Best Web Sites for Anyone

by

Glen R. Pritchard

The following links exemplify what is best about the Internet: the easy, inexpensive, and immediate access to art, science, news, and other information that is just plain fun. Some of these authors have spent thousands of hours publishing their pages simply for the joy of sharing what excites them. I hope you enjoy their work.

These links in this list were subjected to a rigorous screening process by which I am the sole judge! It is a work in progress.

Contents
Art Cars (Updated 6/9/1998) Chess (Updated 6/16/2003) Distributive Computing (3/23/2000) Government (Updated 2/5/2000) Literature Money (New 6/29/1998) Music (Updated 6/13/2003)	Return to Glen's World

Art (Contents)

See hundreds of famous paintings by dozens of influential artists at the WebMuseum ( http://sunsite.unc.edu/louvre/). The graphics are very high quality and are accompanied by historical and biographical information. Check out Edvard Munch's, The Scream, and come right back. Pretty cool, huh?

Cars (Contents)

Car dealers must hate the Internet. Conventional car buyers have no easy way to know a reasonable price for a new car or the fair value of their trade-in. For years, car dealers have used this information monopoly to their considerable advantage. The Internet changes all of that. Visit Edmund's ( http://www.edmunds.com/) and AutoSite ( http://www.autosite.com/welcome.htm) to find comprehensive information about used or new cars including fair market value, sticker price, dealer invoice, the cost of options, manufacturer recalls, insurance costs, warranties, and much, much more. Never go to a dealership without this information.

On the lighter side, try the Magliozzi brothers of National Public Radio fame at Car Talk.Com (www.cartalk.com).

Chess (Contents)

In the 9th grade I ate, slept, and lived for chess. Alas, I could never find enough willing opponents. The world of chess was also closed to Americans because our media does not cover it here; chess does not sell advertising. Thanks to the Internet, no one need be chess deprived again!

You can find a human opponent anytime by visiting one of the many Internet Chess Servers (ICS). The Internet Chess Club ( http://www.chessclub.com/) is probably the biggest server where approximately 150,000 games are played every day. When you register at ICC, you can play chess with players from all over the world, earn a chess rating, play in tournaments, watch other games in progress, play against computers, or attend chess lectures given by both humans and computers (a computer lecturer named MrSpock gives an automated lecture every hour on the hour). Your games can be e-mailed to you for analysis by computer software like Crafty (see below). Membership at ICC is not free, but if you like chess, it's worth it.

There are also several free Internet Chess Servers (in the U.S.: http://www.freechess.org/) which offer free memberships but fewer players, activities, and features. Tim Mann's free Winboard (http://www.tim-mann.org/xboard.html) is the easiest way to connect with these servers. Winboard also provides a Windows graphical interface for many amateur (free) chess engines, including Crafty (see below).

Your PC is always willing to play using programs (known as chess "engines") which are available for free. The most venerable is professor Bob Hyatt's engine, "Crafty" (ftp://ftp.cis.uab.edu/pub/hyatt/). Crafty is a little tricky to set up, and should be used with Winboard (above). However, it plays Grandmaster level chess; it crushes me without mercy every time! The best part about Crafty is its ability to analyze the games you play against humans on the Internet Chess Servers. Crafty will read you ICS games and show you where you made mistakes. It's like having a Grandmaster living in your house as a chess coach. Tim Mann also keeps a nice list of other chess engines that work with Winboard (http://www.tim-mann.org/engines.html).

To keep up to date on the latest news in chess, visit the excellent weekly on-line magazine, The Week in Chess (TWIC: http://www.chesscenter.com/twic/twic.html). The results of every major tournament in the world are reported here. You can usually download the games for viewing and analysis by Winboard/Crafty or other chess software. It is not uncommon to find 2000 games per week published in TWIC.

The newest, and most exciting, innovation in the world of chess can be found at www.chess.fm (www.chess.fm). This is internet radio at its finest! The specialty is live broadcast of international chess tournaments. The moves are transmitted live from the site of the tournament to The Internet Chess Club. While watching the moves at the ICC, you can listen to commentary on Chess.fm by guest chess experts who explain the strategy behind the moves. The audience is invited to submit questions, either by electronic message or by telephone, so the process is completely interactive and spontaneous. In addition to live tournament coverage, there is also a regular schedule of live and pre-recorded call-in shows and lectures on a multitude of chess-related topics.

Distributive Computing (Contents)

Is your computer bored most of the time waiting for something to do? Even if you type at your word processor constantly, the CPU is working at only a fraction of full capacity. What if you could do useful work with that wasted computer capacity? Better yet, what if you could unleash the wasted capacity of thousands, or even millions, of PCs all over the world on a single problem? Use of the Internet for distributive computing makes this possible.

GIMPS (Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search: http://www.mersenne.org/prime.htm) is one such distributive computing project devoted to finding mathematical curiosities known as Mersenne prime numbers. For centuries, mathematicians have searched for big prime numbers -- numbers that can be evenly divided only by itself and one. Mersenne primes are derived from the formula 2^X-1. Mathematicians noticed that, if x is a prime number, then 2^X-1 often (but not always) results in a bigger prime number. For example,

2²-1 = 3 is prime (2 is the only even prime number)
2³-1 = 7 is prime
2⁵-1 = 31 is prime
2⁷-1 = 127 is prime, but
2¹¹-1 = 2047 is not prime (2047 is divisible by 89 and 23)

Only 37 Mersenne Primes have ever been discovered, and GIMPS found the largest one so far: 2^3,021,377-1. In full form, this number is 909,526 digits long and would fill a 400 page paperback book! The search for the 38th Mersenne Prime continues.

