Table of Contents for this page:

• Preface.

• A few Pages of Puns and Word Plays and other light-hearted family-oriented foolishness.

• Finding Real and Lasting Happiness Every Day.

• Some Things Astronomical.

• Science & Technology Websites.

• Futures Websites.

• Some Very Interesting Microscopic Images.

• HELP Getting Started and Working Safely on the Internet pages, including an "Introduction to the Internet," Help with Social Networking sites {now with a serious caution from a respected Social Psychologist about the teen mental health crisis of the Phone-Based Childhood and the urgent need to get phones out of schools now}, "Help with Internet Email and Mailing Lists," "Help for New Web Surfers," "Help with web page creation and HTML," "Searching the Internet: Parts I and II," and a "Privacy and Intellectual Property Rights Index."

• The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit - a great picture gallery by a Detroit artist of that great industrial city's buildings from its heyday, This section also includes lots of other Detroit links.

• Photo Collection from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

• Edmonton Temple, Family History, Scripture Searching and Book of Mormon Map, etc.
• and an announcement of the passing of Dorothy Meek, 18 Aug 2021.
  

• Learn Some Elementary Egyptian Hieroglyphics (really!).

• Dacaharma's Tasty Delights (recipes).

• More Mindless Doodles (well, what are you going to do? Somebody asked.) 

• A Few Photos for Relaxation.

  Preface

For queries or further information, e-mail us directly from your forms-capable browser.

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A Few Puns and Word Plays:

• The original page (was 140+ Kb) that just got too big. Now it is in five parts.

• Its little brother -Ver 2 (this will give you the flavor, too).

• Its other little brothers - Ver 3 or Ver 4 or Ver 5 (as will these).

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  Finding Real and Lasting Happiness Every Day

• This section provides a starting point for almost everybody's quest (throughout the ages in almost every culture) for greater personal contentment and well-being. I add it here because there are many misleading counterfeits and because there is available only now a reasonable body of research and objective thinking that help define what happiness is and how individuals can foster its enduring effects in their everyday lives.

• See Living a Happier Life.

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  Now, Some Things Astronomical

Left is the planetary nebula Mz3; center is the Cat's Eye nebula;
and right is the light echo around V838 Monocerotis.
All are from the Hubble Heritage Image Gallery.

• Cal Tech's Cool Cosmos has lots of good information in three levels: beginner, intermediate and advanced. It has a cosmic classroom, a cosmic kids section, games, and lots of good graphics including infrared observations and explanations. This site is a product of the IPAC Communications and Education team (about).

• View the Doomed Star Eta Carinae - about to explode in a fireball like you have never seen. "A huge, billowing pair of gas and dust clouds are captured in this stunning NASA Hubble Space Telescope image of the supermassive star Eta Carinae," expanding outward at about 1.5 million miles per hour. There are two versions, both with explanations: Version 1 and Version 2. In case the foregoing are unavailable, see also Nebula in Carinae (19 July 1999 Astronomy Picture of the Day [see below]); the doomed star (16 Aug 1998); and lasers in Eta Carinae (29 Nov 1997). Outstanding!

• View another Hubble phenom, the "supersonic exhaust from [planetary] nebula M2-9." This is an example of a "bipolar planetary nebula" and is estimated to be ten times the diameter of Pluto's orbit (or about 100 billion miles). This picture, along with others in the Planetary Nebula Gallery, contributes to astronomers' understanding of the complex processes that can result from the death throes of Sun-like stars. The site contains the M2-9 photo in several resolutions and formats, an explanatory caption and a photo gallery of other planetary nebulas. And if that is not enough, here are a few more Hubble wonders:
• Photo-1: a majestic view of a planetary nebula, the glowing remains of a dying, Sun-like star.
• Photo-2: Looking Down a Barrel of Gas at a Doomed Star.
• Photo-3: huge shell of gas ejected by a star as it nears the end of its lifetime.
• Photo-4: four stunning colorful snapshots of stellar burnout.
• Photo-5: The Final Blaze Of Glory Of Sun-Like Stars (M2-9).

• The Hubble Heritage website (information center) sees the Hubble telescope as "a tool for extending human vision that is capable of building a bridge between the endeavors of scientists and the public. By emphasizing compelling HST images distilled from scientific data, we hope to pique curiosity about our astrophysical understanding of the universe we all inhabit." An overview of the Heritage Project gallery is available. This site and the more recent HUBBLE site are outstanding websites devoted to the most interesting visual images from the Hubble telescope.

• The Kitt Peak National Observatory has an outstanding Advanced Observing Program (AOP) in which amateur astronomers can use their large telescopes. The Best of AOP contains a superb collection of their images. It is definitely worth a visit.

• The Nine Planets Site (maybe 8 after 24 Aug 2006) by Bill Arnett is a "must-see" for anybody even remotely interested in outer space. It provides a "multimedia tour of the solar system," complete with pictures and brief, interesting explanations written for the layman and general reader. For those in a hurry, there is a "Nine Planets just for kids" and an Overview of the Solar System which should not be missed. Watch out, though ... you are at risk of spending all morning there anyway! It is good stuff.

• Calvin Hamilton's Views of the Solar System is a delightful experience. He is a digital image processing engineer; and you can see the results in this outstanding on-line offering.

• The commercial website NorCAL Fabric Shade Structures posts a A Comprehensive Guide to Our Solar System, and other science education articles which are very helpful. The Solar System article was suggested to us by Chrissy Compton, and contains a brief summary for each planet along with links to other related websites, mainly at universities. Thanks Chrissy.

• The NASA Planetary Photojournal website.

• Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD). Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
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• The Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive is also available, including the "Galactic Cannibal," a huge cluster that eats nearby stars. The Galactic Cannibal was the featured picture August 31st, 1998. Their infrared Saturn (24 July 1999) with false color is spectacular.
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The photo to the right is Saturn's Hyperion: A Moon with Odd Craters (to say the least). Have you ever seen such a thing? APOD's explanation may help you decipher it. Meanwhile, clicking on the image will yield an enlargement. The photo is from CICLOPS (Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS), et al. Great work! . - And to the left here is a stunning photo of Stickney Crater on the Martian moon Phobos. The crater is so big it nearly shattered Phobos on impact. See the Astronomy Picture of the Day for 10 April 2008 for more details.
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• And while we are in planetary mode here, don't miss the Mars Rovers and Mars Lander websites (one each from the U of Arizona and the Jet Propulsion Lab) to see what they are up to. Here is a quick tutorial, Mars 101, that you can read in a short time to get up to speed on Mars in terms of similar features and measures from our planet Earth.

• The EarthLights Photo of lights over the entire earth from the space station (regular size; jumbo size) is one very interesting way to see global population and development densities.

• The Subaru Telescope (construction, specifications and instrumentation), posts some stunning pictures from the heavens which rival those from the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope. The English captions, written for the general reader, are a delight. The explosion of warm molecular hydrogen gas around the Kleinman-Low nebula in the Orion cloud (M42) is particularly impressive. The enlarged JPG is big (476 Kb), but spectacular--definitely worth the wait for the download. Watch this website for some dazzling stuff!

• The brand new Gemini North telescope will also rival photos from the Hubble telescope, especially for images in the infrared. Lots of links to interesting images, systems, etc. This telescope will have what are called "adaptive optics" which will adjust the mirrors on the fly by bending them just a little to compensate for atmospheric disturbances.

• NASA's "StarChild" website offers descriptions of the sun and planets in our Solar System, descriptions of galaxies, stars and black holes in the universe, etc., for grade 3-8 students. In each category they post level 1 and level 2 information. Lots of good pictures. Their Planets website is very good also. And on a more advanced level, Emma suggests a Physics Guide to the Solar System which has more good ideas.

• NASA's 30th anniversary website commemorating the Apollo 11 moon landing (20 July 1969) has some great photo galleries and much more. And they have also posted a recap of the entire Apollo Program (1, and 7-17).

• NASA's Gateway to Astronaut Photography website has photos you can select from a world grid.

• NASA's "Constellation Program" is getting to work on the new spacecraft that will return humans to the moon and blaze a trail to Mars and beyond." It has some well done illustrations of the rockets and spacecraft.

• The NASA Images website is lots of fun, with its sections on the Universe, the Solar System, Earth, Aeronautics and Astronauts. There are a zillion handy accessible images here. It even has a Spaceflight Timeline where you can see the Explorer, Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs, along with those for Skylab, Viking, Pioneer, Voyager, the Shuttle, Galileo, Hubble, Pathfinder, Cassini, the Mars Rovers, and the International Space Station. Great stuff !!

