Silvem

This site has a list (that the author admits is not comprehensive) of banned books, the reasons they were banned, some of the site author's own comments, and perhaps most ironically, a link to buy said books through amazon. It also sports some censorship quotes from famous people, FAQ and an option to sort the list by title or by author. A well-maintained and intriguing site, particularly when you read some of the reasons for them being banned. One note: these aren't books that are banned in the US; rather, they are books that were banned at some point in history by some country. Most of them were banned in the modern era, but notable exceptions include the Bible and Homer's Odyssey. If you want to know more about the sources for the author's list, check out the FAQ.

I'm sure none of you were shocked to see 1984, Fahrenheit 451, or Catcher in the Rye there. But how about James and the Giant Peach, a collection of Escher's work, Shel Silverstein's work or the Lorax? And some of the reasons for banning are absurd. Anne Frank's diaries were challenged because Alabama school board members said it is a "real downer."
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Words fail me.

Very simple and straightforward site that shows a series of pictures with increasingly larger stellar bodies next to Earth (to scale). Many of you may know that Jupiter is far larger than Earth (that whole bit about the Great Red Spot being 1-3 Earths in diameter might've tipped you off), but how many of you know that Jupiter and our own Sun are miniscule when compared to the likes of the red giants Betelguese and Antares?

I leave all "insignificance of Earth" statements to the viewer. At the very least, its cool.

Interesting side note - apparently, the guy who runs the site, Jeff Rense, is a well-known conspiracy theorist (UFOs, Holocaust denial, the works). Look him up on Wikipedia if you want more.

An inspired satire (can I say "divinely inspired" without being smited?) on the faults that emerge when people try to apply ancient laws from Leviticus to current day affairs. Specifically, many conservative Christians are fond of pointing out that homosexuals are an abomination before God. But then again, so is eating shellfish and working on the Sabbath (which was originally Saturday, and still is for Jews). And of course, there's the point that leads to the title of the letter:
"Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?"

Clearly the world would be better off if we would just blindly follow millenia-old laws. Oh, and let's bring back the Code of Hammurabi while we're at it. I've had a hankerin' for my friend's teeth ever since he knocked one of mine out.

A fun little site that draws recipes from 50 common household ingredients. The concept is that it'll give you ideas for what to do when you have a bizarre mix of foods. And not too shabby of a job - it even handled my strange lists of bacon, apples, onions, cheese and stock cubes.

Is it comprehensive and earth-shatteringly broad? Hell no. But its fun, and it will give even the snobbiest chefs some ideas. Perhaps its best use is to remind you that you can still feed yourself with simple dishes.

Brilliant. A collection of the snowman comics of Calvin & Hobbes. It was a great strip, and I always enjoyed the snowmen ones. Some of them could have been scanned in better (a little difficult to read), and not every single snow comic is on the site, but I don't care. It's Calvin & Hobbes.

An extremely extensive mythological encyclopedia. Great jumping off point if you want to learn more about a specific god. As with any encyclopedia, you better know exactly what you're looking for; you can't just type in "Slavic Gods" and have helpful information pop up. You better at least know enough to ask for Svarog or Triglav.

So while this isn't a very good site for casually browsing general mythologies, it can give you some specific information on gods. However, it falls plague to the standard distribution of information on gods: there is scads of info on the Greeks and Romans, on the big three Western religions, and on Hindus and the Norse to a lesser extent. But you won't find much more than anywhere else on the Slavic gods (to continue the above example), or African gods. A specialty site this is not.

And this site does have errors. So do most encyclopedias, believe it or not. Ragnarök is "fate of the gods," not "doom of the gods," which is an important distinction. It is the difference between an inexorable fate and a titanic clash of good and evil. Ragnarök is the former, not the latter. Oh, and Götterdämmerung != Ragnarök. (!= means "does not equal" or "is not equal to" for you non-programming types.) Götterdämmerung means "twilight of the gods" and is the German translation of Ragnarök. They are not interchangeable words in Old Norse, as this site might lead you to believe. Minor errors, perhaps, but errors nonetheless.

Still, if you want to refresh your memory on something, come to this site. Chances are it's got enough information to do so, and you can even learn some more in the process. Just don't use it for research papers.

Oh NOVA, I love you. Sure, you have your little foibles and incosistencies and annoyances, but then I see stuff like this and I forget all about them.

This is a fairly straightforward site, really. There's a NOVA (wiki/google it if you wanna know more) program out there called "The Elegant Universe." In short, it's about string theory. History, experimentation, the hypothesis itself (it hasn't really been tested enough to be a true scientific theory), why it could reunite the quantum and galactic worlds, why it could fail, etc. And this site has that program available for free to watch.

Anyway its a good overview of the topic, done with NOVA's usual balance of science (no PhD required) and cool visuals. When you've got 2 and a half hours or so (its not 3 hours, like it says; the original program lasted 3 hours on TV, but it had ads. This version doesn't) watch this. It's worth it, even if you already know something about string theory.