Ben Yalow's links

This is a collection of miscellaneous links. It's a subset of the stuff I keep in my bookmark file, so it should give you some idea of what sorts of things I'm interested in.

SF related

• Probably the largest archive of SF-related material can be found on the SF-Lovers archives at Rutgers. This includes all of the back issues of SF-Lovers Digest, probably the oldest SF-related mailing list on the Net.
• Another useful list is the Science Fiction Resource Guide. This contains links to a large number of useful SF-related sites.
• A rather useful database of SF literature can be found at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. It goes back pretty far, and has a reasonably good search engine.
• The finest fanwriter of recent decades is Dave Langford. There's an archive maintained in Scotland of his fanzine, Ansible, and other material of his. I will gladly admit to being highly prejudiced, having just finished editing the second anthology of his for NESFA Press.
• I realize this is a legal link, rather than a directly SF-related one. But since one of the unfortunate common sources of fannish (and net-related) arguments comes from copyright comments, then I'll provide a link to Cornell University Law School copyright information, including their link to a hypertext copyright law.

Computer stuff

I've been involved with computers since I first started using them in the mid-60s. In my last full-time job, I was the primary network designer for connectivity to the Internet. A few useful references on computers and the Internet would include the following:

• A useful list of Windows applications for PCs connecting to the Intenet can be found at Stroud's CWSApps List. If you're looking for reviews of apps, along with links for downloading them, this is a good place to start.
• If you're looking for a new ISP, there's a reasonably good list of ISP's at The List (Internet Service Providers).
• If you're interested in lots of boring stuff about how the Internet is put together, a good place to start is with InterNIC Directory and Database Services Home Page.
• And, of course, there are lots of sites where the RFCs and other standards documents that describe the Internet are stored. One of the less busy copies can be found at ISI Publications. But the Indexer at the Internic is better, so you should start there if you don't know the number that you're looking for.

  Mostly, they're pretty dry documents. Then there are RFCs like RFC1149.

• People looking for information about Windows 95 can find a pretty good start by looking at the Windows 95 InterNetworking Headquarters
• One of the largest and oldest software archives is known as the Simtel archives, named after a long-gone machine where the archives used to be stored. It's a good place to start looking for software.
• Unfortunately, the growth of PCs has led to a constant increase in the number of computer viruses. There are a lot of companies that produce anti-viral software, and most of them cooperate quite well with each other. Two of the best are F-PROT, which is available at Data Fellows WWW Server, and Dr. Solomon's, available at Dr Solomon's - Computer Virus Information And More, which also has a good collection of links to other anti-virus companies.

Military History

I've been a hobbyist studying military history for a number of years, now. For those interested in that, here are a few possible places to start.

• Most of the Armed Services have lots of publications describing what they do, and historical stuff related to them. However, for the most part, these publications simply represent whatever the senior officers of the services have decided is the party line this week (or, given publishing deadlines, the party line about a year ago). An exception to this rule is the United States Naval Institute. Their main magazine, Proceedings, is full of arguments on policy as well as historical information, and, every few years, there's a controversy when somebody submits, and USNI publishes, an article vehemently criticising current thought. Considering that the head of the USNI is always the current CNO, this takes a lot of political will, but it produces a great magazine.
• Rather than maintaining a lot of historical links, you may want to let someone else do it for you. And the best list I've found so far is at The University of Kansas - The World-Wide Web Virtual Library: History.
• Another site that I keep bookmarked, mostly for the ship and airplane lists, is Andrew Toppan's Railroads, Ships and Aircraft Homepage. A lot of the questions that come up about things like "What aircraft carriers does France have?" can be answered by starting here.

News sources

Tied in with my interest in history is being a news junkie. And the Internet had really helped that addiction. An increasing number of news sources are now available online.

• The finest news magazine published is probably The Economist, a British news magazine. Their online site is pretty new, and doesn't have much. But if it ever gets close to the paper magazine (which is well worth subscribing to, even if it is pretty expensive), it will be a great resource.
• For Americans, the major national newspapers tend to set the tone of the discussion. And some of them are available free (I won't list the Wall Street Journal, which used to be free, but is now a pay service). Good places to start are The New York Times, and The Washington Post. And, to give a countervailing viewpoint, a newspaper that started out as a hopeless junk rag, but has become a serious source of news, is The Washington Times.
• Of course, there are newspapers all around the country that have Web presence. A good place to look for them is The Newspaper Association of America, which keeps hotlinks to newspapers on the Web.
• Most of the TV networks have homepages. Like much of their broadcast schedule, there isn't much news on their pages, either. However, there is always CNN Web.
• And for those interested in Israeli news, the main English language paper there, The Jerusalem Post, has a site.

