Gershom (Jan M.L.) Martin The Lady Thatcher Professorial Chair in Chemistry Dept. of Organic Chemistry | Faculty of Chemistry | Weizmann Institute of Science | Rehovot | Israel

Home Biosketch Full CV Publications Preprints Research Interests Freq. Cited Papers Sites I maintain Scientific Writing Links and stuff Tools & widgets Paper finder Personal stuff Intranet HUD HTML test page Group website Old homepage Wiki (under construction)

Some interesting links:

Caveat lector: these links were taken over from the old homepage and are full of what webmasters call 'link rot'. Eventually I'll get around to cleaning them up ;-)

Search Engines

• MetaCrawler (WWW meta-search engine); see also The Mother of All Search Engines
• AltaVista (WWW and Usenet news search engine)
• The Mining Co. (same idea as Yahoo)
• FileZ (FTP search engine, much faster and handier than Archie)
• WhoWhere: search engine for Email addresses and telephone numbers and street addresses (mostly USA).
• Acronym server. Expansions of about 20,000 acronyms.
• Encyclopedia Britannica: free search (with ads, slower) and search for registered users (no ads, faster).
• Online Dictionaries page
• US Patents database maintained by IBM corporation
• TechWeb TechEncyclopedia: great if you forgot what the heck is the difference between PCS and PCMCIA, or the like

Macintosh

• Our intranet server of Macintosh utilities (under construction)
• Apple Tech Support Online
• Macintouch --- the latest news for Macintosh users
• MacFixit --- news for Macintosh troubleshooters
• MacVirus --- all about viruses on the Macintosh (less of an issue than on a PC, but still...)
• HyperArchive (WWW access to Info-Mac collection --- best collection of shareware and PD software for the Macintosh)
• AllMacintosh, the TuCows Macintosh download site
• PureMac, a website cataloguing public domain, shareware, and demo software by subject; e.g. Chemistry
• MP3 music software for Macintosh; Comparative review of MP3 encoders for Macintosh; and while we are on the subject, MP3meta search engine.
• Online Macintosh magazines: TidBits, MacWorld (back issue search), MacUser, MacWeek (back issue search of latter two).
• OzTeX: shareware (La)TeX/Metafont/DVIPS/... implementation for the Mac (as fast as a Unix workstation on an iMac or G3 Mac); index of Tex-on-a-Mac links
• MacWindows, information on working in mixed Macintosh-Windows environments (necessary evil for some).
• The Interface Hall of Shame --- examples of how not to design a user interface. (Unless you work at Microsoft, that is.)

Unix and the TeX computer typography system

• Unix workstation vendors: Digital, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Silicon Graphics, Sun Microsystems.
• Digital Unix (formerly OSF/1) FAQ
• Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (CTAN)
• Hypertext help on LaTeX
• HyperText Markup Language (HTML) primer; HTML Resources at about.com
• The whole megilla on URLs (Uniform Resource Locators), i.e. addresses on the World Wide Web and elsewhere
• Performance Database Server (PDS), a database for high-performance Unix workstations and supercomputers maintained by the NETLIB crew.
• machba (mercaz ha-hishuvim ha-beinuniversita'i), the Israel Interuniversity Computing Center
• Geek Girl's Unix Reference Desk --- don't be put off by the name, it's very useful! Also a nice Unix Beginner's Guide (48 pages, PostScript)
• Fortran information page; the FortranLib page; Fortran subroutines for a variety of functions by John Burkardt of Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center; Fortran programming notes
• Award-winning History of Computing site at Virginia Tech Computer Science Department

Israel, Judaism, and Jewish culture

• Digital Road and Street Map of Israel (in Hebrew). Use the arrow and zoom buttons to navigate.
• Maven, index to Jewish/Israeli WWW sites (in English)
• iGuide, the almost complete guide to Israeli WWW sites (English and Hebrew)
• WALLA!, index to Israeli WWW sites (in Hebrew)
• Andy Tannenbaums Jewish resources page. Perhaps the most complete directory of links relevant to Judaism, Jewish culture, and Israel.
• Jerusalem Post (Israeli English-language daily) online (news section; opinion section)
• Selected translations in English from Ha'aretz, Israel's most highly regarded Hebrew-language daily.
• Selections in English from Globes, the Israeli financial newspaper (also large number of links to Israeli business resources); Shekel currency conversion rates from Globes
• excerpts from Jerusalem Report (award-winning English-language biweekly covering Israel and the Jewish world)
• Jewish Communications Network (very well-produced online newspaper)
• Jewish Telegraphic Agency (independent news agency, established 1917)
• soc.culture.jewish FAQ (frequently asked questions)
• The Chartzufim, Israel's answer to "Spitting Image" now on the WWW!
• chaver, ani zocher (friend, I remember). Yitzchak Rabin hy"d, 1922-1995 (memorial pages of Knesset, David Lisbona, and WZO); Rabin Center of Israel Studies.
• Information in English on The Knesset, Israel's Parliament; also links to WWW servers of various Israeli government offices.
• Public transport in Israel: Egged bus schedules (requires a graphical browser, Java support, and Hebrew fonts); also train schedules (useful principally if you live in the coastal plain)
• a very preliminary FAQ on Jewish family names and their origin by Joachim Mugdan; an introduction to the same subject; see also the Jewish Genealogy FAQ and the Jewish family names database of the Diaspora Museum. Also a very very embryonic FAQ about Israeli surnames
• Israel --- a country study on the Library of Congress website (a bit outdated but still very well worth reading); other country studies
• The Israel Museum and the Museum of the Diaspora
• A glossary of Yiddish (Judeo-German) expresssions.
• Giving Wisely, an online directory of nonprofit and philanthropic origanizations in Israel (maintained by Prof. Eliezer Jaffe of Hebrew U., J'lem.)
• Documenting the indescribable: online Encyclopedia of the Shoah at the Simon Wiesenthal Center; see also Yad VaShem and the Ghetto Fighters Museum (Beit Lochamei haGeta'ot) founded by surviving leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. See also The Nizkor Project.
• The Bloomfield Science Museum in Givat-Ram, J'lem.

