Free Clipart for Educators

A modest collection of free clipart, fonts, wallpaper, etc. await the educator at Awesome Clipart for Educators. None of the items are award-winning but they are simple and free. Visitors are asked to fill out a survey stating their status; student, parent, teacher... It's worth a visit.

Don't Look Now, But Your Shoelace is Untied

At Shoe Lacing Methods one discovers that with 6 pairs of eyelets there are just slightly less than 2 trillion ways to lace a shoe. At this site the webmaster has chosen his 24 favorite lacing methods and diagramed them and excellent step-by-step instructions. There are instructions for standard lacing, boot lacing, and even one-handed lacing. Quite a nice site.

Shopping at the Government Store

Are you looking for some good, used items. Maybe a car or van? How about office equipment? Or real estate? Well the U.S. Government may just have what you're looking for. Visit the FirstGov.gov shopping page and see if you can find any bargains.

Journal of the H.M.S. Endeavor

The National Library of Australia makes the journal entries of James Cook (1728-1779) available at this site. This is not a transcript but the scanned images of the original journal. This comes from the library's Digital Collection. Visit the library's home page for more interesting materials as well.

Comparing Hospital Health Care

"Hospital Compare has quality measures on how often hospitals provide some of the recommended care to get the best results for most patients. You will see some of the recommended care that an adult should get if being treated for a heart attack, heart failure, or pneumonia.

"This information helps you, your health care provider, family, and friends compare the quality of care provided in the acute-care hospitals (general hospitals) and critical access hospitals (small, remote hospitals) that agree to submit data on the quality of certain services they provide for certain conditions. This quality information not only helps you make good decisions about your health care, but also encourages hospitals to improve the quality of health care they provide.

"Quality information is not available on this website for children's, psychiatric, rehabilitation or long-term care hospitals because they generally do not treat adult patients for heart attack, heart failure, or pneumonia."

Where Are You? Google Knows.

Google has another beta service for us. Actually it's been around for a little while now but it just took me some time to get around to writing it up here. The site is called Google Maps. It allows you to access street maps, magnify them, scroll them and more. You can even get satellite images of the area you are viewing. You don't need an address. You can search for locations the way you perform a general Google search. I've looked at the satellite images but they don't seem to have a time/date stamp on them. So it may be a little difficult to determine the currency of the image.


Once you've looked at your house, your place of work, and some friends and relatives, you might want to load Google Earth Beta. "Google Earth puts a planet's worth of imagery and other geographic information right on your desktop. View exotic locales like Maui and Paris as well as points of interest such as local restaurants, hospitals, schools, and more." The download is free. There are also deluxe versions available for a fee.

Archival Links

At Archival Internet Resources you can find a huge collection of hyperlinks to various archive sources. These links are categorized as: Master Lists of Archives, Tools for Archivists, Archival Search Engine, Professional Resources, and Searching Resources.

The Archives Hub is a United Kingdom version of the Archival Internet Resources. Or is that the other way around.

Primary Resources Unlimited (Almost)

The Repositories of Primary Resources has nothing in the way of primary resources. It represents a bridge that links to a multitude of archival sites all over the world. Everything from town council meetings to small town libraries in the most out-of-the-way places. Impressive.

Historical Manuscript Collection 101

Definitely a site for the academic. But wonderful in the scope of its offerings.

"The Schoyen Collection comprises most types of manuscripts from the whole world spanning over 5000 years. It is the largest private manuscript collection formed in the 20^th century.

"The whole collection, MSS 1-5274, comprises 13,500 manuscript items, including 2,172 volumes.
6,850 manuscript items are from the ancient period, 3300 BC - 500 AD; 3,859 are from the medieval period, 500 - 1500; and 2,791 are post-medieval."

12 Great Books

The British Library has what it calls a Turning the Pages system for displaying 12 historically significant books in their original format. You can not only view the pages but zoom in on the details. Among the books listed are: Baybar's Qur'an, Golden Haggadah, Versalius's 16th century anatomy and more.

