Pete's Porridge
Shortlinks > Physical sciences & mathematics
Lichen on basalt towers, Columbia Plateau, eastern Washington.

Lichen on basalt towers of the Columbia Plateau, eastern Washington.

"hairy ball: A well-known result in topology stating that there is no nowhere-zero continuous vector field on the sphere. An immediate corollary to this theorem is that for any continuous map f of the sphere onto itself there is a point x such that f(x)=x or f(x) is the antipode of x. Another corollary is that at any moment somewhere on the Earth there is no wind."
– from nightflight.com/foldoc

And a third corollary states that on every head there must be a whorl in the lay of the hair, hence the name.



These links were cleaned up in January 2007.


resources & links | astronomy | physics | math | chaos theory | weather | chemistry | geology


    resources & links
  1. intute.ac.uk/sciences: "...providing you with access to...Web resources...selected by a network of subject specialists. It covers the physical sciences, engineering, computing, geography, mathematics and environmental science. The database currently contains 33203 records."
  2. newscientist.com and sciencenews.org
  3. xxx.lanl.gov: "Open access to 400,814 e-prints"
  4. 101science.com: Science 101, a web index to "more than 20,000 science sites"
  5. scicentral.com: "Gateway to the best scientific research news sources"
  6. micro.magnet.fsu.edu/index.html: Molecular Expressions "goes where no microscope has gone before"
  7. pbs.org/wgbh/nova: Nova: maybe not science, but still cool
  8. amasci.com: Science Hobbyist: amateur science, cool science, weird science, more
  9. madsci.org: "Welcome to the laboratory that never sleeps!"
  10. eskimo.com/~billb/weird.html: "Weird Research, Anomalous Physics"
  11. scienceU.com: neat astronomy and geometry, including tilings
  12. lhup.edu/~dsimanek/home.htm: with such tasty treats as "The Museum of Unworkable Devices" -- perpetual motion machines as physics puzzles.

    astronomy
    There are also a few links to distributed computing sites that you might like to look at.
  13. skytonight.com: Sky and Telescope
  14. csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr161/#resources: a couple of dozen "Web Links for Astronomy Students" from the Dept. Physics & Astronomy, University of Tennessee
    solar system:
  15. solarviews.com: The Solar System -- one-stop shopping
  16. nasm.si.edu/ceps: Center for Earth and Planetary Studies at the Smithsonian
  17. csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr161/lect/, Astronomy 161, a nice hyperlinked intro to The Solar System
    deep space:
  18. hubblesite.org HubbleSite, which has, among much else,
  19. hubblesite.org/gallery/album/entire_collection/pr1995044b, "Star-Birth Clouds in M16" in five sizes and formats
  20. ast.cam.ac.uk/astroweb/yp_pictures.html: "Pretty Pictures" from the AstroWeb at Cambridge, but really, a lot more than that
  21. nationalacademies.org/ssb: Space Studies Board of the NAS
  22. map.gsfc.nasa.gov: the Microwave Anisotropy Probe, which measures the background radiation of the Big Bang and sits at the L2 Sun-Earth Lagrange point.
    satellites:
  23. heavens-above.com/main.asp?...loc=Seattle...: visible satellite predictions for Seattle, including Iridium flares
  24. liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/RealTime/JPass: Java satellite tracking
    space weather:
  25. sec.noaa.gov/SWN: NOAA's Space Weather Now, and
  26. spaceweather.com, which can be faster
  27. nasa.gov/mission_pages/themis/auroras/index.html: a good page from NASA on auroras
  28. pfrr.alaska.edu: the Poker Flat Research Range, with auroras and more
    NASA sites:
    NASA is basically a big umbrella organization. It has a dozen separate centers -- Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Marshall Space Flight Center, Ames Research Center, et al. Then there are all the different missions NASA has, currently about twenty -- from Aura, through Hubble, to Voyager. Centers, missions, news, data products, etc. -- if you don't know where to look it can be a daunting task trying to find something. Being helpful, they did this:
    "NASA's public Web Portal is organized so that users can take multiple paths to information. The same content may appear in multiple sections, because people navigate through the site in different ways. The three main navigational paths through the content are: * broad topic areas * audience groups * subject areas." Oh, well, at least that explains why I keep going in circles....
  29. nasa.gov, NASA, and its sitemap, where you may want to start
  30. their great Image Gallery and an Astronomy Picture of the Day from the Goddard Space Flight Center,
  31. jpl.nasa.gov, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory ("Live from Mars," mostly),
  32. science.msfc.nasa.gov, the Marshall Space Flight Center,
  33. and finally, an advanced search of NASA's millions and millions of pages.
  34. nasawatch.com, too

    physics
  35. physics.uoguelph.ca/tutorials/tutorials.html
  36. physicsweb.org
  37. alcyone.com/max/physics/index.html: physics references (and his host, alcyone.com which might be worth exploring)
  38. aps.org: the American Physical Society provides physicscentral.com, where you can "learn how your world works," Physics Links, and more
  39. aip.org: American Institute of Physics
  40. math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/faq.html: "This is the web version of the Usenet Physics FAQ. Its purpose is to provide good answers to questions that have been discussed often in sci.physics and related usenet newsgroups. The articles in this FAQ are based on those discussions and on information from good reference sources."
  41. hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/hframe.html: HyperPhysics, where "Online tutorials cover a wide range of physics topics, including modern physics and astronomy...."
    two on superstrings:
  42. theory.caltech.edu/people/jhs/strings/intro.html: The Second Superstring Revolution by John H. Schwarz
  43. superstringtheory.com is "The Official String Theory Web Site"
    and accelerators:
  44. lhc.web.cern.ch/lhc: The Large Hadron Collider Project at CERN and some background
  45. rhic.bnl.gov: the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory
  46. fnal.gov: Fermilab -- the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
  47. lbl.gov: Berkeleylab -- the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
  48. slac.stanford.edu: Stanford Linear Accelerator Center

