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L I N K S

Amazing

• Time-lapse view of the Earth at night from the International Space Station, ending with a sunrise over Antarctica
• Zoom into deep space shows colliding galaxies in spectacular detail - animations based on a Hubble photo of the Antennae Galaxies.
• "Supermassive Black Holes" by Fulvio Melia (2007).
• Ultraviolet photo of sunspot turbulence - NASA
• The "Wow!" signal
• "Emerging Possibilities for Space Propulsion Breakthroughs" by Marc G. Millis (NASA)
• "Mini-galaxies" of "dark matter" orbit the Milky Way - New Scientist, 14 February 2007.
• Sunset on Mars - photo taken by Rover on 10 June 2006 (NASA)
• Creating matter from light - "Out Of Pure Light, Physicists Create Particles Of Matter," University of Rochester press release, via Science Daily, 18 September 1997
• "Generating matter and antimatter from the vacuum," press release from the University of Michigan (via PhysOrg.com, 8 December 2010): "...scientists and engineers have developed new equations that show how a high-energy electron beam combined with an intense laser pulse could rip apart a vacuum into its fundamental matter and antimatter components, and set off a cascade of events that generates additional pairs of particles and antiparticles. 'We can now calculate how, from a single electron, several hundred particles can be produced...'"
• Scientists reduce the speed of light to zero - "Light 'frozen' in its tracks" by Jenny Hogan, New Scientist, 10 December 2003
• "Mathematics Of Cloaking: New Analysis Improves Methods To Render Objects Invisible," Science Daily, 26 December 2006. See also "Scientists say real invisibility cloak is in our grasp," by Mira Oberman, Agence France Presse (via SEED Magazine, 6 April 2007).
• Scientists build a virus from its published DNA base-pair sequence - "synthetic biology" ("Researchers Create Virus in Record Time" by Rick Weiss, Washington Post, 14 November 2003)
• Craig Venter's 21 May 2010 news conference at which he announces the first successful self-reproducing cells made with completely synthetic DNA.
• "Neanderthal DNA" -- a compilation of articles, videos and links by Nature magazine.
• Two lines of evidence suggest a Big Bounce, not a Big Bang - "The Universe Before It Began," by Maggie Wittlin, SEED magazine, 22 May 2006.
• Researchers claim the "fine structure constant" isn't constant after all: "Ye cannae change the laws of physics. Or can you?" The Economist, 31 August 2010.
• "An Ancient Greek Computer" -- article from Scientific American (1959) by Derek J. de Solla Price (one of my teachers at Yale).
• "Counterfactual Computation" by Graeme Mitchison and Richard Jozsa, Proceedings of the Royal Society, London, A457 (2001) pages 1175-1194: "Counterfactual computation is a process by which the result of the computation may be learnt without actually running the computer..."
• Reality does not exist when not observed? - "Quantum physics says goodbye to reality," by Jon Cartwright, PhysicsWeb, 20 April 2007.
• "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything," by A. Garrett Lisi (6 November 2007).

Art

There are many good "meta-pages" -- huge collections of links chosen by one or more experts, often with short comments or descriptions. The ones I use most often are:

• Voice of the Shuttle - by Alan Liu
• The Mother of All Art History Link Pages - maintained by the University of Michigan.

Artnet.com Magazine -- With it's barrage of photo- and gossip-filled "Letters from [London, Rome, Paris, Venice, New York, Athens, etc.]," Artnet.com's online magazine has become so useful and so alive that it must be described as essential reading for anyone working in the visual arts.

Notebook -- a very unusual site. It looks like it's meant to be private -- a labor of love, or obsession, created as a personal reference-tool. Yet the name of the site's creator isn't revealed. Its internal linking is haphazard, so it's hard to know exactly what's there. What makes this site worth visiting anyway are the long and uncommon texts - entire books in some cases, e.g. How to Care for Works of Art on Paper by Francis Dolloff and Roy Perkinson; part of John Ruskin's The Elements of Drawing (1857); etc.

Tracey - an online focus for contemporary drawing, maintained by Jane Tormey at Loughborough University's School of Art and Design in England. There is almost nothing here about history, collecting or the art market. They view drawing as a tool for thinking and analysis.

Umelec (Artist) -- great international magazine based here in Prague.

a node for Jack Burnham -- my attempt to provide access to the writing and ideas of this great theorist.

Friends

John Perry Barlow Lowry Burgess Donald Burgy Joe Davis Uros Djuric Peter Fend Henry Flynt Kevin Kelly

Benn Kobb Donald Lipski Adrian Piper Rick Prelinger Mark O'Brien Seth Siegelaub Alan Sondheim -- here, hear, heer or heeer Bruce Sterling Willoughby Sharp

Fun

• Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society (on some days this should be listed under Amazing)
• Dr. Fun

Important

• Link established between string theory and guage theory - "Princeton physicists connect string theory with established physics," Princeton University press release, 1 May 2007.
• "'Exact uncertainty' brought to quantum world," by Eugenie Samuel, New Scientist, 27 April 2002: "...The result is an expression that looks like Heisenberg's original relation, but gives the exact uncertainty in the measurements of position and momentum. [Michael] Hall says it is an equation rather than an inequality, which is 'a far stronger relation'. So strong, in fact, that in a paper published this month in Journal of Physics A, Hall and Marcel Reginatto of the Physical-Technical Institute in Braunschweig, Germany, have managed to derive the basics of quantum mechanics from it, including the Schrödinger equation that describes the behaviour of quantum-mechanical wave functions..."
• Nuclear energy levels seem to match a new formula to calculate primes - "Prime Numbers Get Hitched," by Marcus du Sautoy, SEED magazine, 27 March 2006.
• First 3-D map of the Universe's dark matter scaffolding - European Space Agency, 7 January 2007
• "The Known Universe" - a zoom from the Himalayas out to the edge of the known universe and back again, created by the American Museum of Natural History and the Rubin Museum of Art.
• Principia Cybernetica
• "The AI Manifesto: Internet SuperMind and Beyond" by Ben Goertzel and Stephan Vladimir Bugaj
• Astrobiology at NASA
• Best images from the Hubble Space Telescope
• The Search for ExtraSolar Planets
• SETI Institute
• arXiv.org -- significant new papers in the physical sciences
• "Solving Einstein's Equations on Supercomputers" - from IEEE's Computer magazine.
• Drew Berry's computer graphic animations of DNA, RNA and protein synthesis.
• Articles by Michio Kaku and John Gribbin
• Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle
• Flemming Funch's "Whole Systems" webpage

Interesting

• Edge - John Brockman's web publication
• Computer animation/simulation of colliding galaxies
• 24-second animation shows air traffic over and enroute to the US during one day
• A recording of Sputnik 1's signal, made 7 October 1957
• Dave Farber's "Interesting People" list archive
• John G. Cramer's Alternative View columns
• The MIT Biology Hypertextbook
• Android World - all about building anthromorphic robots and animatronics
• The Earth Impact Database - asteroid craters on Earth (a descriptive atlas).
• The PaleoGeographic Atlas Project.
• World System Archive
• The Particle Adventure at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
• Composite worldwide weather map generated every 6 hours (~75 kb). They also offer an MPEG animation based on the past week's maps (~2MB).

Scary

• "An Appraisal of Technologies of Political Control" -- working draft of a report by the European Parliament (1998).
• "Somebody's Listening" -- by Duncan Campbell, with links to more texts about Echelon and other governmental systems for intercepting private communications.

Useful

• eHow -- "step-by-step instructions on how to do just about anything..."
• The Car Repair FAQ.