This very impressive free game allows players to run their own university campus, SimCity style. Decide what departments to fund, how stringent requirements for tenure are, and how well to fund the athletic department. Then watch your campus thrive or crumble. Requires Windows.

Are your ideas about God's existence logically consistent? Whether you believe or not, this interactive test will let you know how well thought out your convictions really are.

No, not musical arts. This web page provides users with recordings made in the presence of various works of visual art. Described on the page itself as "Part social experiment, part sound exploration, and part guaranteed conceptual failure," this archive allows users to hear what they would hear in the presence of such works as the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo and The Night Watch.

Since 1999 NIIT, an IT and software company, has made the internet available to the poor of the slums of India. By placing kiosks in very poor urban areas the group hopes to study how internet literacy spreads among populations. This site brings together summaries of the project, reports of past failures and successes, and future plans.

A page dedicated to self-portrait photographs taken when looking in a mirror or other reflective surface. Most charming.

The satirical newspaper The Onion provides this assessment of whether the future will live up to the expectations created by science fiction films. From Back to Future II to The Postman, this humorous piece describes what technologies and societies are predicted, and the likelihoods that these predictions will come true.

The National Security Archive, in concert with ProQuest, has placed many collection of declassified documents on line. Cataloged by subject, these documents cover such events, crises, and interventions as the Berlin Crisis, US involvement in El Salvador, its policy towards South Africa, and its policy towads Afghnistan.

Did you know that Franklin Pierce snored? Or that he suffered from depression? With this well researched and very well referenced resource, one can find that Chester Arthur suffered from kidney disease. While including major medical conditions, this resource also cataloges the minor physical ailments of the presidents, from Polk's shaking hands, to Ford's clumsiness.

History in Color transforms black and white photographs into color reproductions. Sources range from the 1860s through the 1950s. An attempt to bridge a divide between us and our past, or a crime against history itself, you decide.

This site, provided by Hamilton College in New York State, collects a number of Java-based tutorials covering music and music theory. Of interest to any teacher of music or freelance music lover these tutorials cover such subjects as note reading, musc speed reading, and chord drills.

GrooveLab is a free online drum machine and rhythm manipulator. Users can create their own brief rhythm tracks as well as their adjust tempo. Further functions allow users to adjust the reverberation, echo, and volume of specific sounds. Truly distracting.

Provided by BBC Radio 3, this collection of games introduces users to music-making as well as musical structure and musical instuments. The games have varying levels of actual educational content. Requires Shockwave.

Ever sat up at night wondering just how familiar you were with the Dewey Decimal system? Who hasn't? For those millions whose familiarity with DDC remains unassessed the Middleton Thrall library has provided three tests of varying difficulty.

A simple but useful device for discovering, as the page's title promises, what your phone number spells.

A brief and clever tutorial, using stick-figure illustrations, of what philosophy has figured out so far.

Ryuichi "Richie" Iwamura, an engineer from San Diego, offers this service for anyone who doesn't remember where they heard that tune that's stuck in their head. Enter a tune using an online keyboard and this resource will search for it on a database of over 1500 classical music melodies. Requires Java.

Many in Paris are angered that the city government has spent more than 200,000 dollars on a single artwork. While the price is hardly unusual they are concerned about the longevity of the artwork itself, a parrot.

An online exhibition of Vietnamese art from the nation's period of conflict with the United States, this resource presents and discusses works from both sides of the war. Ranging from the simple to the elaborate, the personal to propaganda, this exhibition permits a glance into an era infrequently considered for art historical analysis.

I have no idea how to describe this. Two figures dance, they make music, you can start them and stop them. Just know that without the magic of the internet you would never be able to see something like this.

An archive of once everyday sounds we no longer hear. Come here to listen to teletypes, weaving looms, propeller planes, and just to make you feel old, telephone dials. Also included are historical sounds such as the bombing of London, and Apollo 11.

