|
|
|
|
If you studied science and arts in high school, you should have no difficulty in passing the 1869-1870 entrance exams to MIT. These brief question papers are extracted from the MIT Institute Archives and Special Collections and cover Arithmetic, Algebra, Geometry and English. Want to know if your answers are right? Click on the Check your answers button. (Kim Komando) Solar power is one of the options for offsetting the energy crunch. There’s a biennial contest among college teams called the Solar Decathlon intended to encourage innovation in home building. The 2007 winning team was from the Technical University Darmstadt, Germany, closely followed by teams from University of Maryland and Santa Clara University. The website shows the homes built, disassembled, shipped to Washington, DC, reassembled and viewed by the public. (NY Times) If you have ever considered buying a hybrid car as your next vehicle, you need to take a look at the links under the Consumer Center at Hybrid Center. This project of the Union of Concerned Scientists offers a sober, detailed comparison among all available models. You should enter a few items about your driving habits and it will offer you an annual cost-of-gas figure for the models you compare. Click on the links under the Tech Center to find out how the various systems work. (David Henry) There’s lots of talk and reams of print these days on the subject of climate change. The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has been a respected leader in assessing its impacts in a sober, measured way. The Global Warming page of the UCS website recommends five major changes governments can implement, and ten personal solutions we can all reasonably consider. Other major areas researched and covered on this site are Vehicles, Energy, Invasives, Security, Food and Scientific Integrity. (David Henry) Anyone with a science, engineering or technology background will be like a kid playing in a sandbox at the huge range of topics covered in Science Daily. The links into articles, news items, videos and encyclopedia references typically consist of several sentences that offer you a pretty good idea of the target subject matter. The broad areas covered are Health and Medicine, Mind and Brain, Plants and Animals, Earth and Climate, Space and Time, Matter and Energy, Computers and Math, and Fossils and Ruins. (Kim Komando) “You probably know that modern man originated in Africa thousands of years ago. Well, it was over 160,000 years ago, to be exact. But chances are you don’t know how Homo sapiens came to inhabit the entire globe. And you probably don’t realize the role climate played. At Journey of Mankind, you can trace the migration of modern man, based on DNA research. It follows man from the cradle of civilization to the far corners of the world. Along the way, you can read about supporting archaeological evidence. You can also see how changes in climate influenced migratory paths.” (Kim Komando) Every schoolchild knows that Edison was a great inventor, and in fact had a lab whose business was creating and perfecting inventions. The Edison Foundation has an unusual site in which is buried basic information and access to complete patent documents. “Buried” because the ingenious but unorthodox menu system left me frustrated when sometimes unable to figure out how to view detail on a particular invention. There are original film clips here too. (Kim Komando) Technology Entertainment and Design, or TED. “TED is an event like no other. It brings together more than 1000 thought-leaders, movers and shakers…[once a year] for four days of learning, laughter and inspiration.” Videos may be viewed of talks by inspiring mavericks and innovators such as Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, co-discoverer of DNA James Watson, and inventor of the Information Superhighway Al Gore (!). (Pat Durkin) In TED 2007, I recommend anyone to watch Hans Rosling’s fascinating talk on presenting statistics. Dull you say? Absolutely not; this is exciting and entertaining stuff, rapid fire on-the-edge-of-your-seat stuff. Just enter the Professor’s name in the search box. (David Henry) BMW has been researching and developing hydrogen-powered cars for thirty years, and the results are on display at BMW World. You start with the sun that shines on solar panels to produce electricity that is used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen is cooled to liquid hydrogen form and put into the tank of a BMW 750hL that runs on hydrogen in a fuel cell that produces power and water. Presto! a pollution-free car. (NY Times) Have you ever had an EEG, a CAT scan, a PET scan, an MRI/fMRI or MEG? These are all comparatively recent technologies that have been applied to the study of the brain and its diagnosis. They are described at the PBS site The Secret Life of the Brain, where you can also find a timeline of major discoveries in neuroscience, 3-D Brain Anatomy and some fascinating Mind Illusions. There’s hope for seniors here, too, in The Aging Brain. (Nona Evans) If you’ve suffered from excessively hot weather this year, you might care to contemplate life in the research stations at the South Pole. Specifically, take a guided tour of the new Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station under construction