EssentialsI expect that most people who would be interested in these sites already know about them, but if you do not, do yourself a favor and check them out. | |
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All Sites - Stack Exchange | Stack Exchange is bar none the greatest knowledge-sharing platform created to date. |
Home - PubMed - NCBI | Search all published biomedical literature back to 1966, as well as selections from earlier years. |
Colossal | Art, design, and visual culture. | One of the best art sites on the internet, a constant source of content that goes viral for good reason. |
My Modern Met – The Big City That Celebrates Creative Ideas | Another fantastic site for discovering new art. |
Kaggle | The granddaddy of data science websites. |
Adobe Color | Adobe tool to find well-matching colors. |
NYCInteresting things in and around NYC. | |
Open House New York | An annual event where achitecturally notable private spaces around NYC open for public tours. |
Waterbody Advisories - DEP | I like to swim in the Hudson River. It's probably never all that safe, but I pay attention to water quality advisories so as to avoid exposing myself to excess risk. |
Culture Pass NYC: How to Get and Use it for 47 NYC Attractions | Requires some planning ahead, but if you have a New York/Brooklyn/Queens Public Library card, you can use culturepass.nyc to sign up and get passes for events around the city. |
Riverkeeper - Protecting the Hudson River & NYC's Drinking Water Supply | Local organization that conducts its own water quality monitoring and lobbies for a cleaner river. |
List of museums and cultural institutions in New York City - Wikipedia | Even if you are a born and bred New Yorker, I bet there is stuff here you've never heard of. |
An alternative view of New York | Long-running blog about City history hiding in plain sight. |
NYC Housing Court | Knowing the basic rules around NYC housing is essential for life in NYC, if you live here and have not been to this site, do it now. |
Amazing ArtSelect artists whose work made a particular impression on me. | |
Eiko Ojala Illustration | Gorgeous illustrations with a remakable sense of depth. |
Diana Sudyka | Fantastic and colorful illustrations. |
Albane Simon – The Surreal Collagist | Surreal collages |
Tiffany Bozic | Deeply psychedelic wildlife-themed paintings. |
Catalina Toro Art | NYC based painter and illustrator. Her series of glow-in-the dark paintings is especially beautiful. |
Strange Gods: Art of Valin Mattheis | Filled with skeletons and sorcery, this work seems almost alive. |
Olga Klimova | Visionary artist of lush, layered, fantastically detailed paintings. |
The Art of Anna-Maria Jung | Illustrator and maker of comics and shirts with playful fantasy/sci-fi themes. |
SoftwareSome of my favorite free software. | |
Zotero: Your personal research assistant | I use this every day and have found it indispensible for organizing scientific papers. I have tried severl PDF organization solutions, and have found Zotero to be the best, especially when my library got very large. It must, however, be used with a good PDF reader with annotation capabilities to be maximally useful. |
Drawboard PDF | My favorite PDF annotation tool. |
Qoppa PDF studio | Commercial software, but the only decent option for annotating PDFs on Linux that I am aware of. |
Rstudio | Integrated development environment makes the open-source statistics package R a pleasure to use. |
Pycharm | My favorite IDE for Python. |
Trilium Notes | Build your personal knowledge base on a self-hosted server. The syntax highlighting makes it perfect for storing code snippets. |
Paule Bourke: Geometry, Surfaces, Curves, Polyhedra | A treasure trove of geometry demonstrations, the most famouse of which is probably |
Supershape | Program for making natural looking 3d shapes |
Tutorials and ExplainersTutorials and explainers that I found particularly useful. | |
Symbol Sheet / SWT | As a non-mathematician, I do not use many mathemetical symbols frequently, so when I come across ones I do not remember, this is a handy reference. |
Math is Fun | I wasn't a "math person" in school, but the explainers here have been very useful for brushing up on concepts that I now find I actually need to use. |
7 Regression Types and Techniques in Data Science | Overview of types of regression model. |
Series on Confusing Statistical Terms - The Analysis Factor | Statistics is full of confusing terms or terms that mean different things in different context. This deals with some common ones. |
Learn Python the Hard Way | I only had patience to do it "the hard way" for a little while, but this is definitely one of the best introductions to Python out there. |
Beautiful plotting in R: A ggplot2 cheatsheet | Ggplot2 is an amazing package, but the vast array of options can be overwhelming. |
A quick primer on split-apply-combine problems | R-bloggers | If you work with large datasets in R, this is an essential technique to understand. |
Be Careful with Using Model Design in R | R-bloggers | Important considerations when working with linear models in R. |
JOINing data in R using data.table | The speed and memory benefits of the data.table in R are immense, but the syntax is a bit different than for dataframes. Not being aware of the differences can be a source of frustration. |
15 Easy Solutions To Your Data Frame Problems In R (article) - DataCamp | Useful tips. |
LikeGeeks Linux Archives | Excellent linux explainers, and excellent resource for beginners and more experienced users alike. |
