| WW II Codes and Ciphers This homespun site was created by Tony Sale, a man instrumental in preserving, restoring, and curating the historical collection at Bletchley Park. Headquarters of British code-breaking during World War II, Bletchley was "Britain's best kept secret" -- the place where the German Enigma was finally deciphered in an incredible cooperative super-effort. Detailed tutorials for the mathematically inclined explain how the Enigma cipher machine worked and how the Lorenz code was broken by the British-built Colossus machine. A Bletchley Park photo album presents snapshots of an ordinary-looking, extraordinary place. |
| The Brownie Camera @ 100: A Celebration In February of 1900, the Eastman Kodak Company introduced the Brownie, a compact portable camera that cost $1. During the first year, over 150,000 cameras were sold. The Brownie was designed and intended for children, but it's explosive popularity led to the birth of popular photography, the rise of photojournalism, and the all-American snapshot. Kodak's gorgeously designed site offers dozens of recollections, original advertisements, audio commentary clips, and plenty of Brownie-shot snaps. |
| BoondocksNet.com This site was created by historian and Mark Twain scholar Jim Zwick. It began in early 1995 as a page about Twain's writing on the U.S. expansionist war in the Philippines; since then, it has become an essential library of historical texts, articles, photographs, and political cartoons for the study of imperialism and anti-imperialism in the late 19th and early 20th century. Remarkable e-texts and related gems include: Arthur Conan Doyle's The Crime of the Congo, Hull House founder Jane Addams' The Long Road of Woman's Memory, and an interpretive archive of 3-D stereoscopic photographs. And the title? Boondocks, which means rough country, is derived from the Tagalog word for mountain, and entered American English around the time of the Phillipine-American War. |
| Antimatter: Mirror of the Universe From CERN in Switzerland, the amazing particle physics laboratory that brought us Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web, comes this introduction to antimatter. Tune in on November 21 to a live educational webcast produced in cooperation with San Francisco's Exploratorium or listen anytime to the archived presentation. Take a guided video tour of the Low Energy Anti-Proton Ring (LEAR), a particle accelerator that lets scientists create and observe antimatter in a quest to understand how the universe works. Read about Paul Dirac and the history of antimatter or see how it has seeped in to our daily lives. |
| Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World In bilingual collaboration with the Bibliothèque nationale de France (France's national library), this exhibition explores the roots of utopian thinking from ancient traditions to modern times. Travel from the Garden of Eden to the City of God, then on to Thomas More's definitive 1516 work, Utopia, a word that means both "good place" and "no place." The exquisite image collection covers the Enlightenment, 19th-century revolutionary dreams, 20th-century dystopic nightmares, and 21st-century metaworlds. The paintings and illustrations will make you wish you were going nowhere too... or would that be Erewhon? |
| This is SportsCenter Which is better: ESPN's SportsCenter or the commercials for the show? If you're a fan of the latter, you'll enjoy this rotating selection of choice ads. No dumb beer ad humor here. SportsCenter ads are like tiny Saturday Night Live skits: self-deprecating, offbeat, and usually very funny, even if you don't like sports. So treat yourself to a two-minute sanity timeout. |
| short stories at east of the web British web-design firm east of the web presents this splendid collection of short stories organized by theme: fiction, romance, crime, sci-fi & fantasy, humor, horror, hyperfiction, children's, and non-fiction. How perfectly civil of them. Most of the stories are wonderful, and thanks to public interest copyright law, they're all free. Read them onscreen, print them out for the train ride home, or download them onto your Palm Pilot. |
| Lego Star Wars Trilogy The product of over 2,500 hours of monomaniacal determination, the Lego Star Wars Trilogy recreates 180 key scenes from the original series. Relive all of those magical moments through Lego-lensed glasses: the Tatooine races, the Hoth battles, the Ewok dances. You won't find any Millennium Falcon or Imperial Walker Lego sets in stores; these are all custom-made models. As your Japanese host S. Fujita proclaims, "I completed this project by myself without any support." Thank you, S. Fujita. |
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