• Here is a 1:30 video of the assembly of the International Space Station. It even provides module names, dates, and shows where/how they fit together.

• Don't miss the Earth and Moon Viewer, a creation of John Walker at Fourmilab. It contains user specified views of earth from space, etc., that you will enjoy. You will even enjoy his questions and answers section. Lots of fun.

• The Terra Earth Observing Satellite, launched only in December of 1999, posts a very detailed and interesting gallery of photos and other images of the earth. This site will be worth checking often as it grows, having been designed with multiple simultaneous imaging systems "for a comprehensive check up of planet Earth." The Earth Observatory Image of the Day is always interesting, too.

• Another website containing more delightful images is also very informative and easy to navigate. The Chandra X-ray Observatory Science Images, includes a spectacular Shooting Neutron Star that looks like a crossbow.

• Google Earth has a section "Explore the Sky with Google Earth." Lots of fun here, too, looking at a Hubble and other views of the sky overhead where you are, checking out the orbits of the planets and much more. Google Earth gives you maps galore of the surface of the earth, too, of course. The unofficial Google Earth Blog by Frank Taylor describes "the amazing things about Google Earth."

• On a little different level, here is an Astrophysics course you can actually understand. Dr. John C. Evans at George Mason University Physics and Astronomy Department has posted "Foundations of Cosmological Thought," and also the class notes for his Astronomy 103 class. If you want to know more about Astronomy, Physics and Astrophysics, these are very well done introductions. Each topic starts at the beginning, and defines terms as they come up. The result is that you can pick the topics you are interested in without having to read all the others. Dr. Evans has also explained Astronomical Coordinate Systems (the numbers Astronomers use to tell each other where to look for stars, galaxies, etc.). It is also very well written. Thank you, Dr. Evans!
• And here's another one: The Physics Department at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania offers Physics 108, Astronomy in the Physical Universe. Its section on the evolution of stars is just excellent. You can read the whole thing in under half an hour. It is very readable for us non-astronomers and non-physicists. It begins with an introduction, describes all the stages in half a dozen sections, and ends with "Black Holes: Gravity's Ultimate Victory." It even has some illustrations.
   
  
• Also on a different level, Daniëlle Futselaar posts her Digital Artwork and Graphic Design website and a blog that you will not want to miss. Her space art has appeared in a tonne of places; but she also focuses on fantasy art and children's books which are very imaginative. To the left is her Sparrow Warrior Girl, who clearly has her wings and is ready to engage the bad guys. Be ready! And her hitchhiking astronaut has me laughing every time I think of it. Lots of fun here.
  

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  Science & Technology Websites.

• TheOnline Guide to Snowflakes, snow crystals and other ice phenomena, hosted by the Information Management Systems and Services unit at Caltech, is a great place to learn about snow. It has "Frequently Asked Questions," several galleries of photos of individual snowflakes, and even a "designer snowflakes" section. You can learn if there are really no two snowflakes that are exactly alike, and if they are always (or even mostly) symmetrical; and you can check out just about anything you ever wanted to know about snow and the perennial 6 arms of a snowflake. Hey, if you are stuck in the snow six months of the year like we are, you might as well learn all about it. They even have some great snowflake wall paper for your computer, and a list of snowflake books.
• The USDA's Beltsville Agricultural Research Center posts a very interesting Electron Microscopy Unit Snow Page that features images from a low temperature scanning electron microscope, including lots of snow and ice crystals at high magnifications. They also post other microscopic images of mites, etc.
• Tiffany Peterson suggested another website with a page "Throw, Catch, and Learn about Snowflakes" which has lots of fun ideas and good links on snowflakes, too. Thanks Tiff.
• The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) is part of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder. There is a tonne of stuff at this NSIDC website about the world's frozen realms, ... and lots of photos, too.
• Don Komarechka (about) has posted a gallery to unravel the mysteries of snowflakes. Don't miss this one; the variety is astounding.
  
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• Ron Hipschman's website on Bubbles is outstanding. In his introduction he wonders about "the precise spherical shape, the incredibly fragile nature of the microscopically thin soap film, the beautiful colors that swirl and shimmer, or most likely, a combination of all these phenomena. Why does a bubble form a sphere at all? Why not a cube, tetrahedron, or other geometrical figure?" He then says: "Let's look at the forces that mold bubbles."  Definitely worth a peek, as are his several other websites. Just Google his name, or see the Exploratorium Webmaster's Page.
• See also the Exploratorium's website on Ice Stories - dispatches from polar scientists.
• See also the Exploratorium's Microscope Imaging Section, particularly their Gallery. Fascinating stuff.
• See also the Exploratorium's Scientific Evidence (how do we know what we know?) website. Very well-prepared.

• For those interested in thermonuclear fusion and the machines needed to contain the very hot plasmas in which these reactions occur, All The World's Tokamaks is a website containing a fascinating gallery of photos (external and internal) from the early Russian TM models in the 1960s (even the very first TMP in 1954), to the present 500 megawatt ITER project in France which may be operational as early as 2018. This international project will provide vital design information for tomorrow's fusion power plants. A Tokamak Discoveries page lists the principal tokamaks (Wikipedia Tokamak page) in date order of their construction. To the left is a cropped photo of a 1987 Russian postage stamp containing an image of one of their early tokamaks, likely from the 1960s.
. The Princeton Plasma Physics Lab posts several good images (internal and external) of their Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor which ran from 1982-1997, along with some explanations for the general reader of the accomplishments which scientists made while using it. They include a ton of links to related material, historic and present. The U.S. National Ignition Facility is working on inertial confinement fusion as a related method of confining the plasma. Their Photo Gallery contains captivating photos of the construction and fabrication of NIF along with conceptual diagrams.

• For those interested in Nuclear Power Reactors such as the boiling water reactors which are in jeopardy at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in Japan following the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission posts the Students' Corner website which explains nuclear energy, nuclear reactors, radiation, emergency planning, security, decommissioning and radioactive waste. It is written for those who are new to nuclear power and electrical power generation. They also post a number of other informative and helpful pages for those new to the nuclear energy field.
• In addition, the Union of Concerned Scientists (an advocacy group focusing on nuclear and environmental safety) posts on its "All Things Nuclear" website several interesting and informative articles: Possible Source of Leaks at Spent Fuel Pools at Fukushima, More on Spent Fuel Pools at Fukushima and an introductory .PDF slide show showing how a Boiling Water Reactor works in detail.
• Normally seen as a low risk component of the fuel cycle at nuclear reactors, the pools for holding spent fuel assemblies (Wiki's introductory description, with photos) have become perhaps the highest risk at Fukushima after boiling dry or leaking water. [In normal operation the pools keep the spent fuel assemblies cool, and contain their radioactivity while they are cooling after their useful life in the reactor is over. When the water level drops below the tops of the spent fuel assemblies for more than a short time, the zirconium cladding on the fuel rods can become hot enough to ignite causing radiation discharge, generating a lot more heat, and perhaps contributing to the melting of the fuel itself. The combination represents a substantial risk since, absent the water, there is no shielding against the radiation emitted, radioactive aerosols can be discharged into the atmosphere when carried by the smoke from the fire (since the pools have no tops--they are open, much like a swimming pool, and the buildings surrounding them have been damaged significantly), and any undisciplined pile of melted nuclear fuel at the bottom of the pool represents a great deal of uncertainty and risk.]

• The Large Hadron Collider (Wiki) that came on-line in mid-2008 is another fascinating machine for investigating sub-atomic particles and their properties (updated entries, including the busy 2013-15 shutdown). The Boston.com blog posts some large and delightfully detailed photos (from Aug 2008) of the tunnel, its components and the detectors, mainly during construction and assembly.
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• Here are links for detailed information and availability concerning the Encyclopedia of Computer Science - Wiley website) and the Concise Encyclopedia of Computer Science, the first edition of which I edited with Dr. Anthony Ralston (his page at UB). The Table of Contents for the 4th Edition is on-line. Here is Dr. Ralston's paper describing the evolution of the Encyclopedia: "Four Editions and Eight Publishers: A History of the Encyclopedia of Computer Science." The article first appeared in the IEEE's Annals of the History of Computing in 2004, Vol. 26, No. 1, pp. 42-52.

