• Read a non-fiction book.
  • ANYTHING by Isaac Asimov: Well known for his great science fiction, many people don't realized he wrote more non-fiction than fiction. Works mostly scientific topics, but cover everything from the atom to antient Egypt, to Shakesphere.
  • Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy and Steven Levy
  • Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age by Steven Levy
  • 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos by Jennet Conant
  • The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage by Clifford Stoll
  • Catch Me If You Can by Frank Abagnale - Young man takes up fraud for a living. Fascinating, fun story. Very good movie, excellent book.
  • Miller Planisphere's - OK not quite a book, but a durable, easy to use plastic wheel that allows you to dial up the view of the night sky for any date and time, great for identifying stars and constellations. - Available - in 2 versions for different northern hemisphere latitude ranges.
  • The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks.
  • The Anthropologist from Mars by Oliver Sacks.
  • In His Image by Paul Brand and Phillip Yancy.
  • Fearfully and Wonderfully Made by Paul Brand and Phillip Yancy.
  • Pain the Gift Nobody Wants by Paul Brand and Phillip Yancy.
  • Bringing Down the House: How Six Students Took Vegas for Millons by Ben Mezrich
  • Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art by Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo - an interesting glimpse into the world of art through a story about an art forger.
• Read a Book to a Child - Here are some of our favoriest - You will enjoy them as much as the child.
  • Pizza for the Queen Nancy Castaldo - based on true story about shop in Naples making pizzas
  • 26 Fairmount Avenue Series Tomie DePaola- biography of DePaola's life in 1930-40's
  • Frindle Andrew Clements - invents new word for "pen"
  • Anything by Beverly Cleary - start with Henry Huggins, Ramona the Pest, or Mouse & the Motorcycle
  • The Amber Cat Hilary McKay - on beach meeting Harriet ghost. Mom telling the story years later.
  • Big Numbers Edward Packard - Picture book about big numbers.
  • Wayside School Lous Sachar - Fun made up story about the weirdest school you ever heard of.
  • Little House on the Praire Series Laura Ingles - based on true story of growing up in American West.
  • Peter and the Starcatchers by Ridley Pearson and Dave Barry - fun prequel to Peter Pan.
• References.
  • Wikipedia the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
  • Google. All good searches start with Google.
  • Amazon.com I know it's a book seller's site, but for finding a book, I've not found anything that beats it. Never thought I'd find an online site that beat browsing in a book store.
  • Project Gutenberg Project Gutenberg is the Internet's oldest producer of FREE electronic books.
  • Google Maps. Best maps on the internet.
  • PubMed PubMed is a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the National Institute of Health that allows MEDLINE searches for medical articles.
  • http://freeonlinecalculator.net/index.php Need to calculate the area of a circle, volume of cube quick? Check here to find a cacluator.
  • units.txt and units-egs.txt
• Scientific Sites.
  • Astronomy: Build a scale model of the solar system - enter the size of the Sun you want and it will give you the scale diameter and distance of the planets. Don't just look at the page, go out and try building a scale model of the Solar System. You'll be amazed at it's vastness. - If you start with a 4 inch (10 cm) diameter sun, earth is just under 1 mm diameter and 35 feet away, Pluto will be 0.1 mm diameter about 1/4 mile away.
  • Astronomy: Cartes du Ciel - an AWESOME free and POWERFULL sky chart's program.
  • Chemistry: WebElements.com. Hands down the best site on the periodic table and elements on the web!
  • Science is fun: Mr. Styles' Chemistry site how to make chemistry fun. (Largely by blowing things up.)
  • units.txt List of units of measurements & their converstions I've collected and found helpful over the years. and units-egs.txt List of examples of things using these units.
• Music
  • Bach's "Goldenberg Variations" - See Wikipedia's article for details.
• Software
  • Text and Hexadecimal Editor: Ultraedit . The best text editor in existence. Includes macros, advance search and replace capabilities, column modes, open/save directly from/to FTP, of course spell checking.
  • Irfanview "IrfanView is a very fast, small, compact and innovative FREEWARE (for non-commercial use) graphic viewer for Windows." - The best.
  • Astronomy: Cartes du Ciel - an AWESOME free and POWERFULL sky chart's program.
  • Database: MySql. "The world's most popular open source database." Used widely in Linux for web based databases applications. Licensed under GNU General Public License. A few years ago I installed it - with some difficulty - on a Windows 95 based system using Apache and PHP. -- Don't ask me how I did it. I don't remember.
• Video clips online.
  • The Mentos and Coke Video featured on NPR
• Podcasts
  • This American Life For a relaxing evening. Turn on your computer and listen to an episode of "This American Life" produced by Ira Glass
  • 13 Minutes to the Moon.  Season one produced by the BBC in 2019 to honor the 50th anniversary of the lunar landing, looked at the last 13 minutes of the Apollo landing in great detail.  Season 2 in 2020 looked in great detail at the Apollo 13 flight.  Great story telling.
  • 50 Things that Made the Modern Economy
  • 99% invisible
  • Radiolab
  • The Memory Palace, by Nate Dimeo - Great story telling of events in American History.
  • Twenty Thousand Hertz
  • Switched on Pop - in times when so much in the world is looking depressed, switch on pop is excitingly different. Two music critics analyze modern pop like they would classical music, discussing cord changes, beats, but not in a boring way.  They do it with such enthusiasm and excitement that you can't help but smile.
• Just for fun.
  • Improv Everywhere " Improv Everywhere causes scenes of chaos and joy in public places." -- Very funny web page, look around at the dozens of "Missions"
• Movies. -- Lots of great movies out there, here are some of my favorites. . . Random order?
  • The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Return of the King (2003), The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) -- I waited almost 20 years after reading this series for the live action film to be made and was not dissapointed.
  • Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock? -- True story about a 73 year old truck driver who buys a painting at a thrift shop for $5.00, becomes convinced it is a Jackson Pollock, and takes on the art world to try and prove she's right. Fun, story, interesting glimpse into the art industry. PG-13 for some language.

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