Indeed, GIMPS' mission is to find every Mersenne Prime up to 2^20,500,000-1. GIMPS provides free software to do the computing in the background without interfering with your usual activities. The GIMPS central computer feeds work to your computer over the Internet. When your computer is finished, the results are returned to the central computer which, in turn, sends out a new chuck of work. Currently, about 6000 computers actively contribute to GIMPS. In one day, GIMPS produces the same amount of work as a Pentium 90 PC running for 32 years! Put differently, GIMPS processes at the same rate as 6.5 of the fastest Cray super computers working full speed.

What's in it for you? The finder of the next big prime will earn a $1500 reward and secure a place in mathematics history. But don't hold your breath. The odds are about 1 in 55,000 that any given exponent will yield a Mersenne Prime. Working 24 hours per day, it will take my Pentium II 450 about 2 weeks to determine whether 2^6,626,863-1 is prime. So, don't quit your day job.

5/16/99 Update: Well now maybe you can quit your day job! The Electronic Frontier Foundation (http://www.eff.org/) recently raised the stakes by offering $50,000 to the finder of the first 1 million digit prime number.

3/23/00 Update: On June 1, 1999, the 38th Mersenne Prime was discovered by Nayan Hajratwala which will result in payment of the $50,000 reward once the discovery is published in an academic journal. The prime is 2^6,972,593-1 which is 2,098,260 digits when written out in full. The search is now on for the next big prime, and the reward for the discovery of the first prime with more than 10 million digits is $100,000!

Prime numbers not exciting enough? How about searching for intelligent life on other planets! SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) scans the cosmos looking for signs of intelligent life. SETI analyzes data as it streams in from radio telescopes but does not have the computer resources to scrutinize the data more carefully. Distributive computing will provide the solution. The SETI@home (http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/) project is scheduled to begin in April 1999. SETI@home will provide a free screensaver which will receive SETI data over the Internet. Instead of wasting computer resources generating that fish tank screen saver, your computer could be looking for signs of extraterrestrial intelligent life.

Government (Contents)

Democracy works only when the people understand the issues and are able to influence their government representatives. The Internet helps to facilitate this otherwise daunting process with Project Vote Smart (http://www.vote-smart.org/). You can find out who represents you at the state and national level (by entering your zip code) and get detailed and unbiased information about pending legislation, voting records of elected officials, and platforms of candidates for office.

But to really understand what a candidate is all about, follow the money! The Internet makes it possible for every citizen to obtain detailed information about where the candidates get their money. On the national level, check out OpenSecrets.org (http://www.opensecrets.org/home/index.asp). In Ohio, the Secretary of State's Campaign Finance Database (http://www2.state.oh.us/sos/) is on-line, and Ohio Citizen Action (http://www.ohiocitizen.org/) makes the information somewhat easier to digest.

Literature (Contents)

Free literature abounds on the Internet. A great place to start is the On Line Books Page (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/books.html) where you can search over 5000 titles. Project Gutenberg (http://promo.net/pg/) is a global effort to make literature available on the Internet for free. A smaller, but higher quality site is The On-line Literature Library (http://www.literature.org/) where the texts are easy to read and many are accompanied by delightful graphics. My favorite specialized literature pages are The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (http://the-tech.mit.edu/Shakespeare/works.html) and The Marx and Engals Internet Library (http://csf.colorado.edu/psn/marx/Archive/). Classic Short Stories (http://mbhs.bergtraum.k12.ny.us/cybereng/shorts/) are available at this site of the same name. The Ohio State University also has a gopher site (gopher://wiretap.spies.com/11/Books) with many classic works in simple text format.

Money (Contents)

They say you can make a small fortune in the stock market -- by starting with a large fortune! It's easy to track the progress of your fortune in either direction by setting up a free portfolio at Quicken.com (http://www.quicken.com/). (Click on "portfolio"). Enter your stock or mutual fund ticker symbols along with the number of shares you own. Your balance and other statistics are calculated on a 20 minute delay for stocks and daily after the markets close for mutual funds. Similar portfolio tracking, with even more sophisticated analysis tools, are available at Microsoft Investor (http://investor.msn.com/home.asp). Just click on the "portfolio"; tab and follow the directions.

Don't know a P/E Ratio from a 10-K Report? No problem! Learning to play the market is easy and fun at The Motley Fool (http://www.fool.com/). Particularly useful is the page called "The Thirteen Steps"; which starts with the basics and progresses to advanced techniques for picking the right stock.

Don't let a lack of cash prevent you from testing all of this new found Street smarts. Let your captialistic impulses run amuck at Final Bell (http://www.sandbox.net/finalbell/pub-doc/home.html) where your free brokerage account is stocked with 100,000 (simulated) dollars. Buy long, sell short, or attempt a hostile takeover of Microsoft -- even the brokerage fees are simulated. Compete with other players for prizes and glory (but alas, not money.) Quarterly contests pit thousands of players against the market and each other to see who can make the most money in 3 months. A perpetual portfolio will also allow you try out your long term strategies.

Music (Contents)

As Internet bandwidth increases, listening to music on the Internet has become realistic. Thousands of radio stations also broadcast over the Internet. To find your favorite, visit RadioTower.com (http://www.radiotower.com/) or Radio-Locator.com (http://www.radio-locator.com/).

Naturally, for music listening, the more bandwidth, the better! (Pun intended. If you want better quality humor, get your own page!)