Among the thousands of excellent Web resources are occasional
sites
of truly outstanding educational, entertainment, or utilitarian
value.
The list below includes those that I consider of such special
quality
as
to deserve the exclusive Sprott's Spots Award.
Congratulations
to the authors of these sites for their superb efforts in
elevating the
World Wide Web to new heights. Note that some of the sites
(indicated
by *) have moved or gone out of existence since winning the award.
*MuSoft Builders - Listen to fractal music and download a shareware program that produces music from fractals.
The Gallery of Random Art - See artistic patterns produced randomly by the computer and vote on your favorites.
*The Non-linear Lab - Learn about chaos and fractals with simple explanations and interactive animations.
The MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive - Learn all about famous mathematicians and the problems with which they have grappled.
Eric Weisstein's World of Mathematics - Take all your hard math questions to this encyclopedic mathematical resource.
Bizarre Stuff - Visit this museum of classic home science experiments, mainly from the 1930's-1960's.
*Twenty Questions - Try this addictive experiment in artificial intelligence.
*TheTrip.com Flight Tracking - Track the status of any airliner in flight and notifty people by e-mail of its progress.
*Hampton Hampster's Hamster House - Visit a very entertaining home page and learn more than you probably need to know about hamsters and their human companions.
PhysLINK - Use this Ultimate Physics Resource as your starting point if you are interested in physics.
*IllusionWorks - View the most comprehensive collection of optical and sensory illusions on the Web.
The Chaos Hypertextbook - Educate yourself with this massive resource of images, movies, software, and links.
Thinks.com - Enjoy the puzzles, games, computer images, and software.
The Straight Dope - Read the answers to interesting questions you never thought to ask.
The Fractory - Learn about fractals, make your own, and post them for others to see.
*Views of the Solar System - Take a guided tour from the Sun to Pluto.
*Algorithmic Image Gallery - View over 100,000 fractals and make your own.
The Primordial Soup Kitchen - Feast on this smorgasbord of cellular automata.
Cliff Pickover's Home Page - Meet the prolific author, computer artist and puzzle master.