap. The tiger, then is a fitting mascot and acronym for this page run by the US Census Bureau, where it stands for the Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing system, a "non-visual database of geographic features" primarily developed to assist in the gathering and classification of census data. It contains all sorts of interesting trivia and other information collected by those guys who came to your door threatening you with fines and/or imprisonment if you didn't tell them how many bathrooms you had in your house. It covers data collected over the last decade or so. It's about as easy to navigate as the long census form, but if you manage to find or otherwise stumble across it, there is a good deal of interesting information as it relates to US people and places. No names, or Social Security numbers, of course; that would be illehttp://tiger.census.gov/
SCIENCE AND ART
Puttin' on the Ritz
http://www.forensicartist.com/index.html
RESIDUE
We can't be sure what else is out there
Wladyslaw Jan Kowalski's Eclectic Interests
This is the personal Web space of a Penn State doctoral student and is probably related to research projects that he may have been working on. It's a nice presentation on such things as bad air, Roman sports (ancient bikini-clad volleyball?), art (erotic art), and music (erotic), stone-age life, and the Tylenol murders. The cave bear and Roman board games pages are especially interesting; he's collected a nice variety of images. Our only complaint points to annoying animated GIFs in a few places. Readers prone to seizures or nausea are advised to avoid the site.Site: http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/w/x/wxk116/
Jan's the guy at the bottom: http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/w/x/wxk116/famphot.html
PSEUDOSCIENCE, BAD SCIENCE, AND WORSE
I rarely use it myself, Sir. It promotes rust.
Above Top Secret - Uncovering Government Conspiracies
Either the terms Majestic 12, STS-48, Plant 42, A-17, and Area 51 mean something to you, or you have something to hide. Aliens. Government facilities, secret programs, and unmentionable agencies. Those guys across the street who come and go at night. Mr. Brillowski, your shop teacher. You knew - they were all working together. But, did they know it at the time? Secret and suppressed documents and photographs. Sworn testimony of anonymous or unknown persons. Is it real evidence? Is it real evidence of disinformation? Will they know that you've downloaded information from the site???http://www.abovetopsecret.com/