Edgar Fahs Smith Collection - An unusual and dark layout provides an apt backdrop for Pennsylvania University's Special Collections Library. The site was established in 1996 to provide the scholarly community with web access to virtual facsimiles of original texts, documents, and sources from Penn's collections. It now carries printed books, manuscripts, photographs, maps, broadsides, ephemera, and recorded sound. And, there is a lot of them. Much of the material here will be of use in researching American history but much of it will be of rather limited appeal. More, specifically, the Edgar Fahs Smith Collection provides plenty of photos of plenty of scientists from Ernst Abbe to William Christopher Zeise. There are so fascinating images of archaic scientific instruments and equipment including 37 different pictures of alembics and a reverberatory furnace. Reprints of images and other materials can also be ordered if you are very keen to have a tangible piece of science history. Not for the faint hearted but certainly for the science historian. Rating: 6 out of 10 (5 January 2003) DB
http://dewey.library.upenn.edu/sceti/smith/
National Archive of Geological Photographs - The British Geological Survey photographic unit is home to the National Archive of Geological Photographs over 100,000 images, the earliest taken in 1891. With the help of grant-in-aid some 6000 photographs have now been digitized and appear on the archive's online searchable database. Though the site is aimed at specialists, it is easy to turn up surprising and striking images with broader appeal including spectacular shots of Britain's coastlines and mountains, and beautiful images of fossils. My favourite is an image packed with polished Welsh pebbles that could easily grace the wall of an art gallery or an interior design store. The collection has scenes from all over the globe from icebergs in Antarctica to the dramatic recent eruptions on Monserrat. Historians need not feel neglected, there's an intriguing glimpse into the lives of wartime women at work in the mineral industry and a wealth of early 20th century photographs. The site is well designed, clear and easy to navigate one can either browse the featured themed galleries or use a keyword search option. There's even the chance to make a detailed search by district or BGS map reference. The results appear as decent-sized thumbnails, accompanied by informative explanatory blurb. Of course, the usual copyright laws apply but it is free to download images for personal use, other freebies include a fossil montage screensaver. In due course, the site promises that the entire collection will make it online. Rating: 7 out of 10. (31 August 2002) JS
http://www.bgs.ac.uk/photoarchive/home.html
Islamic Tessellations - Tessellations are interlocking, repeating graphic patterns that fill and cover an entire area, often mathematically produced. Long before like M.C.Escher and other Western artists discovered tessellations, they formed the basis of Islamic design. In Islam, as depiction of the human figure is forbidden, a purely geometrical style of ornamentation, dazzling in its complexity and elegance, evolved to decorate mosques and holy places. Ancient Islamic artisans created these patterns solely with compasses and other drawing tools, perhaps using methods similar to those shown on www.askasia.org/frclasrm/lssplan/1000030.htm. Not surprisingly, given the geometric and tessellated nature of Islamic ornament, computer programs have been written to generate it.. "Taprats" by Craig S. Kaplan www.cs.washington.edu/homes/csk/title/ treats Islamic ornamentation as tessellations, and "Puerta" isafahan.anglica.ac.uk/puerta4/index.html by Javier Sanchez Gonzalez approaches it as rectilinear interlaced lattices. Both of these programs produce impressive artistic results, shown on their web sites, and both have shortcomings. Kaplan's program does not run on Macintosh nor does it work with Netscape . Although a detailed mathematical explanation is given of "Puerta" and how to use it on the Isafahan site, there is a no indication given how to buy or down load it. Taprats can be used on line or downloaded, and both sites, despite their faults, give a unique insight into Islam , where beauty is expressed through mathematics, the purest of all sciences. Rating 7 out of 10. (25 June 2002) WTS
Symmetry and Tessellations - For those who are intrigued by patterns, beware - you just might disappear into this site, and not be heard from for much longer than you intended. Youngsters will also be fascinated, but perhaps for a shorter period of time. The author, Jill Britten, teaches mathematics at a British Columbia college, and offers an exhaustive number of links to sites that feature hex signs, quilt designs, logos, hubcaps, Japanese family crests, Easter eggs, (including a step-by-step guide to Ukrainian ones), polyhedra, origami, traffic signs, snowflakes, totem poles, Sydney lace, Escher, tessellations, and flags. The South Korean flag holds particular interest, showing both antisymmetry and symbols for binary numbers. Ms. Britten also points to appropriate videos, software, applets to create your own tilings, and ambigram (inversion) generators. 10 out of 10. (28 May 2002) AD
http://www.camosun.bc.ca/~jbritton/jbsymteslk.htm
NASA Earth Observatory - As a change from going to other planets, NASA's stated mission with this site is to provide freely-accessible satellite imagery and scientific information about the home planet, focussing on climate and environmental change, and they certainly accomplish this mission. The uncluttered home page gives the latest news and, when I viewed it, it had details of the eruption of Mount Nyiragongo in Africa a few days before, with satellite pictures of the plume, together with ongoing bush fires in Australia. There are links from the home page to specialised sections, such as data and images, features, and reference, all divided into broad sections covering the atmosphere, the ocean etc., and providing highly detailed information, with extensive satellite images, many with superimposed scientific data. There are also animations that you can use to show, for example, the changes that occur with the seasons. There are also links to news, missions and experiments, each with the same sort of detail. The experiments section is a learning facility and includes very good interactive models to enable you to study, for instance, the environmental effects of an oil spill. Navigation is easy and works well, and there is a wealth of serious scientific information, together with stunning images, to be found. Rating: 9 out of 10. (22 March 2002) MDH
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/
HubbleSite - This is the official website for the Hubble space telescope, prepared by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates the telescope under contract to NASA. From the inviting home page there are links to sections giving full information, written in clear and simple language, accompanied by very clear diagrams, about the telescope itself, its design, how it operates, and the instruments that it uses. There are also clear explanations of the physics involved. I was particularly interested in the explanation of how the telescope is kept pointing at the target. There are also links to large numbers of beautiful images obtained by the telescope, together with some movies, including a tour of the cosmos and the collision of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet with Jupiter. These are very well done and have detailed and very informative and professional commentaries. Another very interesting feature is a page showing the track of the telescope around the Earth in real time, with the position of the sun for reference, and with the facility to find out when it will next be visible (in theory) from your location. There are extensive educational links, with some structured lessons and teaching tips. Considering the complexity of the images and the movies, the site was remarkably trouble-free and it is well worth a visit for general interest or for educational purposes. Rating: 9 out of 10. (13 March 2002) MDH
http://hubble.stsci.edu/
Visible Earth - At this time in our history, earthbound humans can get a glimpse of our home from space thanks to satellites and space missions. The Visible Earth project compiles these images from NASA and makes them available to the public domain for use by the media, scientists, researchers and anyone else interested in seeing the Earth from above. Images, including animations, are categorized by subject for browsing, and extensive searching features can help you to locate desired images. Moving through the site, thumbnail galleries provide an overview of images, and link to individual image pages with background information, including image source. Often, multiple size files are available for downloading with image dimensions, file type, and file size information to assist with selecting the appropriate file. On the help page, you will find links to each of the necessary viewing application for several computer operating systems, a handy tool if you are new to graphics. Whether you are looking for before and after shots of active volcanoes, ocean currents and water temperature, or human infrastructure locations such as the Great Wall of China, you are sure to find an image here that helps you to see our world in a new way. Rating: 10 out of 10 (4 February 2002) CK
http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/