Dedicated to the liberation of garden gnomes everywhere, Stop Oppressive Gardening provides news, links, and ideological tracts. The organization hopes someday to create a world in which gardening is not linked to the opression of our tiny, silent brothers.

Composer Terry Riley has a new collaborator, the Solar System. Space probes pick up the varying magnetic waves that surround planets and moons. These waves can be converted into sounds, sounds which Riley is drawing from for his newer compositions. Speaking of his inspiration the composer reported that in listening to patterns produced by the magnetic field around Ganymede, a moon of Jupiter, "It sounded to me like a voice saying, 'beebopterismo,' so that's the starting point for one of the movements." The universe has spoken.

An enlightening cartoon giving the Buddhist perspective on what some of us do every day.

What explanation is needed? The most basic form of computer driven time wastage.

The Russian census, the first since the end of the Soviet era, has run into difficulties. Hostility to pollsters has taken forms ranging from simple non-cooperation to claims by Russians to being Hobbits, Elves, or citizens of Middle-Earth.

Some things are too bizarre to stay in the dustbin of history. Gone and Forgotten is a page dedicated to character ideas and story lines that were too absurd, too dumb for. . . comic books. Here are profiles of heroes who never really made it into the mainstream, in a genre that can hadly be considered hostile to the absurd.

Have you ever wondered why there isn't one place to go the web for scores by American composers? Who hasn't? New Music Jukebox is this and more, an archive of info, recordings, and scores from 20th American composers from Samuel Barber up to the present day.

Beginning with the games for the Commodore 64 and extending up to the present day, this archive contains a huge store of theme music from thousands of even the most obscure games. A descent into geekdom for which this blogger will make no apology, this site is a tool for nostalgia, an archive of truly bizarre, incredibly strange music, and a dangerously addictive waste of time.

When students and professors do research where do they turn, to books or to online reources? This article finds that both use the internet first, but trust it least.

An ongoing online survey of what persons from various regions of the US call carbonated beverages. A helpful map allows users to determine by region what their neighbors are calling their drinks and whether they fit in, or are considered freaks

British musician Mike Batt thought nothing of a stretch of silence in one of his musical releases. The trustees of the estate of the composer John Cage, however, sued him. The reason, his piece seemed suspiciously similar to Cage's 4'33'', which is also silent.

This easy to use interactive guide introduces users to the nuts and bolts of producing electronic music. Subjects covered begin with the basic physics of sound, moving through waveforms ultimately to the technology that produces, records, and transforms sound. Requires Shockwave.

The new Euro has created a problem no one predicted. One and two Euro coins are allegedly causing allergic reactions. This article in Science News explores the credibility of these claims that new currency can be harmful to your health.

It's an ant; it dances.

Technosphere has created this exercise in artifical life. Users design a creature, name it, and release it into the wild. These creature's lives are then followed as they eat, hunt, are hunted, mate, and die. Due to a sadly predictable result of human psychology the environment is swimming with carnivores so please create a herbivore and reestablish the balance.

This site, provided by UNESCO, provides up-to-date news on Europe's recent floods and their impact on its libraries and archives. News includes calls for aid from various groups as well descriptions of the techniques used to restore materials damaged in the floods.

A labor of love, or something, this page guides the user through an imaginary town built out of Legos. The site includes descriptions and pictures of the town's various government resources, restaurants and sites. Users can also read the town's online newspaper

Webcollage provides the fun of websurfing while cutting down on such features as practicality and predictability. This page presents users with a collage made up of randomly selected images from various webpages. By clicking on the image, the user is then taken to the page from which it came. Serendipity at its best.

Who are your neighbors and how do you measure up to them? This site allows you to try some of the tools used by marketers to classify your zip code. Whether you're a "Young Influential," "Boomtown Single," or "New Homesteader," this site will let you know what maket researchers think of you and your neighbors.

