Pencil Sharpening: City Cams

This is a live cam website from a lot of cities. Go to the Chicago site, fr'instance, and wait for the Sears Tower to show up, all orange and blue. Or look at the eerily empty New York streets at 4 a.m. Betcha can't watch just one! <http://www.earthcam.com/metrocams>

Medicine: The Greeks, from the gods to Galen

"Many foundations of modern Western medicine lie in Classical Greece, from about 800 B.C.E. to about 200 C.E. During this period, Greek medicine departed from the divine and mystical and moved toward observation and logical reasoning. These ideas spread throughout the Mediterranean world and as far east as India, and their influence has remained strong in the West to this day." - from the website of the American National Library of Medicine. <http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/greek/index.html>

Music: Independent Downloads as Cheap as 25 Cents

"Mperia is a music portal that allows independent artists and labels to sell music directly to their fans while retaining the majority of the profits. Mperia combines independent music with networking features that allow fans to explore, sample, share, and buy independent music." -- from the website. <http://www.mperia.com/>

Good Eatin': Cooking for Engineers

"Have an analytical mind? Like to cook? This is the site to read!" - from the website. <http://www.cookingforengineers.com/>

California Dreamin': Hybrid and Electric Cars

"This site is a resource center for consumers searching for information on hybrid and electric vehicles. It has been designed and published to inform the public on the development and use of hybrid cars and related technologies.... Current hybrid cars can get up to 60 miles to the gallon on the highway. In addition to fuel economy, they boast lower emissions and depreciation than gasoline powered cars." -- from the website. <http://www.hybrid-car.org/>

Books: A Movable Feast

From the Gustine Courson Weaver Collection at the University of North Texas Libraries comes an animated exhibit of pop-up and movable books published in the U.S., France, Germany and Czechoslovakia from 1850 to the present, including a brief history of movable books since the 13th century and images from S & J Fuller paper doll books of the early 19th century.
<http://www.library.unt.edu/
rarebooks/exhibits/popup2/>

Western Civ: Squashed Philosophers

Cliff Notes: "There is no taking-part in the 'Great Debate' of Western civilisation, the debate about who we are, how we should be governed, how we think and how we ought to behave, without some familiarity with the, remarkably few, thinkers in whose language and idiom the talk is conducted....Unfortunately, life is rather short, the little storeroom of the brain doesn't have extensible walls and the greatest of thinkers seem to also be among the worst, and the lengthiest, of writers....So, here are the most used, most quoted, the most given, sources of the West. The books that have defined the way the West thinks now, in their author's own words, but condensed and abridged into something readable." -- from the website. Plato and William James will take you an hour each, but you can knock off Boethius, Descartes, and Leibniz, for example, in less than ten minutes each. <http://www.btinternet.com/
%7Eglynhughes/squashed/>

Writers: Paul Laurence Dunbar

The Springfield (Massachusetts) Library's presentation of the works of Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), the child of slaves and the first African-American to achieve widespread recognition for his writing, features descriptions and images of some of his works, links to other sources, and suggested reading.

<http://www.springfieldlibrary.org/
dunbar/dunbar.html>

Transportation: RailPictures.net

A database of tens of thousands of photographs of trains from the U.S. and Canada, searchable by type of locomotive, railroad, location, and photographer, and browsable by category, such as tunnels, night shots, and derailments. Also includes a discussion forum, but a free membership is required to add photos and comments. <http://www.railpictures.net/>

Research: National Opinion Research Center

The University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center reports on topics of public interest from housing to drug abuse. The website reports on recent survey and research efforts, such as the Illinois Health Curriculum Study and the Residential Energy Consumption Survey. NORC's four academic divisions include the Center on Demography and Economics and the Population Research Center. <http://www.norc.uchicago.edu/>

Streaming: AccuRadio

AccuRadio features music formats mostly absent from the broadcast dial: Swingin' Pop Standards, Brit Rock, Piano Jazz, Broadway, pretty much you name it: <http://www.accuradio.com/>.

Pencil Sharpening: Poom!