there by the National Science Foundation. It is a technological and engineering marvel, and although by no means luxurious, it is “poles apart” from the earlier stations the USA has used there since 1956. (Kim Komando) Yes, there are now digital cameras with a resolution of 1,000 megapixels, and their capabilities are on display at the Gigapxl Project. Team members have been crisscrossing the country for five years in an endeavor to assemble an ultra-high-resolution Portrait of America as their first objective. You’ll appreciate the gee-whiz factor when you visit their website to view some of the results and the remarkable close-ups possible by zooming in with this technology. Don’t miss seeing the Columbia Restaurant in Ybor City. (Kim Komando) Technology Entertainment and Design, or TED. “TED is an event like no other. It brings together more than 1000 thought-leaders, movers and shakers…[once a year] for four days of learning, laughter and inspiration.” Videos may be viewed of talks by inspiring mavericks and innovators such as Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, co-discoverer of DNA James Watson, and inventor of the Information Superhighway Al Gore. (Pat Durkin) If you want to know how products are made, you can’t do better than visit the website How Products Are Made. It offers no-nonsense detailed descriptions for Air Bag, Aluminum Foil, the Artificial Limb and so on. There’s a bibliography attached to each article; and if you are an expert on any of these products, there’s an opportunity to contribute your knowledge. (Kim Komando) In a remarkable conjunction between science fiction, high technology and design expertise, the competition held by Timex to speculate on concepts for timekeepers 150 years in the future produced some vivid flashes of inspiration. It attracted over 600 entries from 72 countries, and the winning entries are displayed at 2154 – The Future of Time Competition. Some of these are truly far out, like the time being displayed on a contact-lens-like device. (Netsurfer Digest) What do you think of rocket-powered bicycles? Or compressed-air gramophones? Or mechanical analog computers? Before you dismiss them out of hand, take a look at The Museum of Retro Technology, where you’ll find their indefatigable inventors took them very seriously indeed. Some of them, and other marvels, actually made it to market. I found the beautifully illustrated story of one-wheeled vehicles quite fascinating. (Netsurfer Digest) Fortunately, Germany downgraded its atomic bomb development work during WWII believing it would not be ready soon enough. The basic timeline at The Scientific History of the Atomic Bomb shows that from 1895 until the thirties almost all the important groundwork was done in Europe. Not until the Manhattan Project started in 1942 did the huge industrial strength of the US make atomic weapons (and power) possible. Those without basic science backgrounds will still be fascinated by this second phase. (Netsurfer Digest) Did you know that USF’s helicopter UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) has been used in research into hurricane Katrina situations? That and many other fascinating scientific topics may be explored at the Webby Award winner National Science Foundation website. It’s good to see some positive results from research funded by taxpayers’ money. (People’s Award 2005) Would you like to be in charge of a tiger-breeding program at the Minnesota Zoo? At the Zoo Matchmaker interactive site, you will begin to understand what happens after a few generations if your chosen strategy is to a) Maintain genetic diversity, or b) Maximize disease resistance. As Internet games go, this one probably appeals to pre-teens as well as seniors. (Netsurfer Digest) Anyone who has more than a casual interest in computers will find much fascinating material at The History of Computing Project. In the Biography section, read the wonderful story of Gene Amdahl, whose career leapfrogged in and out of IBM as he made more and greater contributions to computer development. Or find in the Hardware section the story of Blue Gene of 2000, a computer operating at one quadrillion operations per second. Other sections are Software, Companies and a superb Timeline. (Tourbus) Not having studied biology in school, I was at a disadvantage when I came across Understanding Genetics, a section of The Tech, San Jose’s Museum of Innovation website. Yet I was captivated by the first thing I tried: Zooming into DNA, a series of photos of a hand at magnifications of 100x to 900,000x accompanied by explanations that give clues about cells, nuclei, chromosomes, genes and DNA. The whole site looks just wonderful. (Netsurfer Digest) The question of the safety of genetically modified plants is like that of global warming. You may choose to stand with the “better safe than sorry” argument by avoiding the use of GM products altogether until their safety is demonstrated to the complete satisfaction of the scientific community. In the meantime, read as much as you can of an Overview of the Hazards of Genetically Engineered Foods by a Canadian expert; it will show you some scary results. (Cynthia Roberts) If you were circling the Earth in the space shuttle and had a camera handy, you would probably want to snap anything you could see that looked interesting. That's exactly what our astronauts have done and they brought back thousands of images that NASA is sharing with us at Earth From Space, Astronauts' Views of the Home Planet. This is a dataset searchable in several ways—for example, by city; however, one of the more interesting ways starts from the (Search by:) Clickable Map button. It shows you a map of the world and lets you zoom in on your favorite area. The thumbnail of a particular image may look dull, but a couple of clicks will bring it to life in a near-full screen image. (Netsurfer Digest) What happened to all those brilliant--or crazy?