these are links I collected from 1994 to about 1995 or 1996. So if they actually work, well, woah!
Science Sites
While science is the backbone of much of the net, much of the content is extremely dry.
- This is accessable, the questions are easy, stuff you wanna know - why do my feet smell? Why is poop brown? How do barcodes work? Ask Beakman & Jax.
- Here is genuine real world - web interactivity for you: control a robot arm from the web at the Robotic Tele-Excavation site. After signing on and passing a operator's test, you wait your turn for your five minutes of operating time. Using clickable maps of a little sandbox filled with random little objects, you move the arm around, and squirt air to uncover stuff. The thrill is in the actual doing of it, of course, not the discovery of old Smithsonian pens...
- Sometimes you run across a site that you know foreshadows the future. Such a site is the Frog Dissection Kit Info Page. In connection with the Whole Frog Project, David Robertson has created a way for persons with forms browsers to interactively pull apart a frog online and look at it from all different angles. By adding or dropping various organs with a clickable forms interface, you can gaze at an image of a computer-rendered frog and its entire internal structure. Then, when you have the gizzards you want to see selected, you can rotate your perspective around the frog by clicking on the imagemap.
- What's remarkable about this is that it clearly foreshadows science classes of the future. Without having to kill another hapless frog, without having to smell fromeldahyde, you can peek under the skin of a model of a living creature. Now there's something to be said for the first hand experience of manipulating the organs of a frog with your own fingers, but perhaps we can begin to use technology to replace the thousands of specimens subjected to the scalpels of students. Hopefully, the new computer creatures will be at least as accessable as the Online Frog Dissection kit.
- Here' s link to the NSF Science and Technology Centers
- Your tax dollars at work: Army Research Laboratory Info Server
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Yer Mama Net Productions / Justin Hall / <justin@cyborgasmic.com>