The UNIX School: awk - 10 examples to group data in a CSV or text file | If you've ever been frustrated by tedious work manipulating Excel spreadsheets and dealing with clunky macros, consider converting to a plain text format and doing your modifications with Awk (and its cousin, Sed). It is difficult at first, but can save you enormous amounts of time if you deal with a lot of spreadsheets that need cleaning. |
Running Windows 10 on Linux using KVM with VGA Passthrough | I might not have my current computer setup were it not for this post, or at least it would have taken me a lot longer without it. |
ArchWiki | Even if you do not use Arch, this is a great resource for general Linux how-to and troubleshooting. |
Main Linux problems on the desktop, or why Linux sucks | I love Linux and use it every day for 90% of my computing, but there are definitely some things about it that are less than wonderful, and this is a good list of them. It is for many of the reasons listed here that I feel the need to use a Windows machine alongside Linux. |
Datasets, data exploration tools, and reference tablesMy background and main interest is bioinformatics, so this list is heavily skewed towards that. However, bioinformatics has led me to a broader interest in data science, so this list includes resources related to a variety of topics. | |
Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) - NCBI | NCBI repository of gene expression data. |
ENCODE RNA Dashboard (hg19) | Transcriptome data from the ENCODE project. |
World Bank Open Data | Data from the World Bank. |
The GDELT Project | A constantly updated resource for the monitoring of global media. |
OpenCelliD Database of Cell Towers & Geolocation | Database of cell towers & geolocation. Requires registration. |
NIMS Materials Database (MatNavi) | Multiple databases of properties of different materials and chemical compounds. Requires registration and somewhat confusing to navigate. |
Engineering ToolBox | Extremely comprehensive collection of physics and engineering related equations. |
Virtual Metabolic Human | Explore the known human metabolome with interactive maps. |
GTEx Portal | GTEx is a massive project to gather RNA-seq data from different human tissues, as well as computing expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs). |
EMBL-EBI Home: Expression Atlas < EMBL-EBI | Gene expression data and atlas' for a number of species |
Ensembl genome browser | Explore and compare the genomes of many species. |
1000 Genomes | The 1000 Genomes Project, the most complete sequencing of the human genome to date. |
Online Ancient Genome Repository | Ancient DNA (which actually includes DNA that is just a few years old) is a fascinating topic that will only grow in coming years. |
OMIM: Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man | An Online Catalog of Human Genes and Genetic Disorders |
GWAS Catalog | The NHGRI-EBI Catalog of published genome-wide association studies |
NYC OpenData | Open Data is free public data published by New York City agencies and other partners. |
DIY, homemaking and homesteadingThese are a mix of how-to's that I found useful and sites that generally have good information or interesting ideas. | |
Walden Labs: Solutions for Self-Reliance | Solutions for self-reliance: DIY food, water, energy, and shelter. |
Hackaday: Fresh Hacks Every Day | Constant source of cool DIY ideas. |
The Bucket Farm: How To: Building a cheapskate DWC system | I build a very similar hydroponic system to grow herbs in my apartment and it worked very well. |
Making Worm Tea - Delivering Essential Micro-nutrients | Instructions for making "worm casting tea" for promoting healthy microbiota in a hydroponic garden. I found it quite effective in staving off root rot. |
Storage Stairs for a Bunk or Loft Bed | Ana White | I used this to build stairs to the loft bed that I built. |
The Sagulator – WoodBin | Calculator for estimating how much load boards of different length, thickness, and material will withstand weight. Useful for designing shelves, desks, and tables. |
Swing up fixed frame screen (altenative to pull down) | I went with a very similar design for my home theater. |
How to Start Woodworking in a Basement or Apartment | Advice for DIY-ers with limited space. |
History: primary sources, archives, data exploration toolsI have a fascination with ancient manuscripts and I love reading the words of people involved in historical events. If you do too, you will like these links. | |
CIA FOIA: Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room | Search declassified documents from the CIA. Make sure to use the advanced search. |
Wikileaks: Full-text search | I have very mixed feelings about Wikileaks and whether it is a good thing for the world. But once documents are (for better or for worse) out in public, I have no compunctions about reading them. It is important to keep in mind that these document dumps are rarely if ever made without desire for a specific political effect, and that forged documents mixed in with real ones are a possibility. |
US Department of State Office of the Historian | Historical documents from the US Department of State. |
US Navy historical photos collection | Photo collections at the online archives of the US Navy. |
Lynching acts of white supremacy interactive map | "Discover in four pages the heroism of Monroe and Florence Work, who in 1920 showed us that quietly behind the scenes, you can make a whole nation hear you" |
OldNYC: Mapping Historical Photographs of New York City | Find old photographs of NYC by location. |