--transportation ideas of yesteryear? The flying car, the underground airport, the Freedom Ship with 50,000 residents, monorails, the automated highway... At Transportation Futuristics, you can browse through a collection of posters, designs and models gathered by the Transportation Library at UCal and marvel at the breathtaking chutzpah of those proposing some of the more outlandish vehicles. Some failed for their unrealistic engineering designs, others for purely financial reasons. The jury is still out on the Freedom Ship that offers living units starting at $180,000 but with the enticement of no taxes, as the ship will cruise continuously in international waters. (Netsurfer Digest) I have just watched a remarkable Quicktime animation that shows the countdown, lift-off, ascent, journey to Mars, landing and deployment of the Mars Exploration Rover, and all the complex actions performed by its instruments. This is a superb piece of work, making the whole fascinating project come to life, even though we know it's artistic license when you hear roaring rockets in space or the sound of wind on Mars. A link connects you to a play-by-play explanation of what's happening in the video. Kids of all ages will love this. (Netsurfer Digest) Did you know that forty percent of all known mammal species were discovered in the twentieth century? And even that four have been discovered since 1975, with marvelous names like the javelina, megamouth, giant gecko and spindlehorn? You can find their photographs at the International Society of Cryptozoology, whose website is aimed at the layman. I found an even more interesting part was the page of Unresolved Claims, that include brief items on reported sightings of things like sea serpents, lake monsters (like the Loch Ness monster), dinosaur, Sasquatch/Bigfoot and giant octopuses with radial spreads of 100 feet or more. It's fascinating and fun. (St. Petersburg Times) Because I have a scientific background, I can always continue to marvel at the success of the Apollo lunar landings program. It was so fantastically complicated; it was based on technologies of the sixties and it had a firm presidentially mandated deadline. So it was great to come across several virtual reality lunar panoramas that have been stitched together from still photos taken by those astronauts; both the stitching and VR technologies were quite unknown at the time. It's almost like being there, especially when you hear astronauts singing to each other as they go about their chores. Panoramas.dk also lets you access many other, terrestrial panoramas from this home page. If this has piqued your interest, why not also check out the Russian moon lander hoax site? (Netsurfer Digest) Flops, teraflops and petaflops (meaning pretty fast computers to you and me). As of June 2005, the USA (via IBM) has overtaken Japan to become top dog in the ongoing race to build the world's fastest computer, or, more accurately, banks of computers working as one. Read all about the IBM Blue Gene/L system and what the scientists expect to be able to use it for. (Netsurfer Digest) The story of the Brits working away during WW2 at Bletchley Park, England in order to break the Ultra code of the secret German Enigma encrypting machines is well known, especially since it has been made into a not-very-good Hollywood movie ("Enigma"). What has only recently been revealed is that part of the work led to the development of one of the world's first digital computers, named Colossus. It was so secret that it was dismantled and stored at the end of the war, and how it worked remained classified well into the 1990s. Now a team of computer enthusiasts has re-created the successor Colossus Mk 2 in all its vacuum tube and paper tape reader glory, and the BBC has a nice report on it. (Netsurfer Digest) I'm not surprised that the BBC Human Body and Mind site won the 2004 Webby Award for Education because it is chock-full of interactive teaching games. If only Biology or Psychology 101 had been as much fun as this when I was a kid! Where exactly is your spleen? Can you tell whether someone's smile is real or fake? What sex is your brain? These tests are not designed to show you how ignorant you are, but to gently lead you along the path to understanding, with strong visuals and concise explanations. Go up one level to the BBC's Science and Nature site for more wonders. (David Henry) Words, words, words... often pretty dense and intellectual, can be found at Edge, a kind of weblog for the intelligentsia. But wait! Even these mostly scientific guys can let their hair down once in a while. Take a look at Edge, the World Question Center. For 2004, the question was, "What's your law?"