This week we've been immersing ourselves in bucketloads of Absolutely Positively Useless Trivia. How else do you learn facts like: "There are more plastic flamingos in America than real ones." "In England, the Speaker of the House is not allowed to speak." "In Texas, it's illegal to put graffiti on someone else's cow." "Octopi have gardens." (Way to go, Ringo!) "Melting an ice cube in your mouth burns about 2.3 calories." And, "pain travels at a speed of 350 feet per second." Further trivia: Picks has received at least one fan letter every week since its inception. Thanks, Mom!
Sometimes facts can be earth-shattering. Really groundbreaking. For example, did you know that Aristotle theorized earthquakes were caused by great winds below the earth's surface? Yup, it's true. We learned it at Understanding Earthquakes, a well-designed site that lives up to its name by helping you--um, you know, understand earthquakes. Take the quiz, read famous firsthand accounts (from the likes of Mark Twain, Jack London, and Charles Darwin), or learn the history of seismology, among other things. You'll find animations, too: one showing how earthquakes occur, the other of a rotating globe pinpointing various quake locations. We tried to find more earthquake puns to round off the rest of this paragraph, but couldn't. But you can't fault us for not trying, now can you?
The facts of life are rarely trivial. Case in point: Winnie, Her Life in Kenya. The family of a British woman who spent two decades in Africa has put together a loving look at her life and times. The site offers a narrative by Winnie's daughter, Marjorie Todd, as well as several illustrations for each chapter. The photos are happily devoid of Photoshop filtration and the story doesn't once mention "plug-ins" or "push technology," all of which makes this kind of "personal history" site a refreshing alternative to the typical homepage. Of course, this is not to say the site is not well-designed. Quite the contrary--it's a feast for the eyes as well as the mind. Eat your heart out, Isak Dinesen.
A not-so-trivial fact: movies and music go well together. The same not-so-trivial fact stated another way, with a specific example and a twist: if you play Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon while watching The Wizard of Oz, all sorts of groovy things happen. For more on this see The Synchronicity Arkive, which explores the concept of "synchronicities" between otherwise unmatched movies and pieces of music. You'll find plenty of examples at the site. Perhaps no coincidence at all, most of the music that makes for the best synchronicity comes from the fab foursome of far-out, Pink Floyd. If you visit the Arkive and enjoy this kind of thing, please do return here. We find reading Picks to a sampling of Englebert Humperdinck soothes the nerves in a way that little else can.
From musical to magisterial: A casebook for any aspiring Clarence Darrow, F. Lee Bailey, or Lionel Hutz, Law Research allows you to search some of the best law databases on the Internet. Find Supreme, Circuit, and Bankruptcy Court decisions, as well as references to law-related people and federal regulations. For example, a Supreme Court search on "privacy not abortion" retrieves 22 critical High Court decisions from the Cornell law database, and a search on "Contract with America" retrieves the full-text of several hundred bills from THOMAS, Congress's legislative archive. For the record, we also searched on "Yahoo! Picks" and "Indictment" and nothing came up. Yes!
Speaking of indictments: What can we say about the government? The question is moot, the Government says enough about itself. And a lot of what it says is conveyed in the form of statistics. FedStats is a collection of searchable and browsable databases, chock full of statistics and information from more than 70 federal agencies. A random sampling of bureaucratic topics includes world agriculture, unemployment, exposure to radiation, cows, veterans, prison, school enrollment, homicide, mass transportation, and catfish. Find out death rates, tax rates, and crime rates from the likes of the FAA, NCI, EPA, USDA, FBI, USGS, HUD, BTW, LOL, ROTFL, IMHO, RTFM, and XRPQ7 (oops, that's the serial number on our keyboard.) Useless? Useful? You decide.
Useless fact #514: Spiders give us the creeps. We know that says more about us than our eight-legged pals, but what can we say--we're wimps. However, our arachnophobia was no barrier to our enjoyment of National Geographic's new info-spectacular, Tarantulas. This slick site spins out facts relating to the Tarantula's anatomy and life cycle, and features photos of eight different Tarantula species, none of which we'd like to meet in a dark alley. So, go ahead and visit the site as we repeat to ourselves: "Nice spider, good spider, friendly spider."
Finally, concerning a different kind of webspinner: If you're trying to create a killer site, but you're not down with the latest technology, your site could be on the express train to snoozeville. No problem. Developer.com kicks some serious knowledge about Java, Javascript, JavaBeans, VRML, Channels, and the mysterious ActiveX. It's a directory of directories, featuring sites, news, applets, and online shops, all related to Internet technology. Sounds cool? It is. In no time, you'll be compiling applets, authoring worlds, pushing channels, and, of course, taking your pick(s).
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