• I Was Wondering is a very well-done interactive website which begins with a young woman named Lia talking about her favorite female scientists (Flash required). It's highly engaging and designed to get young women excited about entering scientific professions. On the homepage, visitors can read through answers to questions like "How do bones tell a story?" and "What's inside an atom?" The site also includes a wonderful Time Travel Timeline, as well as a "10 Cool Scientists" area including profiles of scientists like Heidi Hammel, Adriana Ocampo, Marta Tienda, and Amy Vedder. Overall, this is a website that does a tremendous job reaching out to curious future scientists in a way that's both inviting and fun. This description was adapted from The Scout Report (about) of March 22, 2013 -- Volume 19, Number 12. Our thanks to The Scout Report for finding such a good website for women in Science.
• The American Physiological Society (about) also posts "Women Life Scientists Units," a set of 20 life sciences modules, designed for middle and high school life sciences curricula to increase students' exposure both to female science role models and to hands-on, inquiry approach activities.
  

• Scientific American Magazine posts 60-Second Science, a website containing "quick reports and commentaries on the world of science." They really do take only about one screen, can be read easily in a minute or less, and contain links to further reading. They are a very good idea when you are in a hurry, or only want the overview to start.
  

• Science @ NASA sponsors Space Weather, which keeps an eye on solar activity, provides an aurora watch predicting good aurora conditions and their dates based on observed solar activity, and the speed of the solar wind. They also report on asteroids, meteors, etc., and provide a good list of "Essential Links." Every week they post something very interesting that is readable; and they have a glossary and an on-line tutorial for those learning about space weather. They often post interesting links to websites with other interesting atmospherics, such as:
• Richard Fleet's section about "Glows, Bows and Haloes" which lists all kinds of rainbows, fogbows, mirages, auroras, glories and many other interesting optical wonders in the sky.
• Les Cowley's website on Atmospheric Optics is also fascinating.

• The Biological Sciences Division of Molecular and Cellular Boisciences at the National Scence Foundation posts a fascinating introduction to cells called A Tour of the Cell, at which you can view the components of cells, learn what they do, and how they operate. It is an easy read with a one-screen description of each component.

• Science Oxford Online demonstrates how the different Science Oxford teams work together, and with diverse audiences to achieve their mission: To encourage the pursuit of science and enterprise. Their new design makes connections between science, enterprise and society. It illustrates connections between different areas of science. It also tries to show the many connections that science has with everyday life; and it does so in a way you can follow and understand. You can see a video on the amazing properties of cornstarch, for example (in which you can ride a bike over a pool of it, but if you stand still you sink in). There are photos of a very big spider, and many other very interesting items: pages and pages of them. It is very easy to navigate, to bring up videos, etc., and to move from one item to another. Don't pass this one up. You can spend five minutes here, or five hours.

• Heather Renyck, a science educator in New Hampshire posts some delightful science, nature and other photos on her websites: Summer 2007 and Last Day of Summer Holiday or other galleries. Check out her aspen leaf with water droplets that was featured on the Earth Science Picture of the Day (EPOD) for 21 Aug 2006 (where there is a stunning full-resolution version, complete with magnified mineral grains in some of the droplets). Additionally, we are indebted to Heather for that terrific New Hampshire sunset in the upper right corner of this page. Thank you, Heather!

• Carrie Jacobson, a home schooling Mom who hosts Learn More Fun (about) has suggested an interesting Physics page: "Newton's First Law of Motion in your Car." It has lots of links (scroll to the bottom) that may be helpful to other home schoolers, and others. Thanks Carrie.

• Chloe and Ella, a couple of budding science students, suggest taking a peek at an interesting science web page: Elevator Physics: Newton's Laws. It covers Newton's laws of motion, and even has a piece on elevator physics {elevator physics, from an elevator company? Who would have thought?!}. Anyhow, thanks go out to Chloe and Ella: all the best in your school work, and especially your physics pursuits. Carry on!

• Denise and the Lyndhurst STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) club have suggested Handyman 101: Tinkering and Electrical Projects. It has lots of interesting ideas for projects you can do at home or at school. Thanks, Denise and club members.
  
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• The HyperPhysics website by Dr. Rod Nave at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Georgia State University provides comprehensive physics and astronomy information based on concept maps (image, right) or tree structures for easy navigation.
. This site provides simple explanations aimed at High School and College physics students, with links for greater detail on every aspect. Click the "Index" link for a very handy index in a frame to the right on the index page. In addition to being very readable and informative, this website is very comprehensive and stable. Thank you, Dr. Nave.


• Another Physics website is Online Learning Fun with Physics, posted by Maryville University in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. It has sections on motion, heat and thermodynamics, light, electricity and magnetism, and gravity. Many good external links are provided. This link was suggested by high school tutor, Eva. Thanks Eva.

• Yet another Physics website, "Newton’s Laws of Motion and Car Physics" has been suggested by Tess and her high school age daughter. Thanks for the tip.
  

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• The Smithsonian Institution publishes a free newsletter "Spotlight on Science" to which you can subscribe. It often has interesting articles that are short, well-written and cover a variety of subjects.

• The Infrared Astronomy website features the Infrared Universe. But it also has a ton of infrared images from the everyday world in its World Gallery. Lots of fun here, from steaming cups of hot drinks, to hot and cold running water, geysers, animals, even a just-removed shoe, etc. Dr. Michelle Thaller also manages the site as one of her public education interests.

• The Smethwick Steam Engine (photo) is the oldest steam engine still in working order. It was built in 1779, and is just one of many interesting items at the WORKSHOP of the WORLD website which features invention and innovation in the West Midlands in the United Kingdom.
. Though you will need the Macromedia Flash Player [free download], this site provides short descriptions of many interesting machines, some of which you will not know originated in the West Midlands. . The West Midlands region (map, right, from Wikipedia) of England has been an important center of commerce and industry for well over five hundred years. The city of Coventry was a dominant center of wool and clothing manufacturing in the Middle Ages, and Birmingham was a prime location of industry during the Industrial Revolution. Drawing on the collections of museums in Birmingham, Coventry, Stoke-on-Trent (and others), the Workshop of the World website brings together some of the compelling inventions that came out of the West Midlands region in the 19th century. Visitors can look over several dozen of these inventions, including an automatic wood screw making machine, a button shank making device, and a rotative steam engine. Each object is accompanied by a photo or illustration, and a short essay gives detailed background information about the object's importance and use. [Summary from the Scout Report, Volume 13, Number 16, 27 April 2007].

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• MIT's Open Courseware website. Their objective is to have all their courses available free for on-line auditing within the decade. A laudable objective, to be sure. Somewhere above 1,400 such courses are now available. The Open Courseware Consortium lists other universities and colleges following suit; and the Open Courseware Finder will help you find the one(s) you want.

• The Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia contains plenty of exhibits, reports from expeditions, etc. Their Butterfly Gallery alone is worth a stop, as is Outside-In: The Academy's Children's Museum. Nice Work!

• The Biology Corner "is a resource site for biology and science teachers. The Lesson Plans section contains classroom activities, labs and worksheets, [teachers] can change any of these to suit ... classroom needs. The Webquest section contains inquiry based projects that utilize the Internet. Internet lessons (also called miniquests) are smaller activities that use one or two science related web sites for the students to explore and answer questions about." The site is the creation of Science educator Shannan Muskopf; and she has been "making it a personal mission to locate and compile interactive science education sites. Some web programs like Flash can create some amazing virtual labs that students can really benefit from. You will find many of these places in the section under Internet lessons, all of which utilize fantastic websites to help students understand scientific concepts." Great work, Shannan.

• The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History posts Farmers, Warriors, Builders: The Hidden Life of Ants, a really good website about ants, how they live, what their nests look like, what they eat, etc. Their Photo Gallery is worth a stop all by itself. Don't miss this one if you have any interest in ants. Lots of fun.
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• The U.S. Department of Energy (about) has a section "Discovery and Innovation" offering a wide variety of stories mainly in the physical sciences, and including a "Brief Science Highlights" section.

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• The GeoBirds website provides lots of good information for teaching and learning about birds and birding.
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• The Butterflies and Moths of North America website at the Big Sky Institute of Montana State University is full of fascinating images and information. Their Gallery for Gossamer-wing Butterflies alone is worth a stop.