--your unique observation that deserves to be a scientific law, named after you. Some of these "Laws" are hilarious, some brilliant, some pompous, and some merely obscure. After reading some of these, I made up David's Law: "All laws should be short". (Netsurfer Digest) There was a big buzz in technical circles in 2004 when word got around about DARPA's Grand Challenge to American inventors to get a vehicle from Los Angeles to Las Vegas without a driver. They offered a prize of $1 million to the first group that could do this; 100 teams applied to take part. As it turned out, nobody won; the best result was a Carnegie Mellon team who made it 7.4 miles from the start. DARPA says it learned several "important ideas" from the race, and plans to run it again in October, 2005. The prize has been upped to $2 million. (Netsurfer Digest) Animals exploited for meat, milk and eggs are increasingly subjected to inexcusable abuse on industrialized farms. So says the Flash-animated movie at The Meatrix, an impassioned diatribe against animal cruelty, the threat posed by antibiotic resistant germs, massive pollution, and the destruction of small farming communities. Learn the facts about veal production, gestation crates, battery cages, mistreatment of "downers", foie gras, and maybe you'll consider "going veg". (Netsurfer Digest)
The Concorde, alas, has gone to its final
resting place in the sky, or rather in several aviation museums. One of
them, our own Smithsonian, has put up a website that allows you to take
a 360 degree
Want to find out about Planet X, Comets Go
Whoosh! or Were Some folks, like Theodore Gray, come up with a wacky idea and pursue it to its inevitable, off-the-wall conclusion. That's why Gray was awarded an Ig-Noble prize at Harvard in 2002 for his Wooden Periodic Table Table. He actually made a table of the Periodic Table that generations of chemistry students have to study. The result is used as a conference table and also has storage for samples of every element. The website tells some chatty stories of each sample that can be amusing to the layman. Don't click to enlarge the photos unless you have broadband; even then they are excruciatingly slow. (Derek Lore) What's the weather like in Space? Not rain nor snow of course, but phenomena like the Solar Wind, Solar Flares, the Auroras, the meteor showers and other "Science news and information about the Sun-Earth environment". Find out what's coming in planetary events and more alarmingly, what Potentially Hazardous Asteroids -- there are 520 of them -- are expected to just miss the Earth each month. All this and more is at SpaceWeather.com, a colorful and informative site maintained by Dr Tony Phillips. (Netsurfer Digest) Do you want to go for the big bucks? The X Prize is a $10 million prize competition for the first team to build and launch a fully reusable rocket that can boost three humans into a sub-orbital flight (60 miles or 100 km high) on two consecutive flights within two weeks. Before you try, you might first want to check how the Space Shuttle works in this excellent exposition. The mind boggles at the sheer complexity of the design and engineering, and you just have to again take your hat off to everyone involved. (How Stuff Works) What's the car of the future expected to look like? According to GM, in twenty years time, it could look like its Hy-Wire lab model. It will discard the internal combustion engine in favor of a stack of fuel cells that generate electricity to drive motors that turn the wheels. That's the Hy part, for hydrogen-fuel-cell. The Wire part represents drive-by-wire, analogous to the fly-by-wire system used in some modern aircraft in which control is all done by computers. (How Stuff Works) Delphion Research is a business concerned with sober patent research. It seems however that the boring days of patent examiners may occasionally be enlivened by weird, wacky and wonderful inventions, such as a bird diaper, air-conditioned shoes or a motorized ice cream cone. Frankly, I think some of those shown in the Gallery of Obscure Patents are "having me on", but see what you think. If these are genuine patents, maybe we can all become rich by submitting ideas we get in a bad dream. (St Petersburg Times) "Powers of Ten" is a noteworthy page of the Florida State University website. Start by viewing the Milky Way at 10 million light years from the Earth. Then move through space picture by stunning picture towards the Earth in successive orders of magnitude until you reach a tall oak tree just outside the buildings of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida. Continuing, you enter a microscopic world that reveals leaf cell walls, the cell nucleus, chromatin, DNA and finally, the subatomic universe of electrons and protons. (Jenny Lind Olin) NASA has done it again, this time with another visually stunning and informative site called the Visible Earth Repository. It is "a searchable directory of images, visualizations and animations of the Earth". Click on a photo of the sandy Nevada Desert and be prepared to be amazed at an enlarged image of the same area with its underlying minerals (shown in color) identified by special satellite cameras. Browse some of the other 4000 images; each is accompanied by an