Here are a couple of cool site that I have enjoyed for a while or just discovered.

When I was in college, my favorite reading was the Journal of Improbable Research. While this magazine went through several iterations, editors and sponsors, it is now called the Annals of Improbable Research (AIR). While the journal is not on-line, they do have a website with some really interesting stuff, including information on the Ig Nobel prize. www.improbable.com.

One of my regular blog readers sent me this (I guess I’m assuming that I have more than one regular reader, though I have no proof). It’s a site dedicated to the mid-seventeenth century Jesuit polymath named Athanasius Kircher, a guy who studied everything and wrote down everything he learned in massive encyclopedic works. His life’s work was “chronology”, creating a complete list of human events throughout the entire history of the world. The current blog on their site describes the world’s longest running experiments. Cool stuff. www.kirchersociety.org/blog.