BBC: WW2 People's War | BBC project to record and archive people's stories and photographs from Britain in WWII. |
OPenn primary digital resources: curated collections | Collections of primary source documents and manuscript fragments from ancient up through modern times. |
Digitised Manuscripts at the British Library | Digitized archives going back into Anglo-Saxon times. |
DMMapp: Digitized Medieval Manuscripts app | Links to medieval manuscripts in the digital archives of numerous institutions. |
The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature | Archive of Sumerian writings with translation. |
Information, Literature and Media SourcesOnline archives of published media. | |
Wolfram Demonstrations Project | Enormous collection of demonstrations of mathematical concepts and principals. |
Royalty-Free Stock Video and Music Library | Pond5 | Large collection of royalty-free (but not free!) video footage. |
NYPL Digital Collections | The digital collections of the New York Public Library, including archives of photography, art, and orignal manuscripts. Unfortunately, you must pay for high-resolution images. Another annoying thing is that to view the images larger than thumbnail, it makes you download them instead of showing them in the browser. |
Internet History Sourcebooks from Fordham University | English translations of medieval literature from Europe and the Middle East. |
The British Library on Flickr | Flickr account for the British Library containing many themed collections. |
OZ magazine from the Historical & Cultural Collections at University of Wollongong | PDF archives of a counter-culture/arts magazine that existed from 1967-1973 |
UFDC: Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature | Vintage children's books. |
Books with Full-Text Online from MetPublications at The Metropolitan Museum of Art | Online version of many publications from the Metropolitan Museum's press. |
WikiArt.org - Visual Art Encyclopedia | If you want to see the good quality images of the work of any past artist, this is a good place to start. |
NASA Image and Video Library | NASA's image archive. |
Math symbols cheat sheet | A math symbols cheat sheet that mostly does not overlap with the previous one linked to. |
BlogsBlogs with conistently interesting content that I like to keep up with. | |
Failed Architecture - Architecture and the Real World | Blog about architeture and society. |
Maps Mania | Blog highlighting interesting and unique maps. |
Archaeology in Europe News | News about the latest discoveries and ideas in the archaeology of Europe. |
Quanta Magazine – Illuminating Science | Quanta Magazine | Examinations current scientific theories and controversies written in clear and accessible style. |
Phys.org | The latest and most exciting new scientific findings. |
NIH Director's Blog | Blog from the office of the Director of the NIH on current topics in biomedical research. |
Lawfare | Top-quality analysis of issues related to national security law. |
War on the Rocks | In-depth analysis of military affairs. |
RNA-Seq Blog | Current news on the latest methods in RNA-seq and other -omics research. |
PodcastsWhat would my life be without podcasts? Most of these are history podcasts, but some are about current affairs. I have spent dozens of hours listening to each of these podcasts. | |
Current Hardcore History Available for Free | The granddaddy of history podcasts. |
WDFpodcast.com | The most thorough coverage of Western history available in podcast form. |
The History of Rome: Archives | One of the finest history podcast series ever made. |
Revolutions | Mike Duncan of History of Rome covers the major revolutions of the Western world. Every bit as excellent as History of Rome. |
The History of England | David Crowther's amazing podcast on English history. The lively narration and dry wit make it extra-enjoyable to listen to. |
The Lawfare Podcast | The best national security law podcast around. I find it an essential resource for cutting through the media hype and getting a grasp on what is actually going on. |
HOME | theredlinepodcast | An excellent global affairs podcast featuring expert guests. |
The Eastern Border podcast – The Other Side of the Cold War | Excellent podcast on Soviet and post-Soviet history. |
War on the Rocks Podcast | Military affairs discussed in detail, but accessible to the layman. |
Our Fake History – Historical Myths Relished and Ruined! | Always informative and entertaining. |
The History of English Podcast: The Spoken History of a Global Language | Absolutely fascinating exploration of the English language back to proto-Indo-European roots. |
Literature & History | A deep dive into the great works of the Western literary canon, starting in ancient times. At the time time of writing this page, it is just getting into late antiquity. |
The History in the Bible Podcast | A scholarly look at the Bible(s), both their content and the origins of the texts. |
Art websites and blogsMy favorite sites to discover new art. | |
Juxtapoz Magazine | An excellent magazine of contemporary art. |
Hi-Fructose Magazine | Another excellent magazine for contempoarary art. |
Metal on Metal | Although no longer updated, the archives of this blog are a great place to explore and discover art with dark and/or gory themes. |
Monster Brains | A blog of monster/creature art. Also no longer updated. |
Giornale Nuovo | Another defunct blog. now only available via Archive. |
Open Culture | An ever-growing collection of open-source media. |