Skepticism and the struggle against pseudoscience and pseudomedicine

• "skepticism" [sic] denotes the critical scientific investigation of (claims made by) pseudoscience, the paranormal, and so-called "alternative" so-called "medicine". It is not to be confused with philosophical "scepticism" (associated with the Scottish philosopher David Hume, 1711-1776). See essay by Michael Schermer.
• The Skeptic Society
• some related resources
• HealthCare Reality Check, scientific assessments of many fashionable 'alternative treatments' offered by the Georgia (USA) Council against Health Fraud. Includes useful on-line Encyclopedia. Example: homeopathy (FAQ), the one type of pseudomedicine hardest to swallow — no pun intended — to chemists. (Lucid explanation why)
• the annual IgNoble Prizes awarded by the Annals of Improbable Research
• Home page of James Randi, a professional magician who unmasked countless "paranormal" charlatans
• The Pigasus Prize
• The case against the Torah codes by Prof. Barry Simon (see also related site 1 and 2 of Prof. Brendan McKay).
• Check out the results of this Postmodern Essay Generator; see also the Social Text Affair site of Alan Sokal (highly recommended reading).

Music

• There are composers, and then there's J. S. Bach.
• Pages dedicated to some other favorite classical composers of mine: Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Liszt, Frydryk (Frederic) Chopin, Gustav Mahler, Claude Debussy, Dimitri Shostakovitch (another Shostakovitch site).
• Classical MIDI archives - enormous library of classical music in MIDI format. Requires QuickTime 2.1 or later (or a dedicated synthesizer setup) for playback.
• Internet database of CD tracks. Searchable track lists of virtually every music CD ever published.
• From the "Apollonian" back to the "Dionysian": info on some of my favorite rock bands: the legendary Canadian trio Rush, Genesis (their old stuff, as well as "progressive rock in general), Steely Dan (another site including Donald Fagen solo projects), Led Zeppelin, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Living Colour, and of course (older albums by) my favorite caffein substitute Metallica. And yes, you noticed correctly that all of this has either a "progressive" or a "jazz fusion" streak in common :-) Among the new generation of progressive rock bands, I really dig Dream Theater and Spock's Beard, as well as their side projects.
• I'm also quite fond of 1940s-1950s jazz (Bud Powell, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane,...), as well as some ECM-type stuff (John Abercrombie, Pat Metheny,...).
• Some pioneers of "electronic" music (what's nowadays known as "new age" if slow, and "trance" if fast): Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze. Nice sonic wallpaper, and sometimes a lot more than that.
• lyrics server containing tens of thousands of song lyrics (searchable by artist, album title, song title)
• MP3 on a Macintosh site
• some pointers for online bookstores and online CD stores
• OLGA, the Online Guitar Archive. Tablatures and chord changes for just about any song you can imagine.
• more to follow!

Miscellaneous

• the WebMuseum, a large collection of digitized famous paintings.
• Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy --- online edition of this invaluable medical desk reference
• photo.net, a fairly neat online photography site (no, not that kind of pictures :-))
• Ben Gurion National Airport flight arrival and departure information
• Find flight schedules: LowestFare site (see also El Al Israel Airlines, in Hebrew)
• Classic 164 Currency Converter - also includes conversion rates on specific dates (in the past, obviously... :-))
• The New York Times on the Web (replaces the old TimesFax)
• track your FedEx (Federal Express), UPS, or TNT Worldwide Express shipments online;
• Slang dictionaries for a variety of languages (amusing if somewhat bawdy)
• Irreverent, tasteless, and hilarious: Monty Python's Flying Circus (another site, including also Fawlty Towers and other solo projects)
• How Things Work by Prof. Louis Bloomfield (great popular science site, online version of the book by the same name).
• Read all about the fight against Internet spam (unsolicited junk E-mail ads)
• 171 years old and counting: meet Harriet, Charles Darwin's pet tortoise who is now the world's oldest known resident.

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