Sci/Tech Web Awards 2003

Roland Piquepaille writes "This is the third year that Scientific American gives these awards. This is a collection of 50 sites which have something really neat to offer: science. "It's a jungle out there. With more than three billion Web pages to sift through, finding great science sites is harder than ever. The good news is the editors at Scientific American have once again trawled the Internet for the best the Web has to offer. We think our list of winners has something for everyone." These 50 sites are classified in ten categories, like anthropology & paleontology or astronomy & astrophysics. In this column, you'll discover my personal four favorite sites, including a great one featuring optical illusions (the link is too complex to be included here)."

Fp?

[JimSpike]

Fp?

missing link

[CanSpice]

They left off my favourite astronomy website, the Joint Astronomy Centre's Birthday Stars [hawaii.edu] website. It's really informative and fun!*

* Disclaimer: I work for them.

Re:missing link

[SugoiMonkey]

Tell the Birthday Stars computer when you were born, and it will look for a star that is your age in light years away from Earth. This means that the light we're seeing from that star today actually left the star around when you were born, and has taken your entire life to reach Earth.

From month to month you may see your birthday star changing. This is because as you get older the light from more and more distant stars has had the time to travel to Earth in during your life

The explaination is a little vague. My star will change if I understand correctly that your site only chooses it by the time in which its light takes to reach the Earth. That means that every year, if not more freaquently, I will get a new star since my old star will still send light at the same rate (in my case 16.7 light years will change to a 17 light years star in a month).

Am I comprehending your service correctly?

Re:missing link

[CanSpice]

You are, yes. It doesn't change more frequently because of the sparseness of interesting stars within eighty light years. This program would be a lot less interesting if your birthday star happened to be some 11th magnitude red dwarf. It's much more interesting to have a 3rd magnitude star, one that you can actually see with the naked eye.

The link is to complex?

[reinard]

The link was to complex to be included here? They look pretty regular to me. You've maybe heard of the A tag [w3.org]? Was it Great Archaeological Sites [culture.gouv.fr], Exploring Mars [exploremarsnow.org], Earth As Art [nasa.gov], or Archimedes' Lab [archimedes-lab.org]; _OR_ did you just want some traffic to your site? ;)

Re:The link is to complex?

[rpiquepa]

This was the link to optical illusions: http://www.archimedes-lab.org/atelier.html?http:// www.archimedes-lab.org/page17b.html . When submitting the story, I noticed that the portion of the URL after the ? was not *hidden*. And in fact, this URL leads to a two-step process: first, an error, then a window with a frame. So I decided not to include the link in my submission. Roland.

Re:The link is to complex?

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't need the silly referrer part of the link. All you need is this http://www.archimedes-lab.org/page17b.html [archimedes-lab.org]

Google U.S. Puzzle Championship

[Anonymous Coward]

Google U.S. Puzzle Championship

For all those of you who use Google search [google.com]everyday but missed out the fact that currently, Google is running Google U.S. Puzzle Championship [google.com], a national online competition to identify America's most logical minds.

Two winners receive slots on the US Puzzle Team and all expense paid trips to the Netherlands for the World Puzzle Championship in October. The top 25 finishers receive prizes as well as the satisfaction of knowing that what they know is well, pretty remarkable.

There's no entry fee. No special equipment is required. And the questions don't favor a specific cultural background. To get a feel for what you'll be up against, try the puzzles on this page [google.com]. Solve them and you may find a slot for you in Google's engineering department (they love logical thinkers)....

Scientific(?) American, more at: utter crap

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to rain on the submitter's parade, but SciAm is the largest heap of shit I have ever had the displeasure of reading. If i had a science site they linked to, i would seriously wonder what I'd done wrong as thier editors wouldn't know the difference between good and bad science if it bit them on thier collective asses.

If Nature is too technical, and PopSci is too plebeian for your scientific tastes, then please use the New Scientist as your source of scientific news. This way, when I meet you on the street, I won't be forced to punch you in the face when you start spouting pseudoscientific crap from between your gums.

Thank you,

News has it for me.

[mrthoughtful]

It's pretty easy to come up with an arbitrary list of cool science websites, considering there are in excess of 3,083,324,652 pages [google.com] on the web nowadays.
But in my opinion, cutting science news sites have to have the edge, and there are times when science on slashdot [slashdot.org] is not as fast as the news on eureka alert [eurekalert.org] or for that matter, the science and tech areas of the bbc news site [bbc.co.uk]. Of course, Nature [nature.com] has had a leading role for scientists in the news area for years.
But I guess that there are as many favourite groups of science sites as there are readers of science sites! (Can such a conjecture be proved, though?)

Re:News has it for me.

[merryprankster]

Sci Am have found some good web sites, but it's pretty hard to argue that they are the 50 best, especially when having cool graphics and Rich Media seems to have been pretty high on the list of criteria.

You still can't beat some of the old work horses such as the National Library of Medicine's MedLine/PUBMED service (http://www.bmn.com/general/991) A fantastic resource used almost daily by working scientists, and fairly accessible to Joe Public.

Too complex

[zurkog]

1. (the link is too complex to be included here)

Fermat? Is that you?

Re:Too complex

[VendingMenace]

Dude, if the link is too comlex, you just gotta rotate your computer 90 degrees and try again ;)

SWEET!

Re:Too complex

[Anonymous Coward]

lol I can imagine how many people wouldn't get the joke :)
(not many slashdotters, though)