Politics

And I'm a politics junkie as well. And the various political parties are finally figuring out that the Web is a good place to provide information. And regardless of my own viewpoint, I think it's vital to study all of the stuff that all sides try to present, which makes anybody looking at my bookmarks unable to be sure exactly what my politics are. Which is fine by me.

A good set of starting points would be:

• The two major parties have sites, at the Democratic and Republican National Committees. And a third party alternative (not Perot) can be found at the Libertarian Party.
• There are lots of sites that provide good starting point for political links. Two of the better ones I've found are Turn Left, and The Right Side of the Web. It isn't hard to work out their politics.
• And with a US election coming up, there are a few sites which are looking at the elections. The two best I've found so far are PoliticsNow and CNN/Time AllPolitics.

Government and Law

In order to think about politics, it's vital to understand what the law and the government are about. As usual, rather than including a lot of links, I'll just put a smaller collection of basic ones, from which you can usually get wherever you want in a few hops.

• We can start with the Executive Branch of the government, all of which can be found starting with the site for the head of the Executive, at the White House site. Unfortunately, this site is a bit graphics-heavy (although much better than when it first went up), but there's also a text version.
• Starting with the 104th Congress in 1994, Congress has gotten most of the legislative information onto the Net, with the new THOMAS: Legislative Information system.
• Both the House and Senate have homepages, as well.
• Here's a page with links to the pages for the various U.S. Federal Courts. Most collections of links from other law school pages also include this.
• The House keeps a pretty good starting point for legal links, starting here.
• For those who want to see what's going on, relatively unfiltered, the C-SPAN networks are both vital and interesting.
• Lots of law schools have pages, containing both law information themselves, and lots of useful links. The ones I use most often are the ones at Cornell University: Legal Information Institute, Emory University School of Law, and USC.

Misc stuff

• Once upon a time, you looked people up in phone books. Now, you don't need to keep books for everyplace around, since there are lots of them online. A few of them can be found at Switchboard, and BigYellow. If you need area code information, you can get it at AmeriCom Long Distance AREA DECODER. And there's a directory of 800 numbers maintained by AT&T.
• For those still using snail mail, the USPS maintains a ZIP+4 Code Lookup. And if you want the bar code, you can get it from National Address Server at the University of Buffalo.
• For those who don't trust the USPS, there are other carriers, such as FEDEX or UPS.
• If you're doing much driving, it's useful to get some idea of possible routes. There are a number of CD-ROM based products that can give you that stuff in great detail, but you can get a pretty good set of directions from DeLorme: CyberRouter
• And, of course, you can't travel without taking books to read with you. You've probably got more books waiting to get read, but if not, you can get more at Amazon.com Books! Earth's Biggest Bookstore.
• If you travel to foreign countries, it's sometimes useful to know how much the funny paper is worth relative to your "real money". So you might want to check out Olsen & Associates: Currency Convertor
• Impossible to define, but a wonderful source of interesting writing, is Robert Hunter's (Grateful Dead) writing archives.
• The only piece of non-SF fanwriting that comes even close is The alt.buddha.short.fat.guy FAQ
• I've been following The Flying Karamazov Bros, one of the funniest and most skillful juggling groups for years. See them if you get a chance.
• This page is exactly what the title claims it is: Strawberry Pop-Tart Blow-Torches. I'm not going to even try to describe it.
• Information about Nobel Prizes can be found on the homepage of the Nobel Foundation.
• And, for everybody who ever worked in an office, the source of all truth can be found at The Dilbert Zone
• Unlike many SF fans, I'm a sports fan, too. So here are links to baseball, basketball, football, and hockey league servers. The local teams I root for are (in order by sport, for those who don't know them) the Mets, the Knicks, the Jets, and the Rangers. I'd root for the Yankees if they ever got rid of the DH and started playing baseball again, but that's a religious argument.