• The WebExhibits website "is an interactive, web-based museum [about] that challenges visitors to think and explore scientific and cultural phenomena in new ways. Using innovative and intuitive data interface designs and multimedia content, WebExhibits helps visitors formulate questions and examine issues from several points of view. The success of WebExhibits has led to collaborations with museums around the globe." Current exhibits include the Causes of Color (birds, butterflies, glaciers, gemstones, color vision, pigments through the ages, and many more), Daylight Saving Time, Calendars Through the Ages, the History and Making of Butter, and lots of other interesting topics. You can sign up for their newsletter (issued a few times a year) to learn about new exhibits.

• Learn all about the ABACUS at The Art of Calculating with Beads website. It was created by Luis Fernandes and is posted by the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Ryerson University. Lots of fun here; and you may learn how to use this ancient calculating machine that can add, subtract, multiply and divide, ... not to mention calculating square roots AND cube roots. Amazing. A similar website about the Slide Rule is posted by The Museum of HP Calculators.

• Encyclopedia - Wikipedia [free encyclopedia, frequently updated, comprehensive, includes slang and street terms, etc.].
  Explanations more generally - Reddit's Explain Like I'm Five section provides lay explanations by lay people. It is not as reliable as Wiki; but is often helpful. They want you to sign in.

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  Futures Websites.

Here are some links to places where futurists and others predict what will come to pass as time rolls on. It will focus on social, societal and political items as well as those from technology and science and other topics that seem interesting. They are almost never accurate, of course; and some are more serious than others. And that is all part of the fun. But they will give you food for thought as you try to visualize where we are headed. Have fun.

• The BBC's Future section of their World News website includes all the above subjects as well as health, environmental and other subjects. It is well written, updated frequently and has a tonne of material, including columns for your futures quest, and much more. They also post Ten 100-year predictions [from 1900] that came true.

• Future Timeline contains "a speculative timeline of future history. Part fact and part fiction, the timeline is based on detailed research that includes analysis of current trends, long-term environmental changes, advances in technology such as Moore's Law, future medical breakthroughs, the evolving geopolitical landscape and more."

• Wikipedia posts a Timeline of the future in forecasts, including a section Top 12 areas for innovation through 2025. They also post a List of predictions.

• The World Future Society (about) posts its Top 10 Forecasts for 2013 and Beyond.

• Futurity (about) contains research news from top universities in the US, UK, Canada and Australia.

• Popular Mechanics magazine posts 110 Predictions for the next 110 years and 10 Things That Will Never Change among related items.

• Free Technology for Teachers provides ideas for the classroom, including an extensive archive of historical entries.

• My Teaching Degree (about) - "Learn Today, Lead Tomorrow" posts a tonne of good stuff for prospective and aspiring teachers - all of it freely accessible.
• "It takes a special person to be a teacher. They educate in the classroom, mediate on the playground, and even mentor after school. Learn how to become a teacher and make a difference."
  

• Mashable has a "Predictions about the Future" section.

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  Some Very Interesting Microscopic Images.

Pollen grain   ||   Tip of ball point  pen   ||   Ant's claw

• The Centre for Microscopy and Microanalysis at the University of Queensland (Australia) provides over one hundred scanning electron microscope (SEM) and transmission electron microscope (TEM) images in nineteen categories (gallery), including blood, cellular ultrastructure, hair, insects, materials, pollen, and yeast. Images are black and white .gifs and .jpgs, with file sizes provided. Color enhancements of selected images are available. Above left is a pollen grain; at center is the tip of a ball point pen; and at right is the tarsal claw of a small ant. Lots of fun here.
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• Darlyne Murawski, Photographer, Writer and Biologist, hosts a gallery of outstanding photos of butterflies, fungi, parasites, and others, that will keep you interested for quite a while. Very interesting, all with captions, etc.
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• MicroAngela's Electron Microscope Image Gallery. MicroAngela is the outstanding creation of Tina (Weatherby) Carvalho of the Biological Electron Microscope Facility, part of the Pacific Biomedical Research Center at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Tina has done a terrific job with this very accessible and informative website. Thank you, Tina.
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• The Museum of Science's Image Gallery contains many images from its Scanning Electron Microscope.
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• The BioGalleries at the University of Arizona are exceptionally well done, thanks to Douglas W. Cromey. He also posts Images from the Microscope, which lists a great many good microscopy websites.
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• A Gallery of 3D images by U of Delaware's Roger C. Wagner is also very well done, and includes some Imaginary Life Forms and Imaginary Worlds. Lots of fun here.

• Electron Microscopes graduate from "the field of blob-ology," coming close to imaging individual atoms. “This represents a new era in imaging of proteins in humans [using electron microscopes] with immense implications for drug design,” says Francis Collins, who heads the U.S. National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.
  
• See "Electron microscopes close to imaging individual atoms" at Science Magazine (about) for a fascinating composite image of a protein. Science Magazine is a publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
  
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• See also the Exploratorium's Microscope Imaging Section, particularly their Gallery. Fascinating!
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Return to Table of Contents;  Go to Top..||..Bottom

  Getting Started and working safely on the Internet.

[Since these are all internal links, they do not open new pages in your web browser. To return here, just use the "Back" button. Some of these are fairly old, now; but they still contain useful "getting started" information.]

• An excellent (though longish) Introduction to the Internet (115 Kb) is contained in the Appeals Court decision overturning the CDA on June 12th, 1996. This page is worth the investment if you want to know all about the Internet, how it is accessed, how it works, etc. It has an extensive Table of Contents (TOC) for easy access to individual explanations, and contains quick links back to the TOC from every section. It is written for the general reader, and is the best introduction to the Internet which exists (my own view, of course).

• Social Media, Social Networking and Living in a Digital World Augmented by Technology.

• Historical Perspective:
  
• Parents and others wishing to learn more about Social Media, Social Networking websites and Smartphone social interfaces such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr, Snapchat, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Reddit, WeChat, TikTok, Weibo, Qzone, even Habbo, Meetup, Friendster, MySpace  and many others (Wikipedia's list), might like to read Danah Boyd's now historical but well written piece "Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth 'Heart' MySpace," or her other papers. They will provide you with some degree of understanding why teens and young adults visit these sites in droves, viewing them as some sort of social imperative; and they will offer insight about social networking in general that will not likely be articulated by your teen. Her paper "Social Network Sites: Public, Private, or What?" [.PDF] may help parents and educators with these questions. Similarly, a BBC news item "Should children ban their parents from social media?" may give parents second thoughts concerning what they post on-line about their children. Another BBC article "Can you stop your parents sharing photos of you online?" provides both parents and their teens with help understanding the generational and other differences of opinion (and culture and fact) about Internet privacy and security and risk, the need for parents to get permission from their teen before posting photos (especially from their early years, or any that are unflattering).
  
• Bob Rankin's Tips to tame Facebook gives parents some ideas for suggesting social networking and on-line access for teens and pre-teens. He describes the sites from a parent's point of view. His entry on Facebook Privacy is also helpful for parents and grandparents who want to join their kids at a social networking site, but are not sure about the risks.
• PBS's Frontline program "Growing Up Online" contains some fascinating observations and stories from kids they interviewed. Their "What We Learned" section will give you some hints of the profound generation gap between adults only in their 20s and high school students in the mid-2000s [e-mail is seen as archaic and backward by the teens, for example--nobody uses it; "it is not even in the picture"]. The program's producers mentioned that ubiquitous Internet access has created "the greatest generation gap since rock 'n' roll;" and they comment on some of the implications they have considered. In their "Interviews" section, Dr. C.J. Pascoe, a Berkeley Sociologist talks about her discussions with teens, and notes the fundamental shift to social networking that she has seen in only the last few years. She also speaks of the new freedom and independence that the online world provides, including a few of the implications.
• Increasingly (in 2022), there is hope on the horizon that social media can be used to "support our relationships, identity, and success in life." Maya Gudka posts "How Social Media Can Add to Your Well-Being (Not Detract From It)" in Greater Good Magazine - Science-based insights for a [more] meaningful life. Maya points out that we can manage our social media use to move it in the direction of greater support rather than the greater risk that seems to be more evident from social media designs aimed at profitability without regard for the psychological harm they may be inflicting on users. But, as she points out, "this requires intentionality and cannot be communicated in a few quick tips." The management steps are dependent on lots of factors: age, current perceived status and introversion/extroversion, are but a few. Her article offers "a roadmap for taking a proactive and tailored approach to social media engagement and well-being." But parents may need to be involved in helping navigate the roadmap, especially for pre-teens and early teens. Just to pick a single example, she points out that often image/accomplishment comparison is a higher risk activity than opinion comparison when using social media. And in that case, selection of social media platform choices may be an important part of the managed solution. At any rate, this article is a good read. Maya's work is well written and persuasive; and it brings hope that there are helpful solutions beyond just abandoning social media use.
  