    mathematics
    links and resources:
  49. math.psu.edu/MathLists/Contents.html: Penn State's access to Mathematics Web Sites
  50. math.upenn.edu/MathSources.html, from U Penn
  51. dir.yahoo.com/science/mathematics: of course
  52. ams.org/mathweb: Math on the Web from the the American Mathematical Society
  53. mathworld.wolfram.com: "The Web's most extensive mathematics resource"
    tutorials, tables, etc.:
  54. www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history: The MacTutor History of Mathematics
  55. mcs.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/R.Knott/Fibonacci/fib.html: "Fibonacci numbers, the Golden section, and string"
  56. dept.physics.upenn.edu/courses/gladney/mathphys/Contents.html: "The Interactive Textbook for Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry" assumes extensive use of Maple
  57. research.att.com/~njas/sequences: "On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences. Type in a series of numbers and the database will complete the sequence and provide its name, mathematical formula, structure, references, and links." Great site!
  58. math2.org: "Dave's Math Tables" has theorems, tables, identities, proofs, graphs, and more
  59. math.niu.edu/~rusin/known-math/index/index.html: The Mathematical Atlas
  60. netlib.org: "Netlib is a collection of mathematical software, papers, and databases."
  61. mathsoft.com: mathcad

    chaos theory
  62. order.ph.utexas.edu/chaos/index.html: What is Chaos? a five-part online course for everyone
  63. faraday.physics.utoronto.ca/PVB/Harrison/Chaos/Chaos.html: a short classroom introduction
  64. mcanv.com/ocourse.html: a chaos course with a bit of math
  65. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory: Wikipedia's chaos page and their fractal page
  66. cnls.lanl.gov/People/nbt//Book/node1.html: "An experimental approach to nonlinear dynamics and chaos" with lots of math
  67. industrialstreet.net/chaosmetalink/: The Chaos Metalink
  68. exploratorium.edu/complexity/CompLexicon.html: complex lexicon
    fractals:
  69. mitpress.mit.edu/books/FLAOH/cbnhtml: The Computational Beauty of Nature
  70. mathcs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker/chaos.htm: chaos downloads (PC only)
  71. spanky.triumf.ca/www/fractint/fractint.html: download fractint (PC, Mac, X)
  72. thinks.com/webguide/fractal.htm: links to fractal resources

    weather
    Links to glossaries of weather-related terminology are on the Weather glossary page, and links specific to Numerical Weather Prediction can be found on the NWP inFAQ. Links related to climate and global warming can be found at enviro.html.
    portals:
  73. weather.gov is NOAA's National Weather Service home page
  74. weather.com is the Weather Channel
  75. wunderground.com, the excellent Weather Underground
  76. met-office.gov.uk is the UK Met Office's absolutely first-rate weather site.
  77. bbc.co.uk/weather/coast/shipping/index.shtml is the BBC's Shipping Forecast, which one really needs to hear
  78. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Weather: Wikipedia's weather portal
  79. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (which does so much for the computing world) also has a Dep't of Atmospheric Sciences which puts out the "Online Guides," at ww2010.atmos.uiuc.edu/(Gh)/guides/home.rxml, a "Collection of multimedia instructional modules in meteorology...."
  80. weather.unisys.com: satellite analyses, radar data, modelling info, and more
  81. atmos.washington.edu is the University of Washington (in Seattle) site.
  82. rap.ucar.edu: more good weather stuff from the Research Applications Lab of UCAR
    links sites:
  83. The Tallahassee (Florida) WSFO hosts NOAA's page of Weather Links is at srh.noaa.gov/tlh/wxhwy.html.
  84. WeatherNet from the University of Michigan at cirrus.sprl.umich.edu/wxnet may be a good place to start.
  85. The hypertext version of the Usenet sci.geo.meteorology data sources FAQ is well annotated and very usable.
  86. cdc.noaa.gov/PublicData/data_faq.html, "Locating climate and weather data and information," from NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) concentrates on climate
    satellite loops:
  87. atmos.uiuc.edu/(Gh)/wx/satellite.rxml: satellite loops from UIUC
  88. squall.sfsu.edu/scripts/gwir2sml.html: another sat.loop
  89. ssec.wisc.edu/data/comp/latest_cmoll.gif: always one beautiful image from the University of Wisconson

    chemistry
  90. chemfinder.cambridgesoft.com: Databases and internet searching, some cost, some not
  91. acswebcontent.acs.org: the American Chemical Society
  92. dir.yahoo.com/science/chemistry: Yahoo's chemistry links

    geology
  93. casdn.neu.edu/~geology/department/links.html: geology links from Northeastern U.
  94. geolab.unc.edu/ESresources/ES12795.html: earth resource links at UNC
  95. pmel.noaa.gov/vents/nemo/: the New Millennium Observatory, including "NeMO Net: Near real-time system, linking seafloor instruments at NeMO to the internet"
  96. galleries.com: the superb Mineral Gallery
  97. rockhounds.com: Bob's Rock Shop, where the site is the shop, with tutorials,
    keys, downloads, and more

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