Some great links

New York Times	Perhaps the best newspaper in the universe, the New York Times is always a good read. You have to register, but the on-line edition is free. I particularly like the "Top 25 most e-mailed articles" feature (but again, you have to register).
BBC News	One of the best sources of news on the Internet, from the British Broadcasting Corporation.
RefDesk	A site that tries to provide comprehensive reference information on just about everything.
Worth 1000	This is a 'creative competition and photoshop contest' site. It contains about 3,000 galleries with almost 100,000 original images from previous competitions. There are some excellent photographs here that are well worth browsing through.
BetterPhoto	A great source of information for photographers.
Epinions	A great place to find good reviews of a wide variety of electronic and related equipment.
Morphases	Morphases lets you play with faces, graphically speaking. You can move, bend and twist eyes, noses, mouths and so on to create interesting-looking people. If you wish, you can input a digital photograph of your own face and go to town on it.
Rasterbator	Have you ever seen one of those huge pictures pasted up on a wall that are comprised of several smaller pieces, each printed out at 8½ x 11? This site helps you create such a beast. You submit your own black and white original and the site will blow it up to a larger size and send you back a PDF file with the enlargement. The site includes a gallery displaying the creations of some previous visitors to the site.
Dictionary	A good on-line dictionary. Just type in a word and you will quickly be given its definition(s). Also has a thesaurus, puzzles and other information.
Free Dictionary	Another good dictionary, competing for web visitors with Dictionary.com.
Canada 411	A Canadian telephone directory. Type in the name and location of a person in Canada and if it's listed, there's a good chance this web site will be able to give you his or her phone number. Quite a handy resource, really. Also useful for tracking down the phone number of a Canadian business.
Panther Observatory	Johannes Schedler's web site providing information about his personal astronomical observatory in Austria and various images he has captured from the sky.
Ottawa Astronomical Society	The web site of Ottawa's local branch of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. It contains a variety of articles and pictures about astronomy, as well as news about the society's meetings and other events.
Smithsonian	A superb web site with all kinds of information about art, design, history, culture, science and technology from the Smithsonian Institution.
Science Daily	A top source for the latest news in science and technology.
Scientific Biographies	Ever wondered about the lives of some of the great scientists of history, such as Albert Einstein, Pythagoras, Blaise Pascal or leonardo Fibonacci? There are short biographies here for 100 of these people.
Powers of 10	Wow! See the universe in sizes ranging from super-macro to super-micro. Starting way out there, 10,000,000 light years from the Milky Way galaxy, zoom in by 'powers of 10' steps to the rim of our galaxy, then inside with its billions of stars, eventually to our solar system, to earth, to southeastern Florida and down to earth, to an oak tree, to an individual leaf, to a cell within that leaf, to its nucleus, to its DNA strands and nucleotides, to an electron shell, to the nucleus of an atom and finally to the surface of a proton!
Mathematical Atlas	This site offers a collection of short articles designed to provide an introduction to the main areas of modern mathematics and pointers to further information, as well as answers to some common questions. The material is arranged in a hierarchy of disciplines. A fascinating place to browse if you are interested in mathematics.
Cool Optical Illusions	Almost 100 optical illusions, illustrated and explained. For example, how many legs does this elephant have? 4? 5? 6?
eHow	An amazing 15,000 solutions to a wide variety of everyday problems. This site is highly recommended.
Clown Staples	There are two 'Flash' experiments here. One is a relatively simple 'ball on a string' animation where you can swing a ball around with your mouse. The other is a lot more interesting -- a symphony of sorts, created using the array of sounds that are available in the Microsoft Windows operating system. Check it out.
Annoyances	A site dedicated to helping us cope with Windows annoyances.
Cool Site of the Day	This wonderful place points us to interesting Internet sites, a new one every day.
Google	These days, this is the best search engine going.
Googlism	Find out, in a neat way, what Google thinks about a person, place, thing or time.