Archives of an Empire

"The National Archives of England, Wales and the United Kingdom has one of the largest archival collections in the world, spanning 1000 years of British history, from Domesday Book of 1086 to government papers recently released to the public."

Astronomy Stuff

What follows is a collection of various astronomy sites. The descriptions will be short. If you're into astronomy, you should find something you like. Many of these sites came to me in the Internet Tourbus newsletter mentioned in the post just below this one. The newsletter is great but the Tourbus website is even better. Be sure to visit it as well.

Photographs from Deep Impact probe and Tempe I, courtesy of NASA. Pretty slow access on dial up connection but that's because the event just occurred last night.

ASTRONOMY PICTURE OF THE DAY

At the Astronomy Picture of the Day you see a different astronomical photograph each day. The site also includes a brief explanation of the image and multiple links for more information on the topic.

Astronomy for Kids attempts to provide astronomical information for kids in a digestible format. It contains images of sky maps, constellations, the planets and more. It even has electronic postcards available.

Before you go anywhere in Views of the Solar System, you must pick which of five languages you want to view: English, French, German, Portuguese, or Spanish. Then it "presents a vivid multimedia adventure unfolding the splendor of the Sun, planets, moons, comets, asteroids, and more. Discover the latest scientific information, or study the history of space exploration, rocketry, early astronauts, space missions, spacecraft through a vast archive of photographs, scientific facts, text, graphics and videos. Views of the Solar System offers enhanced exploration and educational enjoyment of the solar system and beyond."

NINE PLANETS: A Multimedia Tour of the Solar System. Not only is current information made available but this site also discusses the history and myth associated with the various planets in our solar system. In addition to the above info there is also a brief sound excerpt from the appropriate section of Gustav Holst's Nine Planets.

The title of Bad Astronomy is really a misnomer here. The author of the site simply corrects common misconceptions about astronomy. While I'm not a total science geek, I especially like his movie reviews. They discuss the quality of the movie some but tend to focus on the science and astronomy angles of the film. His review of the latest Star Wars film is entertaining, insightful, and amusing. Beware! In order to properly explain the science of a sci-fi film the review may contain some spoilers. So if you haven't seen the film yet, wait awhile before reading his review. There's more than sci-fi movie reviews. Visit the site and you'll see what I mean.

Tourbus to the Stars

The Internet Tourbus is a website filled with information about the Internet and computers. But it also has a page dedicated to the stars. The Internet Tourbus News Service Astronomy News and Links has brief synopses of various astronomy news articles and then link to the article.

Medically Speaking

Thanks to the Medical Library Association we have a unique website called Deciphering MedSpeak. That's exactly what it helps you do. The site has its own general medical term glossary with links to other sites to help you get additional information. Find out what your doctor is really saying.

A Small Album of Frogs and Toads

I like frogs. When I was a kid, I would go out to a nearby pond or lake and catch a couple of frogs. I'd bring them home for the summer and then release them back into their habitat in the late summer or early fall. I'd spoil them rotten, feeding them all the night crawlers they could eat.

Enough about me. Frogs and Toads in Color and Sound is a small album of 12 frog images with their accompanying "croaks." You'll need RealPlayer to hear the sound files.

Old Maps and More

"This site (Historic Cities) contains maps, literature, documents, books and other relevant material concerning the past, present and future of historic cities and facilitates the location of similar content on the web."

Before the Ball Point Pen...

Before the Ball Point there was the fountain pen. At Penoply, the fountain pen is given its due. There are samples of some of the great pens of the past, a history of the fountain pen, glossary, troubleshooting (for those who may still have an older pen), and more.

Travel Info: Around the Country or Around the World

This site covers a lot of territory. While it contains very little information of its own, it has links to the sites you'll want to visit before you visit the real place.

"Travelconsumer.com's mission is to provide travelers with a unique and valuable collection of resources, advice, great writing, and unbiased recommendations. Our Web-based discussion group provides an opportunity for travelers to share their adventures, joys, recommendations, and frustrations with each other."

"Travelconsumer.com's content includes every country of the world, the United States, and all of the states within the United States."