I'm a sucker for those top-ten lists in magazines and websites that advertise themselves as the best of whatever category they're purporting to arbitrarily miniaturize to 10 items, and then proceed to place those in some ranked order of goodness, yumminess, or importance.
I just finished one, as a matter of fact, on the best 10 places to live in Westchester County, NY. (We're thinking of moving next month to get Lil' C. into a better pre-k next year, but that's yet another top 10 list to consider...).
In any case, I've accumulated a lot of websites in the past few months, and a few iPod Touch apps, as well. I've been doing a lot of web-based research which has spawned a lot of web-based procrastination clicking of links. And, some of them have led to my learning something!
So, I'm sharing some of them this morning.
Please share yours in the comments!
A caveat
While I have a thing for these top ten lists, I also don't trust them. I'm actually deeply skeptical of them. American Film Institute? Not only do I disagree with their top list, I deeply suspect it was created to push dvd sales of flagging films. That "ten best" places to live in Westchester county? Appeared in Westchester Magazine, full of advertising from places who disproportionately call the top ten home.
What follows is not a "top" anything, except for one, which will be obvious. Just some of places I've found interesting, and from which I've learned something in the past several weeks. My only real criterion is that each link goes to a place that has been so interesting and full of frequently refreshed content that I've found myself repeatedly going back for more. I don't even agree with the editorial bent of some of them (Arts & Letters, you already knew that, didn't you?) but all of them provide me with enough neuron-stretching to feel like I've done some mental calisthenics before heading off to bed.
And, the theme fits the general Things We've Learned ethic in a new and different way than usual for a Tuesday morning. I hope you find something interesting as like little digital spiders we browse the webs.
And off we go...
The Exception!
Blogistan Polytechnic Institute Campus website
Had to get this one out of the way up front!
Clearly one of the best new websites to come down the intertoobz in a long, long time, and home of quite possibly the most caffeinated-looking squirrel mascot I've ever seen. If you've ever cruised a Morning Feature diary and wondered "What the heck is all that BPI and HEMMED and squirrel stuff about, anyways?" This is the place where all your questions are answered. Each time I go back there is more value added than the time before. And by value, I mean valuable information and lots of smiles. Just "Hemmed a little to the left and down'istan" had me smiling for a while (a cool and calm 74 degrees as I write this, by the way!).
News & Current Events
These are the workhorses of my daily mouse clicks. Places to go to find something new and interesting every time, and they often inform the TWLTW diaries and end-of-diary errata lists. I've known some of them longer than the past few weeks, but these never fail:
- New York Times
- New York Magazine
- The Atlantic Magazine
(Yes, I live in New York)
- MSNBC
- Daily Show
- Colbert Report
- Democracy Now!
- CNET - my favorite source of computer and techie news
- Mother Jones -
Thought and Culture
- Arts & Letters Daily - skews slightly right for academia, but lots of links to interesting thinks
- Big Think - articles and videos from people I find interesting
- TED - the motherload of modern interesting ideas
- Intelligent Life - some of the best slide shows on the web (Extreme Dogs currently on the left margin is an example)
- Breakthrough Institute - a liberal think tank focusing on green issues and energy independence
- The Philosopher's Magazine - yes, they have one!
- N plus 1 Magazine - this one could really go in this category and the one above it. Some compelling writing, but be sure to check which category you're in, sometimes they sneak something into "fiction" that feels real enough to be confusing
- Brain Pickings - a perhaps inelegant title, but a blog with some great finds
- Open Culture - THE treasure trove of free information on the web. But you say, "All information is free on the web!" Au contraire, mon cherie! See, I just learned French through a link on Open Culture just so I could write that! And their home page right now is a video of Pete Seeger's live performance of a new song he just wrote about the BP spill. And links and links and more links to really, really good stuff than you may be able to explore in a lifetime. The is the big one.
Entertainment and Design-y Stuff
- Hollywood Stock Exchange - just for fun, and to make my obsession with movies and moviemaking competitive, like fantasy football and the NYSE had a love child
- Entertainment Weekly - possibly my biggest guilty pleasure, other than way too-chocolately chocolate milk
- The Scout - A NYC based design and documentary group, fantastic short films on expert craftsmanship in chocolate and leather, among other pursuits, lots and lots of stuff here
- Savage Chickens - hilarious and mostly nerdy and sophisticated post-it note cartoons
- Slowpoke Comics - definitely not slow, and a stiff poke in the eye of anything conservative or Republican, I love this woman's work!
- Mental Floss - this site is like if your funny uncle who's in Mensa made a website about interesting trivia with a quirky sense of humor, it's also a magazine (as I notice, many of these are)
Productivity
- Life Hacker - how to trick-out your life into being more efficient and productive (sometimes a little over the top, but interesting nonetheless)
- 43folders - not updated very often, but the archives, slide shows, and speechesoffer a lot of ideas
- Evernote- I have an account, and I go back once or twice a week to try and figure out how to use it, and it shows up on everyone else's lists of must-have productivity solutions, so there must be something more here than I can figure out...I just haven't figured it out yet
- Dropbox- on the other hand, this one has improved my life a hundred fold. I used to carry flash drives around everywhere, now I don't.
- Getting Things Done - yes, I'm one of those. The GTD website adds new and sometimes free stuff often, so for me, it's been worth checking semi-often
- Things - it only works on Apple computers, but for me, it's the best "keep me organized" software application I've tried, and I've tried many. The users forum is active and full of ideas for using Things, so I skim it pretty regularly
- Mendeley - an online system for organizing and keeping academic research records and bibliographies. I'm liking it better than Endnote, Zotero, and other competitors right now
There You Go
I hope you find something worth following up with somewhere in this collection.
It could have been much longer than it is, but I had to limit myself. I started adding political activist sites, other than that first one, and of course the one we're on right now, but the thing started to get bloated, so I pulled back to make that a separate list for another diary.
I'd love to see what you think are "not miss" top-ten worthy websites where you go to keep informed, organized, and mentally stimulated, though. And we have an unlimited number of comments in which to have that discussion...
TWLTW:
- Marie Curie's notebooks are so irradiated that researchers consulting them must wear protective clothing before extracting them from lead boxes. Same goes for the cookbook from her kitchen. She kept vials of radioactive isotopes in her pockets and desk drawer, commenting on the pleasant blue-green glow they gave off in the dark. (Mental Floss)
- NYC transit is considering limiting the unlimited MTA card to 90 rides per month. Nearly 7.5 million passengers per weekday ride on NYC public transit. Just north of 8 million people live in NYC. (New York Magazine)
- 1,047,000 students are enrolled in NYC schools, K-12. Last year, more than 25,000 of them took a special test and applied for admission to StuyvesantHigh School. Fewer than 1,000 were accepted. Stuyvesant advertises for students in newspapers in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Beijing.
- Tony Shalhoubhad to be cajoled into applying to the Yale School for Drama by a friend who was familiar with it. Shalhoub claims to not have known where Yale was, nor that it had a respected drama school at the time he applied. He just filled it out to get his friend to stop nagging him about it. The friend was right. (American Theater Wing Podcast)
- Congratulations to that Vera Wang wearing celebrity bride who got hitched in a super secret compound away from the public's prying eyes this past weekend: Alicia Keys!
- Vocabulary:
- Aleatory - Having to do with luck, depending on the unpredictable for profit or loss, usually used in reference to bad luck
- This super-slow-mo video of a lightning strike made my hair stand on end. Creepy and fascinating and made me a little nervous. One and a half minutes of video time equals .31 seconds of real time. I'd love to use this in a meteorology high school class!
What Did You Learn This Week?