• My advice to parents and grandparents with empty (or near-empty) nests is that it is well past time to get on-line with your kids using one or more social networking sites. It is today's equivalent of the dining room table; but everybody participates when and as they can, swapping plans, trip reports, and photos; engaging in social, political and economic commentary; discussing the latest movies, concerts and home renovations, etc. ... and doing all of it mostly asynchronously (at different times). Parents and grandparents can no longer afford to be out of this loop; these sites are no longer just for the up-coming generation. Talk to your kids; they can bring you up to speed. By my reading, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter are safer than most, and are widely used by 20-somethings, as well as many others. Facebook has lots of options for users to control who sees what (but you should still post only information that you would be comfortable if anybody saw it--see Danah Boyd's paper referenced above, her other papers, and our notes on the lengthy lifetimes and potential wide distribution--and especially privacy issues--concerning Internet posts of all sorts). There are also "rules" about parental, grandparental and other family participation, especially with teens--so check with them often about being friends on their social networking websites. Their preferences will change, sometimes quickly and erratically. Many teens and others will setup different personas depending on their different friendship circles. For parents, especially, approval of the teen will be the first order of business in getting online with your kids. The Washington Post article "Social media, teens, parents and whether to ‘friend’" will give you some starting hints.
  
• The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project has posted a report Social networking sites and our lives (pdf): How people’s trust, personal relationships, and civic and political involvement are connected to their use of social networking sites and other technologies (June 2011). The report, authored by Keith N. Hampton and Lauren Sessions Goulet of University of Pennsylvania and Lee Rainie and Kristen Purcell, of the Pew Internet Project, seek to answer questions "about the social impact of widespread use of social networking sites (SNS) like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Twitter. Do these technologies isolate people and truncate their relationships? Or are there benefits associated with being connected to others in this way? The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project decided to examine SNS in a survey that explored people’s overall social networks and how use of these technologies is related to trust, tolerance, social support, and community and political engagement." The Summary of findings is only three pages, and is a quick, informative read.
• An article, "Why Gen Y Is Going to Change the Web" by Sarah Perez will give you additional insight about this up-and-coming generation. It has a list of follow-on reading, too (at the bottom).
• And a Business Week article Social Media Will Change Your Business provides a good introduction to social networking and blogging from a competitive and business perspective.  
    
  
• More Current Perspective:
  
• If your most intimate relationship is with your smart phone, but you haven't realized it yet, you might benefit from this Thrive Global article by Lucas Cantor: "My Most Intimate Relationship? It’s Complicated: My phone and I are not breaking up, but we are going to set some boundaries". Also potentially helpful: "How Social Media Is Making You Sad, According to Science," and "How to Quit Social Media for Good."
  
• From a broader and more strategic viewpoint, and to shift Big Tech's enormous downside to a more helpful upside (my emphasis), the Center for Humane Technology (CHT) "is dedicated to creating the conditions for radically reimagined 21st century digital infrastructure that supports our well-being, relationships, democracy, and shared information environment." From their "What We Do" web page (again, my emphasis): "Tech platforms make billions of dollars keeping us clicking, scrolling, and sharing. Just like a tree is worth more as lumber and a whale is worth more dead than alive—in the attention extraction economy a human is worth more when we are depressed, outraged, polarized, and addicted. This attention extraction economy is accelerating the mass degradation of our collective capacity to solve global threats, from pandemics to inequality to climate change. If we can’t make sense of the world while making ever more consequential choices, a growing ledger of harms will destroy the futures of our children, democracy and truth itself. We need radically reimagined technology infrastructure and business models that actually align with humanity’s best interests. CHT [Center for Humane Technology] raises awareness and drives change through high-profile presentations to global leaders, public testimony to policymakers and heads of state, and mass media campaigns reaching millions. We also mobilize technologists as advocates and collaborate with top tech leaders through open and closed-door convenings. Working at the intersection of human nature, technology, and systems transformation, our goal is to shift the mindset from which persuasive technology systems are built, and to use that process to support crucial parallel shifts in our larger economic and social systems.
  
• And, speaking of Social Media, Big Tech  and "... a growing ledger of harms will destroy the futures of our children, democracy and truth itself," Jonathan Haidt (bio); TED talks; his Anxious Generation website, and its Team) has posted on The Atlantic (History and Mission), "Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid. It's not just a phase." Here are a few quotes from the article:
• "The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s,  ... ... Babel is not a story about tribalism; it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything."
• "Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories. Social media has weakened all three."
• "Social media has both magnified and weaponized the frivolous." And "It’s not just the waste of time and scarce attention that matters; it’s the continual chipping-away of trust."
  
• Collectively, Social Media and the large platforms "unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together."
• "...the dart guns of social media give more power to trolls and provocateurs while silencing good citizens." Moreover, "... the dart guns of social media give more power and voice to the political extremes while reducing the power and voice of the moderate majority." And "... by giving everyone a dart gun, social media deputizes everyone to administer justice with no due process. "
  
• "Now, however, artificial intelligence is close to enabling the limitless spread of highly believable disinformation."
• "And yet American democracy is now operating outside the bounds of sustainability. If we do not make major changes soon, then our institutions, our political system, and our society may collapse during the next major war, pandemic, financial meltdown, or constitutional crisis."
• "When Tocqueville toured the United States in the 1830s, he was impressed by the American habit of forming voluntary associations to fix local problems, rather than waiting for kings or nobles to act, as Europeans would do. That habit is still with us today. In recent years, Americans have started hundreds of groups and organizations dedicated to building trust and friendship across the political divide, ... ... We cannot expect Congress and the tech companies to save us. We must change ourselves and our communities."
• See also (Jan 2025) a guest post "Gen Z, Social Media is Optional" by Gabriela Nguyen from the The Harvard Graduate School of Education. It provides exceptionally astute insights from somebody who has experienced it all first hand and recently. She is outstanding. The article is posted on Jon Haidt's After Babel substack, with an introduction by Zach Rausch. In my view it ought to be required reading by every parent of teens and pre-teens, especially girls.
• Jonathan Haidt (bio); TED talks); his Anxious Generation website, and its Team) has also posted on The Atlantic (History and Mission), "End the Phone-Based Childhood Now: The environment in which kids grow up today is hostile to human development." Here are a few quotes from the article:
• Something went suddenly and horribly wrong for adolescents in the early 2010s. By now you’ve likely seen the statistics: Rates of depression and anxiety in the United States—fairly stable in the 2000s—rose by more than 50 percent in many studies from 2010 to 2019. The suicide rate rose 48 percent for adolescents ages 10 to 19. For girls ages 10 to 14, it rose 131 percent.
• As the oldest members of Gen Z reach their late 20s, their troubles are carrying over into adulthood. Young adults are dating less, having less sex, and showing less interest in ever having children than prior generations. They are more likely to live with their parents. They were less likely to get jobs as teens, and managers say they are harder to work with.
• What happened in the early 2010s ... Those were the years when adolescents in rich countries traded in their flip phones for smartphones and moved much more of their social lives online—particularly onto social-media platforms designed for virality and addiction. Once young people began carrying the entire internet in their pockets, available to them day and night, it altered their daily experiences and developmental pathways across the board. Friendship, dating, sexuality, exercise, sleep, academics, politics, family dynamics, identity—all were affected. Life changed rapidly for younger children, too, as they began to get access to their parents’ smartphones and, later, got their own iPads, laptops, and even smartphones during elementary school.
• The intrusion of smartphones and social media are not the only changes that have deformed childhood. There’s an important backstory, beginning as long ago as the 1980s, when we started systematically depriving children and adolescents of freedom, unsupervised play, responsibility, and opportunities for risk taking, all of which promote competence, maturity, and mental health. But the change in childhood accelerated in the early 2010s, when an already independence-deprived generation was lured into a new virtual universe that seemed safe to parents but in fact is more dangerous, in many respects, than the physical world.
• My claim is that the new phone-based childhood that took shape roughly 12 years ago is making young people sick and blocking their progress to flourishing in adulthood. We need a dramatic cultural correction, and we need it now.
• The transition away from a more independent childhood [in the 1970s, 80s and 90s] was facilitated by steady improvements in digital technology, which made it easier and more inviting for young people to spend a lot more time at home, indoors, and alone in their rooms. Eventually, tech companies got access to children 24/7. They developed exciting virtual activities, engineered for “engagement,” that are nothing like the real-world experiences young brains evolved to expect.
• It was not until the introduction of the iPhone (2007), the App Store (2008), and high-speed internet (which reached 50 percent of American homes in 2007)—and the corresponding pivot to mobile made by many providers of social media, video games, and porn—that it became possible for adolescents to spend nearly every waking moment online.
• In Walden, his 1854 reflection on simple living, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “The cost of a thing is the amount of … life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” It’s an elegant formulation of what economists would later call the opportunity cost of any choice—all of the things you can no longer do with your money and time once you’ve committed them to something else. So it’s important that we grasp just how much of a young person’s day is now taken up by their devices.
• ... perhaps the most devastating cost of the new phone-based childhood was the collapse of time spent interacting with other people face-to-face.
• [The] unsatisfying and anxiety-producing features of life online should be recognizable to most adults. Online interactions can bring out antisocial behavior that people would never display in their offline communities. But if life online takes a toll on adults, just imagine what it does to adolescents in the early years of puberty, when their “experience expectant” brains are rewiring based on feedback from their social interactions.
  