explanatory note. (David Henry) I venture to suggest that, for most people, Egyptology is considered one of the duller and more boring of scientific pursuits. Not so any more, now that TV has brought its more interesting aspects into our living rooms, without the dust and sweat and hard work. To complement one of these docu-drama series there is an excellent website at The Theban Mapping Project. Click on Launch Atlas to explore the fascinating, interactive Atlas of the Valley of Kings, where you can zoom in really close. (Netsurfer Science) Paleoanthropology. The very word strikes fear into the heart of the layman -- all those dusty sites and bits of fossil bones to excavate! But take a look at Becoming Human, an interactive display that makes it all come alive and real, without the heat and the insects. It's the illustrated, narrated story of the discovery of Lucy, a very early hominid skull, by Donald Johanson, the excitement it aroused among the professionals, and how it was fitted into the timeline of evolution. Needs Flash and ideally a broadband connection. (Webby Awards) Earth and Sky is an award winning daily science radio series heard by millions across the USA and in some countries overseas. The companion website offers daily science news in the earth sciences, astronomy and environmental science. In the same areas, it has in depth articles on topics such as the Hale-Bopp comet, monarch butterflies, sea shells, the Piltdown man forgery and the "stars" of Bethlehem. It's accessible to your grandchildren too. (Netsurfer Science) What do you think Alice, The Caves of Lascaux, The Tree of Life and The Earth Observatory have in common? Well, go to Scientific American and click on The Sci/Tech Web awards of 2002, where they are all winning sites. Fifty awards were made covering Archaeology and Paleontology, Astronomy and Astrophysics, Biology, Chemistry, Earth and Environment, Engineering and Technology, Mathematics, Medicine and Physics. This is not dry, academic stuff, but is fully accessible to the lay person. (Netsurfer Digest) When the heavy hand of government is laid upon a quintessentially private development, you might expect the result to be somewhat stodgy. Not so for the U.SA. Centennial of Flight Commission, set up by the Congress to coordinate activities for the centenary year of 2003. You'll find a wealth of information here, not just about the Wright Brothers but about the whole first century of flight. This is a massive website well worth the attention of any aviation enthusiast, including kids. (Netsurfer Digest) There are 2GHz Pentium IVs and then there is ASCI White. It's a super computer built by IBM that can do 12.3 Teraflops /second (12.3 thousand billion floating point operations per second). It has 6 trillion bits of RAM, 160 trillion bytes of storage, occupies 200 cabinets and weighs 106 tons, and is kept busy doing nuclear calculations at Livermore Lab. But it's only No.2 on the Top 500 List of Supercomputers; the fastest is Japanese and is nearly 3 times faster than ASCI White. (Netsurfer Digest) You can treat Space Wander as a modest science fiction adventure, but you would be wrong. This multimedia simulated travel through space starts with trips to the moon, Mars and Jupiter. It is based on NASA photographs and other hard scientific data that is documented and explained en route. When you get to the stars and galaxies, they appear in color that makes for a more interesting view; but remember these images are "digitally enhanced". (Charlie Bigler) What
hath Man wrought? with the newly updated Hubble
Space Telescope, that is. The great increase in resolution and
area of the photographs and the reduced time to take them promise continuing
discoveries in the farthest reaches of space. View four of NASA's stunning
new images of the Cone, Omega, Mice and Tadpole nebulae and galaxies and
marvel at the wonders of the seemingly never-ending Universe. Any
of these would make great background wallpaper for your PC. (Netsurfer
Digest) Have you ever taken a trip through the Panama Canal, or are you contemplating one? Then you'll be interested in the official Panama Canal Authority site. Although primarily aimed at the maritime industry, it is full of interest for the casual visitor, from news articles to a photo gallery, a live camera, an extensive canal history, and a very interesting Programs and Projects section. Those who lived in the old Panama Canal Zone will enjoy the nostalgic site at CZBrats that has a class reunion feel to it. Plenty of History, Stories, Schools, Recipes and Towns, with photos, maps and local music. Americans growing up here seem to have had a pretty cushy life. (Netsurfer Digest) The Hubble Space Telescope is an amazing set of scientific instruments your taxes are paying for. This gee-whiz site by NASA shows some pretty stunning photos taken by the Hubble of familiar and strange objects including planets, stars, galaxies, nebulae and the mysterious other. Some of these remarkable images will have you scratching your head in wonder. Also read about the several shuttle missions involved in deploying and servicing the Hubble. (Netsurfer Digest) Everything
kids might want to know about space and space travel (that's why it's in
this section :-)) can be found at Marshall
Space Flight Center.
