Kurt Thams

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Some Favorite Links

My attempt at putting these links up is to have a small taxonomy of locations I find particularly interesting, unusual, or useful. One of the most powerful forms of Internet-enabled discovery comes from the serendipity of finding a new site because it was linked to by a related site. Because these various goodies here are described, you may have hit on this page via a search engine, and you might find something cool that you weren't looking for.

Ideas and Bloggish Things

  • Ornery.org: The Ornery American. Science fiction writer Orson Scott Card's weekly political column.
  • Management by Baseball: Blog which compares issues in pro baseball with general business management problems. Very clever.
  • David Isen's blog: on telecom and internet. Plenty of insight.
  • JOHO: Journal of Hyperlinked Organization. An amalgam of too much interesting internet stuff.

Interesting web-based applications and Java Applets

  • Earth Viewer: View a map of the Earth or view the Earth from the Sun, the Moon, the night side of the Earth, above any location on the planet specified by latitude, longitude and altitude, from a satellite in Earth orbit, or above various cities around the globe.

Economics

Software Design

  • The Selfish Class: Excellent paper on software design by Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder. The paper compares the reuse and evolution of software objects to genetic (Darwinian/Dawkins) evolution. The analogy is a bit of a stretch, but the paper itself is excellent and contains many good ideas about how to develop good software.
  • Urvashi Kauls' Taxonomy of Design Patterns
  • James Cusik's Taxonomy of Design Patterns
  • WikiWikiWeb: A Wiki server for design patterns. Wiki servers allow visitors to add and edit content. Very cool. Good knowledge base for design pattern stuff.

Surfing (the traditional kind)

Miscellaneous Cleverness

  • Adbusters.org: "...dedicated to reinventing the outdated paradigms of our consumer culture..."

Forums

  • Kuro5hin: About technology and culture

Meta: The Internet Itself

  • World of Ends: What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else
  • JOHO: Journal of Hyperlinked Organization

Other Good Things

  • Summer Science Program in Ojai, CA: An incredible 6-week summer program for high school students, where they learn astronomy and astrophysics. I am an almuni, SSP class of 1981.
  • Wikipedia: A wonderful "open-content" encyclopedia edited by web users