• A simple way to understand the differences between Gen Z and previous generations is that people born in and after 1996 have internal thermostats that were shifted toward defend mode. This is why life on college campuses changed so suddenly when Gen Z arrived, beginning around 2014. Students began requesting “safe spaces” and trigger warnings. They were highly sensitive to “microaggressions” and sometimes claimed that words were “violence.” These trends mystified those of us in older generations at the time, but in hindsight, it all makes sense. Gen Z students found words, ideas, and ambiguous social encounters more threatening than had previous generations of students because we had fundamentally altered their psychological development.
• The debate around adolescents’ use of smartphones and social media typically revolves around mental health, and understandably so. But the harms that have resulted from transforming childhood so suddenly and heedlessly go far beyond mental health. I’ve touched on some of them—social awkwardness, reduced self-confidence, and a more sedentary childhood. ... three additional harms [are] Fragmented Attention and Disrupted Learning, Addiction and Social Withdrawal, and The Decay of Wisdom and the Loss of Meaning.
• Gen Z were the guinea pigs in this uncontrolled global social experiment. We were the first to have our vulnerabilities and insecurities fed into a machine that magnified and refracted them back at us, all the time, before we had any sense of who we were. We didn’t just grow up with algorithms. They raised us. They rearranged our faces. Shaped our identities. Convinced us we were sick.
• Some possible remedies: No smartphones before high school, No social media before 16, Phone‐free schools and More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world.
• We didn’t know what we were doing in the early 2010s. Now we do. It’s time to end the phone-based childhood.
• See also (Jan 2025) a guest post "Gen Z, Social Media is Optional" by Gabriela Nguyen from the The Harvard Graduate School of Education. It provides exceptionally astute insights from somebody who has experienced it all first hand and recently. She is outstanding. The article is posted on Jon Haidt's After Babel substack, with an introduction by Zach Rausch. In my view it ought to be required reading by every parent of teens and pre-teens, especially girls.
  
  
• Ellis Hamburger has posted on The Verge, "Social media is doomed to die", a thorough-going comment on the vices of on-line engagement when it is driven more by shareholder value than user value. He talks about the skew that the former brings, though he does not discuss in depth the mental health costs that it brings to users, especially teen girls. Food for thought, especially for parents. [Jon Haidt, immediately above, has significant material on the mental health costs.]
    
  

  Note: All the above links open new pages in your browser, unlike other links in this section. To return here, just close the new window. And if the above link to the Danah Boyd tome on MySpace has gone AWOL, try this.

  
  

• Our Help for New Web Surfers page (55 Kb) is for those using Netscape, Internet Explorer or Mosaic for the first few times. It is a tutorial explaining how to get around, how to find a web page, how to make and use bookmarks and favorites, how to print a web page, save it to disk, etc.

• Our Help with Internet E-mail, Mailing Lists and Other Internet Postings page (140 Kb). Includes sections: What's Different about E- mail?, What Does Access to E-mail Mean?, Emotional Content in E-mail Messages, notes on the costs of e-mail messaging (separate page; 70 Kb), containing cautions about mailing lists, privacy in e-mail and other Internet postings, a caution about cookies (with reasons to avoid them), help finding e-mail addresses, etc.

• Our Index of pages on HTML (50 Kb), which contains lots of helpful links for creating web sites, publicizing web sites, searching for web sites, critical evaluation of Internet resources, and help in finding e-mail addresses. An associated page of Web Page Style Guidelines and Suggestions has a ton of ideas about web page development for developers at all levels of experience, including beginners.

• Searching the Internet: Parts I and II (55 Kb), containing some Basic Considerations and Automated Search Indexes, Subject Catalogs, Annotated Directories, and Subject Guides. This page contains some very good tips on using search engines, how to find what you want, etc.

• Privacy and Intellectual Property Rights Index (55 Kb), links concerned with privacy, intellectual property rights, copyrights, remedies, fair use, myths, etc. Also contains Fair Information Principles and Practices from the U.S. and Canada, and provides a hint of the impending world-wide privacy crisis.

• A Background Paper - Strategic Planning for Information Technology and Telecommunications: Exploiting Global Information Exchange in the 1990s and Beyond, explores the background and context of computer and electronic network use in the Information Age. As very significant amounts of data and information are increasingly being developed and exchanged by individuals, businesses and governments, a strategic view of its importance is becoming necessary. Both the amount of data and the speed with which it can be moved have the potential to overtake those who are not now preparing to participate in and exploit its use. As we switched from an agricultural society to an industrialized society, we had somewhere between 100 and 200 years. In this century alone (and mainly in the last half) we have seen infrastructure and technology developments which have profoundly affected our circumstances.
.     .. the National proliferation of conventional and nuclear electric power and telephone services,
    .. the emergence of network broadcast radio and television services, and
    .. the internal combustion engine, the automobile and the Interstate highway system, to name only a few. . Other technologies (all developed in the last 50 years) have revolutionized our ways of thinking and living. The jet engine, supersonic flight, rocket propulsion, space travel and satellites come to mind, along with the defeat of many communicable diseases, the use of ultrasound, heart surgery, organ transplants and electronic medical scanning procedures. The development of the transistor, the microwave oven, digital watches and calculators, lasers and, of course, the advent of nuclear armament have also occurred during that time. The office copier, facsimile machine and the cellular telephone come to mind in communications; credit cards, automatic teller machines and electronic data interchange come to mind in the conduct of commerce. But the development and networked use of the general-purpose stored-program computer may have been the most significant development of the period.

• Finally, here are a few external links to miscellaneous reference and other services that I or others have found helpful. These external links will open a new window in your browser. To return here, just close the new window. These are not endorsements, of course. This is just an informal list of websites and software found helpful by me and others for our purposes. You should always do your own due diligence in selecting all software you use.
• Dictionaries: OneLook Dictionary Search provides a quick definition and links to that word in many dictionaries, some of them specialized; also provides links to a reverse dictionary, translation services, provision of word lists from word fragments, etc.
• Thesaurus - Roget's Thesaurus [free lists of synonyms, antonyms, etc., with premium content for paid subscribers].
• Encyclopedia - Wikipedia [free encyclopedia, frequently updated, comprehensive, includes slang and street terms, etc.].
• Explanations more generally - Reddit's Explain Like I'm Five section provides lay explanations by lay people. It is not as reliable as Wiki; but is often helpful. They want you to sign in.
  
• Mailing lists - Internet Scout Report [contains free reliable, interesting and helpful information on a timely basis].
• AdWare, SpyWare, MalWare and Virus Protection - Malwarebytes (when Malwarebytes opens for the first time you will be prompted to start a trial of the Premium version; make sure that you decline starting the trial of the Premium version if you want the free version), SUPERAntiSpyware, AVG Anti-Virus [all are free, automatically update themselves and do a reasonably good job without leaving their own ads or other malware]. Steve Gibson's Internet Security and Shields Up pages are very helpful, and his projects are interesting.
• Screen Capture - ScreenHunter 6 is free and reasonably easy to use to capture a .JPG or other format image of whatever is on your screen.
• Web browsers - WaterFox (successor to Firefox, but with add-ons kept), Firefox, Chrome, Avant and Opera. All are free, fast and better than IE in many respects. Opera has a handy speed dial feature for up to 9 sites you visit often. After Chrome, Firefox is used by the most people by a substantial margin (see Wikipedia's web browser comparison page).
• Thunderbird E-mail (goes with Waterfox and Firefox browsers) and is much safer than MS Outlook, if only because many, many more people use the latter.
  
