Elsewhere
Science
NIST Digital Library of Mathematical
Functions is a project at the National
Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) aiming to digitalize and
extend Abramowitz and Stegun's famous Handbook of Mathematical
Functions, as first published by the National Bureau of Standards (NBS)
in 1964.
This book remains among the most widely cited of all math reference works.
As it is the product of US Government employees acting in official capacity,
it is not protected by copyright, and it can hence be legally viewed and
downloaded off the web.
As the project still is under progress, Abramowitz and Stegun's original
Handbook of Mathematical Functions can be accessed at quite a few
other sites, for example at
http://www.math.sfu.ca/~cbm/aands/
Site: http://dlmf.nist.gov/
Fundamental Physical
Constants, also hosted by the National
Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is a reliable source of
accurate information on electromagnetic and atomic fundamental constants.
Site:
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Constants/
The American Physical Society,
founded in 1899, publishes a set of the world's most prestigious and
widely-read physics research journals.
Site: http://www.aps.org/
Macrogalleria of
Polymers, hosted by the University of Southern Mississippi, is a
virtual museum dedicated to the field of polymer science. A very nicely
compiled booster for general knowledge in plastics.
Site: http://pslc.ws/mactest/
Culture
August Strindberg+Helium::
»Who's hot tonight? Strindberg's hot tonight!»
August Strindberg in a highly concentrated form.
Site:
http://strindbergandhelium.com/
UbuWeb:: The independent resource
dedicated to all strains of the avant-garde arts.
Site: http://www.ubu.com/
Banksy::
»Think outside the box, collapse the box, and take a fucking sharp knife
to it.»
Site: http://www.banksy.co.uk/
Computing
The International Obfuscated C Code Contest is a contest with the
particular objectives to bring out the most Obscure/Obfuscated C program,
to stress C compilers with unusual code, to illustrate some of the
subtleties of the C language, and finally (but not the least), to provide
a safe forum for poor C code.
This years (2006)
winning contribution
(a chess simulator) by Oscar Toledo is absolutely unbelievable in all
its beauty.
Another personal favourite of mine is the
1988 winning contribution by Landon Curt Noll and Larry Bassel,
finally providing us with an elegant way of
calculating the numerical value of π.
Site:
http://www.de.ioccc.org/main.html (German mirror of the IOCCC site)
GSL - The GNU Scientific Library is a numerical library for use in
C and C++ programs.
The library provides a wide range of mathematical routines such as random
number generators, special functions and least-squares fitting. There are
over 1000 functions in total with an extensive test suite.
GSL is free software released under the
GNU General Public License.
Site:
http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/
Scepticism
Vetenskap och Folkbildning / The Swedish
Skeptics (VoF) is a Swedish non-profit organization set out to
promote popular education about the methods of science and its results.
By engaging in open debate, the organization particularly sets its task to
discredit false ideas about matters that can be resolved scientifically.
Site: http://www.vof.se/
The Richard Dawkins
Foundation for Reason and Science
A recent Gallup poll concluded that nearly 50% of the American public
believes the universe is less than 10,000 years old.
Nearly half the population, in other words, believes that the entire
universe, the sun and solar system, the Milky Way galaxy, the Andromeda
galaxy, and all the billions of other galaxies, all began after the
domestication of the dog.
They believe this because they rate a particular bronze age origin myth
more highly than all the scientific evidence in the world. It is only one
of literally thousands of such myths from around the world, but it happened,
by a series of historical accidents, to become enshrined in a book - Genesis
- which, by another series of historical accidents, has been translated and
disseminated to almost every home in the land plus - infuriatingly - every
hotel room.
Even before science told us the true story of the origin of the world and
the evolution of life, there was no reason to believe the Jewish origin myth
any more than the origin myths of the Yoruba or the Kikuyu, the Yanomamo or
the Maori, the Dogon or the Cherokee. Now, in the 21st century as we approach
Darwin's bicentenary, the fact that half of Americans take Genesis literally
is nothing less than an educational scandal.
Site:
http://richarddawkins.net/foundation