Maloney Home Page  |  Links (updated 6/15/04)

New:

Heart Failure | A diary of a third year medical student.

Documented Life | An autodocumentary by Miles Hochstein.

Carfree Cities

(Almost) to Cuba by Canoe | "I screamed. I was sick of being wet. I wanted some decent sleep. This was torture. Saltwater ulcers were flaying me, my hands were puffing up and turning white, and every time I thought I was going to get to land something came up and prevented it. Waves kept splashing me at random intervals. This was supposed to be fun. What had I done wrong?"

When you're done with Wikipedia, Metafilter, The Onion, Memepool, Slashdot, Snopes, the Straight Dope, Red Meat, and even the Red Meat Construction Set:

Astronomy, Cartography, and Aerial Photography

An Atlas of the Universe | Includes the Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram!

The Nine Planets | A multimedia tour of the solar system.

Quarks to Quasars, A Question of Scale | For another great site on scale, see The MegaPenny Project.

The Blue Marble | Global imagery at 1 km resolution.

The Degree Confluence Project | A project to visit each of the latitude and longitude integer degree intersections in the world.

Paleomap Project | The changing distribution of land and sea during the past 1100 million years.

MIT Digital Orthophoto Browser

Science, Engineering, and Technology

The Most Beautiful Experiment in Physics | associated Slashdot discussion.

Bad Science

Causes of Colors | The fifteen fundamental physical causes of all color.

Multimedia Activities

The Mineral Gallery

Units of Measurement

Physics Simulations

Animated Engines

The Pitch Drop Experiment

Nobel e-Museum  

Doomed Engineers | "... a list of the tragic and failed... Most were brought down by their own characters, some by bad luck or malice."

The LED Museum | From ultraviolet to infrared.

The Museum of Unworkable Devices | "Marvel at the ingenuity of the human mind, as it reinvents the square wheel in all of its possible variations." Also see the History of Perpetual Motion Machines.

Essays

The Median Isn't the Message, Stephen Jay Gould | Gould wrote this essay in 1982 upon being diagnosed with mesothelioma, a rare form of abdominal cancer with a median mortality of eight months. I remember reading it in Discover magazine; it was one of my first experiences with the counterintuitive nature of statistics. "I looked at the mesothelioma statistics quite differently... I knew how to read the data properly and not despair." Gould indeed lived another two decades (he died in 2002 from a second, unrelated cancer).

The Accidental Entrepeneur, Gordon Moore | "As another illustration of his motivating skills, one day [transistor inventor and Nobel laureate Bill] Shockley asked a group of us what we would like to do to make the job more interesting. Would we like to publish some papers? We said, 'OK,' so as a way of satisfying this demand he went home that night and worked out the theory of an effect in semiconductors. He came back the next day and said, 'Here. Flesh this out and put your name on it and publish it.'"

Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine, Danny Hillis | Includes some great anecdotes about Feynman. See also Feynman Online. Feynman's Appendix to the Rogers Commission Repot on the Challenger Accident concludes with the aphorism that has graced my whiteboard at MicroCHIPS since 2002.

Microelectronics and Microfabrication

There must be thousands of websites with introductions and summaries of these two topics. Here is a collection of sites that I have used in daily research and design.

Physical Properties of Semiconductors

Physics of Semiconductor Devices

The Physics of Sputtering

Trion Technology's Plasma Cookbook

Electronic Materials and Defects in Crystals

Introduction to Microengineering

Fundamentals of Chemical Vapor Deposition

MEMS and Nanotechnology

There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom, Richard Feynman

Engines of Creation, K. Eric Drexler

Berkeley Lab Research Review

Periodic Tables

WebElements Periodic Table

The Visual Table of the Elements

Periodic Table of Elements

Elementymology

Pictorial Periodic Table

The Wooden Periodic Table Table | assocated Slashdot discussion.

and... The Periodic Table of Funk

Words, quotes, writing, language

Quotations: Education, Science, and Mathematics

The Logical Fallacies Index

Resource of Art Quotations

The English Language

Final Meal Requests and Last Words | associated Metafilter discussions 1, 2, 3.

More 

Starbucks Everywhere | Mr. Winter has taken photos of over 3500 Starbucks stores. Stores I've spent some time in: Alexandria, VA (next door to a bakery/cafe where I briefly worked); Friendship Heights in Washington, DC; College Park, MD; Newbury Street in Boston, MA; just north of Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA; Belmont, MA; Lexington, MA.

Notable Properties of Specific Numbers

Edge

They Write the Right Stuff

The Stanford Prison Experiment

Index of Culture-Bound Systems by Culture

World Walk Travel Adventure

Sounds of the World's Animals

The Skyscraper Page

More Mundane

Steve Martin's Side Effects | "If bowel movements become greater than twelve per hour, consult your doctor, or any doctor, or just anyone who will speak to you."

When I Am King

Things to Say When Losing a Technical Argument

Rock and Roll Confidential: The Hall of Douchebags

The Law of the Playground