• AutoText is a real time saver. You enter abbreviations in the folders of keywords (and their expansions); then every time you type that abbreviation it expands to whatever you specified. It is a very big time saver for customer service desks. I start all my abbreviations with a \ so that it only expands into the expansion text when I type that exact abbreviation. For example, I use the abbreviation \p to be expanded into "Purr-fect !!" If I had used just the p as the abbreviation, every time I typed a p it would expand into "Purr-fect !!". If I wanted to type the word "apt" it would notice the p and expand to "aPurr-fect !!t" Likely not what I would want. You can even use it for common mis-spellings. When I want to type the word "the" I often mis-spell it "teh". Since teh is never legitimate, AutoText notices that and replaces the "teh" with "the". Every time. I am such a bad speller that it takes care of that every time, even when I do not notice the mis-spelling. Can't beat it. Once you have used this thing (or its equivalent), you will not know how you ever did without it.
• WinDirStat (downloads) is a free tool that analyzes your hard drive (and/or any external disk drive, or zip drive), and then displays your files and folders in a variety of textual and graphical formats that help you understand what's taking up all that space on your disk. It was very helpful to my understanding, and helped me find duplicates, too.
• Recuva and Freeraser are two utilities which are used to recover pieces of a file which you have deleted by mistake (Recuva [for "recover"]), and to over-write or erase files (or fragments recovered by Recuva) so that the original contents are actually gone from your disk or flash drive, or wherever you had them stored. The need for these utilities arises because when you delete a file, your computer doesn't actually remove the contents from your storage device, it just flags the disk sectors as available for something else. Eventually, of course, those sectors are over-written when you save other files; but if your disk is far from full, it could be quite a while until that happens. Indeed, most of them could still be reasonably intact when you recycle your computer or that storage device. You might consider using software like this for your old tax or banking files, etc., or anything that could give an identity thief or other least-favorite person a leg up in harming you. There are lots of free or modestly-priced utilities like these. None is guaranteed, of course; and some are better than others. I found these worked for my purposes. You never completely remove everything from your hard drive, unless you drive over it with a truck, then set fire to it, smelt the ashes and fire the result into outer-space, preferrably aimed at the sun. What you are doing is adding to the cost and the need for expertise which will be required in order for somebody to retrieve what you might think you have deleted.
• Recuva comes from the download site (http://www.piriform.com/recuva) at  Piriform (http://www.piriform.com/).
• Freeraser comes from the download site (http://freeraser.en.softonic.com/download) at Softonic (http://freeraser.en.softonic.com/).
• Office suite - OpenOffice.org (have not used it that much; but it has lots of raves from users). It is free and compatible with most others. Writer has an Export to .PDF format, which worked well for my limited purposes.
• The plain text editor DocPad 26 (from Gammadyne; downloads) is a big step forward over NotePad and WordPad for those who don't want editing software to be "too helpful."
• The Portable Document Format reader Foxit from Foxit Software is an independent, small, free, reliable and fast PDF reader that will open a PDF file automatically in your Firefox or Internet Explorer browsers; or it can stand alone. They also market a PDF creator, editors, etc. Despite the "Fox" name, they are unrelated to the Firefox browser developers. They are also unrelated to Adobe. "Five Best PDF Readers" may also be of interest.
• ClipClip clipboard management software makes it possible to copy multiple texts, images or files to your clipboard. Retrieval is by Ctrl+Shift+v and pick the one you want. Again, once you start using any of these clipboard managers, you will not be able to imagine working without it.
  
• File Explorer (Enhanced) - Q-Dir File Manager for Windows, includes EXPORT file lists to text files (in the File menu drop-down), four window panes, and much more.
• FileZilla - replaces WS_FTP LE, transferring HTML web page files to web servers, and related File Transfer Protocol functions. Easy to learn; works like a champ.
  

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  The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit

• The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit, by artist Lowell Boileau. Take the "express" tour of Detroit's buildings from its heyday. When you see an interesting one, take the "detour" for more detail. You could spend a half hour doing lots worse.

• See also DetroitYES for a zillion delightful things about Detroit. Lowell also participated in this project. Lowell Boileau's personal web page is also on-line, along with a Table of Contents for his other work.

• See also Forgotten Detroit ... from author Davig Kohrman (about) - "Detroit is known for one of the most stunning collections of pre-depression architecture in the world. The past two decades have seen several of these treasures sit vacant, waiting for economic revival. On these pages you will find information about the past, present, and future situations of a few of these landmarks. It is my hope that this information helps you gain an appreciation for the importance of both the history and continued survival of these buildings."

• Some Detroit sport pages: particularly the 2008 Stanley Cup Champion Detroit Red Wings,
• ... With an all-time NHL record 23 home game winning streak in February 2012.
• ... And in 2014 with the longest active playoff streak in major professional sports: the 23rd straight season,
• ... that included six final series appearances, and four Stanley Cups.
• ... AND in 2015 once more extending the longest active playoff streak in major professional sports: the 24th straight season!
• See Red Wings clinch 24th straight playoff berth.
• ... AND again in 2016 once more extending their playoff streak: the 25th straight season!
• See Wiki entry List of NHL franchise post-season appearance streaks.

• Other sports teams include the Detroit Tigers, the Detroit Lions and the Detroit Pistons.

• Don't miss Visit Detroit - lots of interesting stops, event schedules, maps, chat, ... the whole nine yards.

• And some other interesting Detroit stops:
• Click On Detroit - national and local 4 news, weather, etc., and Detroit Public TV's website.
• The District Detroit will be 50 blocks of thriving businesses, parks, restaurants, bars and event destinations.
• It will be home to the young and the young at heart, families, new residents and long-time residents who want to be where the action is.
  
• The District will connect Downtown and Midtown into one contiguous, walkable area.
  
• It is where families, sports fans, entrepreneurs, job seekers, entertainment lovers and others who crave a vibrant urban setting can connect with each other and the city they love.
• Imagine Detroit as it once was. Imagine Detroit as it can be again.
  
• Belle Isle Botanical Society, including the Anna Scripps Whitcomb Conservatory, etc.
• Forgotten Detroit - one of the most stunning collections of pre-depression architecture in the world.
• The Detroit Opera House, including some great interior views.
• The Detroit Symphony Orchestra website contains event lists, and sections on planning, support, education and more.
• The Henry Ford Museum, with Greenfield Village, Ford Rouge Factory Tour, Benson Ford Research Center.
• The New Detroit Science Center, with its "our body" exhibit, Dassault Systèmes Planetarium, etc.
• The new Detroit Institute of the Arts: more gallery space, more art, more fun.
• The Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, with its current and permanent exhibitions.
• The Motown Historical Museum - preserving the music and legacy of Motown Record Corporation.
• The International Gospel Music Hall Of Fame And Museum - Historical and contemporary music and sounds.
• The Detroit Zoo, with its Australian outback, its "Out of Africa" section, etc.
• The Monuments of Detroit - a Detroit News item on the sculptures and monuments of historic Detroit.
• The Heidelberg Project for urban renewal has a tonne of fun down-to-earth ideas.

• ... and there are many others !!  Have fun exploring Detroit.
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  The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Photos.

• See also their National Marine Sanctuaries website, which contains information on a rich variety of marine habitats.
• See also their Aquarius website, it describes the World's Only Undersea Research Station. Aquarius is owned by NOAA and is operated by the NOAA Undersea Research Program’s (NURP) Undersea Research Center at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.
• See also their Ocean Explorer Lophelia II 2010: Oil Seeps and Deep Reefs website. It documents the interesting voyages of the NOAA Vessel Lophelia II conducting important experiments and analyses looking into the world of deep-water coral communities, etc.
• See also their Woods Hole (about) website entitled "Alvin's Animals." It includes some outstanding photos and other information concerning the under-sea discoveries of the underwater vehicle Alvin. Amazing, some of them.
  

• And The Science Education Resource Center at Carleton College posts some related information in "Teaching About the Ocean System Using New Research Techniques: Data, Models and Visualization." They also post a tonne of links to other oceanographic, petrology and other science websites.

