An extension of “Snowflake” Bentley’s Studies

“One hundred twenty-five years ago, Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley took the first microphotographs of snow; 46 years later he died of pneumonia contracted while photographing snowflakes in his barn. Today, CalTech physicist Kenneth Libbrecht is carrying Bentley’s work into the 21st century — and posting the findings online.
Libbrecht’s gallery includes a remarkably beautiful photograph of the [...]

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File Sharing Made Easy

“Drop.io is a totally free, totally private server space that allows you to upload and share documents and (unlike Google Docs) music and video files.
“Drops” can hold up to 100MB of data and come with their own e-mail addresses and fax and voice-mail numbers: Once you’ve built one, you create a password to allow others inside. [...]

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NOVA….Interactive

“The producers of PBS’s best science show, NOVA, have posted an excellent gallery of online experiments: Skydive from 100,000 feet. Replicate Shackleton’s 800-mile open-boat journey from the South Shetland Islands to South Georgia. Tweak the variables in a steroid, a rice paddy, or a rocket. Perform a virtual heart transplant. You may get so caught [...]

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Oxford, Baby!!

“Oxford’s podcast series allows you to audit courses at the English-speaking world’s oldest university — free of charge, and from afar.
Learn about quantum nanotechnology while riding the subway. Study Milton in the Laundromat. And hear the creation story as it’s described in the Torah, the Bible, and the Koran. You can also hear American economist [...]

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A Reshapable Map (according to different demographics)

“Hold the globe up to a funhouse mirror and you’ll get a sense of what the Atlas of the Real World’s all about: Here, you’ll find a series of global maps, all of which reshape countries according to various demographic rankings.
Take housing prices: On that map, Western Europe is as big as — well [...]

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Music Resource

“Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise is that rare music book that teaches you how to hear — and feel — in entirely new ways. Now Ross has turned the book’s website into something more than a promotional device: Augmented with 300 audio and video files, it’s become a wonderfully convenient, stand-alone resource for those [...]

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Space Photos…Daily

“Sooner or later, the universe comes down to this: We, the people, don’t matter that much. Our planet is a speck of dust, orbiting a middling star, in an out-of-the-way corner of a totally minor solar system. And in the greatest scheme of things, there’s not a whole lot any one of us can do [...]

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National Geographic Map of the Day

“According to National Geographic magazine, American youths, even the ones not competing to become Miss Teen USA, have an easier time locating the Malaysian island of Pulau Tiga on a map (Survivor was filmed there) than they do New Jersey. Suitably dismayed, NatGeo has responded with a lovely and informative website called Map of the [...]

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Week Long Bug Unit

This summer, “Bugs and Insects” are the themes in the libraries across Kansas. I decided that we would use this opportunity to study them throughout the summer months – – and I will try to keep up with what I do so that you may use whatever resources are listed for your own Thematic Unit. [...]

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Statistics, Geography and Ethnic Information (Together)

“What do you get when you cross the U.S. Census Bureau with Don Rickles? A county-by-county breakdown of America’s ethnic groups, and God’s own gift to political consultants, history buffs . . . and insult comics, who can assume that material about Iceland is fairly safe everywhere in the U.S. — except, of course, Pembina County in [...]

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