Maintained by artist and composer Rodney Berry, this site introduces users to the integration of artificial life and music composition. By using evolutionary methods and genetic algorithms in the generation of sound experimenters all over the world are creating complex and wonderous soundscapes. The links here range from downloadable software (PC only), recordings of compositions, and sophisticated technical and theoretical papers. Among these links, those leading to resources developed by Rodney Berry himself, Shawn Bell, and Palle Dahlsted, are most highly recommended.

The future is closer than you think. Designed by the MIT artificial intelligence laboratory Kismet is an experimental "sociable machine" designed to recognize and produce interpersonal signals such as tones of voice and facial expressions. The site contains an overview of the project and informative videos explaining Kismet's abilities and possible applications. Kismet's designers hope it will be used for educational purposes, which you might find either frightnening or fascinating.

In the summer of 2000 Stanford University hosted a conference on whether computers "will outstrip us [humans] intellectually and spiritually, becoming not only deeply creative but deeply emotive." Major thinkers within the fields of cognitive psychology, computer science, and philosophy gave their analyses of how close we might be to this posibility. Thinkers such as Douglas Hofstadter, author of Goedel Escher Bach, Ray Kurzweil, author of The Age of Spiritual Machines are featured here within a video archive covering nearly five hours of conference time. While the conference may be past it is not out of date and these archives allow users to hear direct from the major minds what relationships humans and machines might have in the future. Sound quality is variable. Requires RealPlayer.

What more needs to be said? See for yourself whether these animal creations are art. This site does sell the artists' work in order to support their upkeep and aid in elephant conservation.

Since 1995 researchers at the Baskin School of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have sought ways to use computers to model animal motion. This page traces the progress of these researchers as they have used more and more sophisticated techniques to account for every aspect of animal movement, down to the basic interactions of bone, muscle, and skin. This record of progress is a capsule history of computer graphics, of the interactions between computers and the life sciences, and a very cool archive of animations modeling animal and human movement. Some of the overviews of modeling problems and their solutions use quite sophisticated language, but this need not detract from an enjoyment of the site. Requires Quicktime to view animations.

Part of a commercial site, this gallery of computer animation shorts showcases the creative works of amateur and professional animators. Works by experienced animators provide links to their own web pages and more chances to see their work. Strongly recommended are Anthony Lucas' SBS Television Identification Clips and Nick Miniatis' animated Legos. Shorts require either Quicktime or Windows MediaPlayer.

An exercise in simulated life, the Virtual Fishtank allows users to create their own fish and release them into a virtual fishtank. After observing their creations surviving with, feeding on, or being eaten by their fellow fish, users may release their creations into a larger virtual tank, checking back occassionally to see how their progeny are doing. Requires Shockwave.

The Thermin was one of the world's first electronic instruments. Developed and popularized by Russian professor Lev Termen in the early years of the twentieth century, the instrument was first intended to be part of a classical orchestra, but has since been used to make film sound effects and as a background instrument by bands like Portishead. The Virtual Theremin allows users to be, or at least control, Lev Termen as he performs. The theremin was played by moving one's hand within the magnetic fields of two antennae. With this simulation users move the mouse to control Termen's hands. The Virtual Theremin must be downloaded and runs on Shockwave. The page also provides information on Termen and his invention, which will be of interest to anyone interested in the history of strange music.

Here you can find the output of hundreds of composers, some only nine years old, within the genres of classical, jazz, and rock music. This site allows any interested young composer to submit their own music, and to discuss that of others in discussion and chat rooms. Sound quality varies. Excellent for getting kids interested in music or simply renewing one's hope for the coming generations.

An educational resource provided by BBC, these games allow you to quiz yourself on and participate in British history. Games such as the code breaking Spying Game and the treasure hunting Diving Game, will be fun for all. While made for children, some games celebrate the more violent end of British history, such as Viking Quest, in which the player sacks a monastery. Three of the games focus specifically on Scottish history.