andrewvs

The Wayback Machine

Sometimes you want to find an old version of a webpage—Google's "cached" feature will display the lastest version of sites that are no longer online (most of the time). But suppose you want to find every version of a website?

Time to enter The Wayback Machine.

Browse through 30 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago. To start surfing the Wayback, type in the web address of a site or page where you would like to start, and press enter. Then select from the archived dates available. The resulting pages point to other archived pages at as close a date as possible. Keyword searching is not currently supported.

The Wayback Machine, which currently contains over 100 terabytes of data and is growing at a rate of 12 terabytes per month, is the largest known database in the world, containing multiple copies of the entire publicly available web. This eclipses the amount of data contained in the world's largest libraries, including the Library of Congress.

Free Legal Documents

If you find yourself in the position where you need a Non-Disclosure, Consulting, Non-Compete, or just about any other kind of agreement and you don't want to hire some fancy four-named attorney who will charge you an arm and a leg for something that's already sitting in his drawer, I suggest you try these FREE online resources:

LawDepot.com
Free legal documents that can be customized on the fly... Very nice.

onecle
Copies of legal contracts made between large corporations. (the "cle" in onecle stands for "continuing legal education.") You too can be a registered and fully-accredited C&P* attorney.

Creative Commons
The future of simplified intellectual property contracts. Cool concept—cool website.

*Copy & Paste

Mispronunciations

It drives me crazy when the President of the United States says "nucular" instead of "nuclear." It's not like the word doesn't come up very often. Can't someone pull him aside and whisper in his ear, "Uh. Mr. President. It's pronounced NOO-klee-ur."*

...but before you (and I) get too high and mighty on mispronunciations, we might want to double-check some of our own pronunciations.

Here is a list of the one hundred most commonly mispronounced words, courtesy of yourDictionary.com

I'll fess up. I found out that I was mispronouncing several: antarctic, barbiturate, dilate, larynx, long-lived, prerogative, supremacist, triathlon, and utmost.

Guess I'm not presidential material either. = )

Not everyone agrees with the list, however. Here is a critique of the list and a rebuttal of the critique by the CEO of yourDictionary.com.

*My selection of President Bush as "poster child" for mispronunciation isn't a political statement—he just provided the best example.

The Straight Dope

I've read all the Straight Dope newspaper articles and all the books. This is great stuff—sassy and smart. And now most of it is available online for your enjoyment and edification. If you're interested in the answers to questions like the ones below, then The Straight Dope is for you.

What is the designated hitter rule in baseball?
Why you can't put pineapple in Jell-O.
If Teflon is nonsticky, how do they get it to stick to the pan?
When a woman gives birth in westerns, why do they always boil water?
When a toilet atop the Sears Tower is flushed, do the contents fall 110 floors?
Is it possible to loop or roll a 747 jet?
Who was more popular, Elvis or the Beatles?

For hundreds more just like these, go here and scroll down the page.

Citing Online Sources

If you are a student, professor, or professional researcher, you are probably familiar with a few of the style guides that provide direction for citing your sources:

American Psychological Association (APA)
     - psychology, education, and other social sciences
Modern Language Association (MLA)
     - literature, arts, and humanities
American Medical Association (AMA)
     - medicine, health, and biological sciences.
Chicago Manual of Style (Chicago)
     - non-scholarly works (books, magazines, newspapers)

Unfortunately, these manuals are relatively weak in the area of citing online sources. For information on how to cite these sources, I highly recommend the Columbia Guide to Online Style.