BookCrossing	This place is a great little non-profit spot. It encourages people to join up, register the books they like and "liberate" those books "into the wild". It supplies labels, bookmarks and stickers that can be included in a liberated book. These items encourage the finder to register the book again at the BookCrossing site, so the original liberator can follow its progress from person to person. It's a fun club where book-lovers exchange information about great books. You have to register to make full use of the site.
eBay	This highly successful commercial site facilitates international on-line auctions for all sorts of paraphernalia. You can buy or sell almost anything on eBay. You can browse for free but if you want to bid or sell items you have to register.
Statistics Canada	From publications to electronic data, census to survey information, this is the official source for Canadian social and economic statistics and products. Statistics Canada provides remarkably detailed content on practically every aspect of Canada.
Bank of Canada	Canada's national bank offers a rich variety of financial and economic information.
Canadian Economy Online	Part of the Government of Canada On-Line project, the Canadian Economy Online Internet site provides a wide range of information about production, income, wealth, employment, finance and the like, in Canada. The site includes up-to-date information on ten key indicators, explanations of economic concepts, summaries of critical economic events of the twentieth century and links to economic information on other Government of Canada web sites.
Bureau of Economic Analysis	The Bureau of Economic Analysis produces and distributes national accounts statistics for the United States. They have an excellent web site, containing an enormous quantity of free statistics.
IARIW	The International Association for Research in Income and Wealth aims to further research on national and economic and social accounting, including the development of concepts and definitions for the measurement and analysis of income and wealth, and to develop and further integrate systems of economic and social statistics. It pursues these objectives by holding biennial general conferences, by arranging regional and specialized conferences, by the circulation of scholarly papers and by the publication of a quarterly journal, the Review of Income and Wealth.
Spybot	Detect and remove annoying and potentially dangerous spyware that may be clogging up your system and do it for free.
Downloads	This is a terrific place to get free or trial-version software.
Shortwave Listening Guide	This is a great place to find out what's on the shortwave radio frequencies.
After Hours	Formerly Russ Porter's and now Andy Sheppard's CBC Radio show "After Hours" is the one of the two best jazz program available on the Canadian airwaves. The other is Jazz Beat, hosted for many years by Katie Malloch. The web site gives lots of information about past and upcoming shows.
Canada Post	Handy spot for determining postal rates, postal codes and so on.
Dragon Go Server	The best site for serious 'Go' players. For more about the game of Go, go the the section of the web site that is devoted to that topic.
It's your turn	A great site for boardgames like Go, Go-Moku, Checkers, Chess, Pente and many more.
Breakout:Normandy	My Breakout: Normandy game site, containing lots of information and strategy tips for this fine Avalon Hill wargame.
Russian Campaign	The Russian Campaign site is dedicated to one of my favourite games, "The Russian Campaign", simulating the cataclysmic war between Germany and Russia between 1941 and 1945. Twenty million people were killed in this war which turned out to be decisive in defeating the Nazis.
Consimworld	This is a non-profit site for gamers. It has discussion forums on virtually every good game you can think of, plus game reviews and a variety of other types of information about gaming. You have to register to use the site, but it's free.
Singing horses	A mildly amusing page -- four horses give us the beat.
The Telephone	A really interesting little site. Takes a visitor to a variety of spots as you dial a phone. Good sound effects too. Very well done.
Hot or Not	At this site, people download their pictures and they are posted so visitors to the site can rate them at 'hot' or 'not', on a scale of 1 to 10. It's kind of fun.
Orisinal	Ferry Halim's excellent collection of over 50 mouse-click games. You can kill many hours here, all the while building up your digital dexterity.
Blue Blocks	Drag the red block around, trying to avoid the moving blue blocks. See how long you can survive.
Penguin Swat	Bat those falling penguins out of the ballpark! This addictive little game challenges your mousing and keyboarding skills.

Compiled, developed and maintained by Philip Smith