See how many times you can get a ball to bounce without falling in a hole. A lot harder than it sounds: <http://www.gotused.com/42/games/poom/>

Flora & Fauna: The Japanese Ant Image Database

A myrmecologist's delight, the Japanese Ant Image Database combines authorative taxonomic data with stunning pictures of various types of ants organized by subfamily, genus and species. Genus and species profiles include images, descriptions, distribution maps, et cetera. <http://ant.edb.miyakyo-u.ac.jp/E/index.html>

Time Travel: Early Vegas

What happens in Vegas…becomes becomes part of the American consciousness. Here's a pictorial tribute to a century of construction, competition and destruction in the Nevada desert, with lush representation of everything from the earliest saloons through the Rat Pack era's swank to subsequent rounds of compulsive reinvention. <http://www.earlyvegas.com/>

Planning: Database of Cities

"We've collected and analyzed data from numerous sources to create as complete and interesting profiles of all U.S. cities as we could. We have thousands of pictures, maps, satellite photos, stats about residents (race, income, ancestries, education, employment...), geographical data, crime data, housing, businesses, political contributions, weather, hospitals, schools, libraries, houses, airports, radio and TV stations, zip codes, area codes, user-submitted facts, similar cities list, comparisons to averages....If you ever need to research any city for any reason, from considering a move there to just checking where somebody you know is staying, this is the site for you.

"Top 100 Lists of cities, including highest income, least crime, newest houses, most females, shortest commute, best educated residents, and many more.

"Random city pictures submitted to our site."

<http://www.city-data.com/>

Health: Medical Information Portal

A good place to start if you're looking for health information on the net: <http://www.emedicinehealth.com/>

Good Eatin': World Carrot Museum

Everything you wanted to know about carrots but were afraid to ask: provenance, cultivation, preparation, crafts, activities for children, factoids, and other stuff. Note that the health content "is for informational purposes only and is not intended to be a replacement for medical advice from your personal physician." <http://website.lineone.net/~stolarczyk/>

Good Eatin': Recipes from Organic Garden

"Search for recipes by keyword, type of dish, or product. Sort your results by recipe title or rating. You can view recipes online and make a printable page of your pick -- or use the 'My Cookbook' feature and collect recipes to download before you leave the site." -- from the website. <http://www.organicvalley.coop/>

Medieval and Renaissance History: Blood and Sawdust

"Containing Articles and Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Woodworking, Furniture, Material Culture, and Reenactment" -- from the website. <http://www.his.com/~tom/>

Travel: Eternal Egypt/L'Egypte Eternelle

"...high-resolution images, three-dimensional reconstructions of Egyptian monuments and antiquities, as well as virtually-reconstructed environments, panoramic images, and panoramic views of present-day Egypt captured by robotic cameras located from the top of Karnak Temple to the streets of Old Cairo." -- from the website. <http://www.eternalegypt.org/>

Technology: The Hindenburg

Background on the German passenger airship, "destroyed in a tragic fire on May 6, 1937" at the Naval Air Station at Lakehurst, New Jersey, including images of the blimp's construction, interior, and artifacts, plus audio from a broadcast made during the disaster. <http://www.nlhs.com/hindenburg.htm>

Resource: U.S. National Debt Clock

The Outstanding Public Debt as of 05 Jun 2005 at 01:15:04 AM GMT is:

The estimated population of the United States is 296,247,415
so each citizen's share of this debt is $26,304.22.

The National Debt has continued to increase an average of
$1.67 billion per day since September 30, 2004!
<http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/>

Resource: Weblog Webliography

An extremely useful source of information on blogging, RSS and related technologies, and on the impact of the blogosphere on politics and culture: <http://kairosnews.org/blogbib>

Music: A&M Records Archive (UCLA)

"Founded by Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss in 1962, A&M Records helped shape the history of American music....Alpert and Moss recently donated their company's papers to the UCLA Music Library Special Collections, where they will form an invaluable resource for the study of American popular music....This online exhibit celebrates A&M's intellectual and creative history with a presentation of selected materials from the collection, along with a few items borrowed from private collections." -- from the website. <http://www.library.ucla.edu/amrecords/>

Aesthetics: Eye of Science

Since 1994, say Eye of Science directors Oliver Meckes and Nicole Ottawa, "Our aim [has been] to combine scientific exactness with aesthetic appearances, and thereby help to bridge the gap between the world of science and the world of art." They use electron microscopy among other equipment and techniques to make images of such ephemera as parasites, cross-sections of a lavender leaf, and a delightfully disturbing image of an itch mite. <http://www.eyeofscience.de/eos2/index2.html>