Great for adults, too! What is Phrenicea? Pronounced fren-EEE-shuh, it is a vision of our future - a 21st-century prophecy predicting the ultimate outcome of the Internet and biotechnology revolutions. Here are some predictions for 2050: Radio, TV, VCRs, cell & wired telephone, fax, records, tapes, CDs, pagers, PCs and the Web/Internet no longer exist (not needed with Phrenicea); reading & writing are extinct; automobiles, planes, jets, powered ships no longer exist. Wild? Far out? Ridiculous? Maybe, but stimulating reading . (Tourbus) Views of the Solar System presents a vivid multimedia adventure unfolding the splendor of the sun, planets, moons, comets, asteroids and more. Discover the latest scientific information, or study the history of space exploration, rocketry, early astronauts, space missions, spacecraft through a vast archive of photographs, text, graphics and videos.
I am impressed with The Why Files, a
website of the University of Wisconsin. With wonderful photographs
- often photomicrographs - to catch your eye on a mystery of nature, you
are stimulated to click on a Who-what-where-when-why icon to read all
about it. Topical areas include Astronomy, Biology, Environmental
Science, Health, Physical Science and Technology. It's all done
with a light touch, a key requirement for a David's Link. (Tourbus) One
of Nature's more beautiful yet mysterious phenomena is the Aurora, the
shimmering sheets and curtains of light, sometimes delicately colored, which can
beautify our northern skies at night. Information, links and photographs
of the "Northern Lights" can be found at the Aurora
Page. The images can be quite stunning and you can also
consult up to date forecasts of displays. (Carmen Crum) You
may not agree it's cool, but it's certainly refreshingly different for
those of us living in an urban setting.
Iowa Farmer Today,
besides lots of farm talk, news and market reports, has three web cams
set up, one actually watching corn grow, one soybeans and a third in the
milking barn. (Mary Walston) Type
(or copy and paste) some text into the box, click the Synthesize button
and hear the result played back to you at the Bell Labs Text
to Speech Synthesizer. It's
more lifelike than typical robot-speech because of the natural sounding
speech inflections. You can choose several voices such as man, woman,
child and also have text entered and played back in your choice of
languages. (Zargon) Can't
wait till the next local forecast on the Weather Channel?
Get it instantly with The
Weather Bug that displays current local weather data along with the
forecast, radar and satellite maps.
Install the program and have the display show automatically at
start up time, or click any time on its system tray icon - the current
temperature. It also buzzes
when there is an Alert such as a thunderstorm, flood, tornado or
hurricane advisory. You can
also get the current display for any zip code. (Jenny Lind Olin) NASA
never sleeps, especially when it produces remarkable images such as the Americas
at Night. This is
actually a composite of 200 images made by satellites orbiting the Earth
and makes you realize how we have conquered the darkness of the ages.
You can find a similar image of the entire world by exploring
elsewhere on the same site. (John Hallgren). Another
remarkable NASA site is the Solar
System Simulator. You
select any planet or named satellite, real or artificial, and the
Simulator will display a colored image showing its appearance as viewed
from any other planet / satellite.
You can also tinker with other parameters, including year, date
and time. (Netsurfer Digest) The International
Space Station has a very
thorough site describing it, which countries are participating and who
is contributing what, the planned missions and what technical and
scientific developments might be expected to result. (This site was
nearly put in Travel!) Then
take a look at some of the stunning images of familiar places taken from
the unfamiliar perspective of space, courtesy of the Ikonos
satellite. They include
Downtown San Francisco, The Pyramids of Gizeh, Hoover Dam and the Sydney
Olympics. You can
still use Dialpad on your PC to call up any
phone in the USA for free. It
works like a walkie-talkie, only one party at a time can talk. There
are some highly detailed photos of your neighborhood taken from a
Russian spy satellite in February 1998; I find this a bit spooky.
View them for free at the TerraServer
site, but if you want to print them you'll pay to download them. Are you an environmentalist? The Nature Conservancy finds, protects and maintains communities, ecosystems and endangered species in the natural world. (BernieS). The Sierra Club, over 100 years old and with half a million members, is probably the premier grassroots group devoted to protection of the environment. Finally, as you would expect, you'll find stunning wildlife photos and reports from intrepid explorers at The National Geographic. More locally, mosey on over to the Florida Sustainable Communities Center, with resources on topics like transportation, land use planning, sprawl / infill and smart growth. (Dave McGarvey)
|