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  The Edmonton Temple, Family History,
Scripture Searching, Book of Mormon Map, etc.

. The Church's Family Search [cookies (cookie caution)] website seems to be a real hit. It provides information on starting your own family history projects (see their How to Start Your Family History page); and it allows searches for your ancestors through a world-wide collection of genealogical and family history records. .  
Here are some other Family History Related ideas:



• The Obituaries Help website (about) posts a number of helpful genealogical tools, including a selection of printable family tree templates and a host of other useful articles.
  
• Our thanks goes to Peyton, who is working (2018) on her research badge in scouting. She has suggested New York City and the Historical Ellis Island which, she notes, "[is] a really neat article on Ellis Island, but also has some [very helpful] general genealogy resources as well." It is especially helpful for those just starting out on their genealogical journey. Thanks again, Peyton.
  
• A scout, Isaac is in the process (2023) of earning his Genealogy badge. He suggests Genealogy for Kids: Building a Family Tree. Great idea, Isaac. Thank you for the tip.
  
• HomeSage (about) posts a "Genealogy Guide" that has lots of tips and links for getting started, or for continuing your family search and genealogy research activities. It may be especially helpful for those just beginning their search. [In case it is of interest, HomeSage is a broker of home heating and other domestic household systems in the UK. And if you are like me, and want to know what a "boiler" is, see ExplainThatStuff. For us North Americans, it is some combination of what we call a furnace and a hot water heater. ... And when you have worked that all out, then you can sit down and do your genealogy research in solid comfort, especially if you are in the UK. Lots of fun.]
• iReviews posts a list of paid and free websites for genealogical research, and provides ideas and suggestions about starting and pursuing research of your family tree. It is titled "25 Best Genealogy Sites – The Definitive Guide." Watch for websites requiring you to sign up or pay a subscription fee; others offer DNA testing. Be sure to check with a parent before sending your DNA sample to a lab though. They often don't have enough regulation to keep your identity secure in my view; and some of the testing is unreliable or even misleading. Once it is out there, you can't remove it or take it back. And be sure you know all the conditions for services-for-a-fee, recurring charges, etc. There are always outfits who offer access to genealogical data, but the fee is the only certainty. Sometimes the data is of questionable validity. It is always a buyer-beware world now.
  
  

The Church's Internet edition of The Scriptures is a big help. The LDS Tech website provides information on computer and website technical services, and involvement ideas for the technically inclined. And unofficially the LDS Scripture Citation Index at the BYU.eBusiness Center provides an invaluable modern aid. And BYU now hosts the Encyclopedia or Mormonism at the Harold B. Lee Library website. Also unofficially, the More Good Foundation sponsors MormonWiki, an encyclopedia of positive content about members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Other Church links may be seen in the Sources of Related and Other Information section of theConstruction of the Edmonton Temple website. Other official and unofficial resources may be found in the Related Websites and Resources section of theConstruction of the Edmonton Temple website. This latter section includes links to a tasteful and frank discussion that is very helpful and long overdue: "And It Was Very Good: A Latter-day Saint’s Guide to Lovemaking."


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• We also post a generic Book of Mormon Map of Nephite, Lamanite and Jaredite cities and other place names, and showing major features, such as the Narrow Neck of Land separating the Land Northward from the Land Southward, the Narrow Strip of Wilderness, etc. Accompanying the map is a list of ~100 Book of Mormon place names with their geographic scriptural references, and a Book of Mormon Timeline of Dates, Locations and Events. The map is available to download in several sizes and formats.

• With great sadness our family announces the passing of Dorothy Jean (Tait) Meek. To that sadness we add the joy of knowing that her beacon on the horizon has always been that she has gone to a much better place of perfect peace, love, happiness and tranquility, where we will all meet again. She died 18 August 2021 at 6:44 am at age 80 at home after a short illness and surrounded by her loving family in Edmonton, Alberta. She is survived by her loving husband of many decades, Chet, by her children, Daryl, Cindy Guenard, Heather Nielson and Randy, and by her siblings Elizabeth Savage, Douglas and David. Dorothy was predeceased by her beloved child Patricia, who died shortly after she was born, and by her parents Gwendolyn and Campbell. We are all buoyed up and comforted in the knowledge that Dorothy and Patricia are now enjoying the sweetest reunion we can imagine.
  
  Dorothy was  born 1 October 1940 in Edmonton, was beloved by all who knew her, and was adored by all her grandchildren and great grandchildren. They all loved looking at her art work, coloring in her delightful home-made coloring books, and hearing her stories of adventure, learning and service to others, always told with her quiet wit, imagination and charm, and always rich with symbols and subtleties. And they all loved playing with the toys and dolls and stuffies she so brilliantly crafted for them. These creations, all of her own design and fabrication, were treasured by all.
  
  She loved and served the Lord Jesus Christ as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She served in a host callings and always enhanced her teachings with her creativity.  Her lessons were always interesting and never boring as she brought lessons to life using her creative abilities.
  
  She had a passion for art and lived her life full of creativity. Her hobbies also included family genealogy, quilting, cake decorating, story writing and telling, drawing, painting and learning.  She was a life long learner who enjoyed exploring new subjects at every opportunity.  In early life she loved ballet and always carried herself with grace and poise.  Her favorite subject was math in school which no doubt helped her with her geometric designs and 3d creations.
  
  In her journal she mentioned a favorite poem The Darkling Thrush.  She always stayed true to the belief and hope and faith for a brighter tomorrow.
  
  The Darkling Thrush
  By THOMAS HARDY
  
  I leant upon a coppice gate
        When Frost was spectre-grey,
  And Winter's dregs made desolate
        The weakening eye of day.
  The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
        Like strings of broken lyres,
  And all mankind that haunted nigh
        Had sought their household fires.
  
  The land's sharp features seemed to be
        The Century's corpse outleant,
  His crypt the cloudy canopy,
        The wind his death-lament.
  The ancient pulse of germ and birth
        Was shrunken hard and dry,
  And every spirit upon earth
        Seemed fervourless as I.
  
  At once a voice arose among
        The bleak twigs overhead
  In a full-hearted evensong
        Of joy illimited;
  An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
        In blast-beruffled plume,
  Had chosen thus to fling his soul
        Upon the growing gloom.
  
  So little cause for carolings
        Of such ecstatic sound
  Was written on terrestrial things
        Afar or nigh around,
  That I could think there trembled through
        His happy good-night air
  Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
        And I was unaware.
  
  Until we hear the beautiful sound of your voice and meet again, we all love you, admire you, and we treasure having the blessing of your loving influence in all our lives: Daughter, Sister, Wife, Mom, Aunt, Grandma, Teacher, Friend.
  
  A memorial service will be arranged by her family when every last vestige of the Covid restrictions has been fully lifted, and when all can gather and cross borders to celebrate her life and the joy she brought to all of us. We will be with her again in a better world. Each of us will go to join her again when it is our turn.
  
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  Learn Some Elementary Egyptian Hieroglyphics (really!).

...  ...  Have lots of fun:

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  Dacaharma's Tasty Delights

• A few of Dacaharma's recipes to try.
• See Dacaharma's Tasty Delights.

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  More Mindless Doodles

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For some delightful drawings, see the Imaginary Life Forms from the 'severly board mind' of Roger C. Wagner.
His Imaginary Worlds and Gallery of 3D images (computer art from biology) are also very well done. Great fun!
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• In a quite different vein, Canadian artist Alma Rumball (bio sketch) created, in the mid-20th century, a number of inspirational drawings aided by 'The Hand' as if outside her consciousness. Wendy Oke, her biographer, "who is divinely inspired to be the one to take the drawings to the world” posts the drawings at the Alma Matters website, and uses them in her ministry.

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  A Few Photos for Relaxation

• Well, there seem to be a few bytes of web space yet unplumbed, so we include a few photos, in case you like them. Click on any to see an enlargement.

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Caution: This website may contain traces of peanuts ... but more likely just binary coded zeros and ones.
All images and other content on this website © Chet Meek, 1996-2025. All rights reserved.
For the record, ... there is no AI-generated content on this website, and no AI collaboration either.
BUT, ... I know nothing certain about the content of outside external links or about their use of AI agents.
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Title: Home Page for the Meek Familyof Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

The primary URL for this page is at:  http://www.GoChet.ca/index.htm.or.index.html Go to Primary website.

The Mirror-2 URL for this page is at: http://www.ocii.com/~cmeek/index.htm.or.index.html Go to  Mirror-2 website.