I don’t visit the Straightdope messageboards/website with a specific topic in mind; I just like to learn new things.
I hope other people come here for the same reason too. What sites do you use to learn about new topics?
I’ve found wikipedia.com to be insanely cool, and everything2.com (to a lesser extent, as that is more about poetry and stuff).
howstuffworks.com - technology made simple
skepdic.com - the skeptic’s distionary, is also pretty useful.
www.fark.com has about 1-2 veeeery interesting articles linked per day. Just today they had one about MIT trying to use nanotechnology to create smart uniforms for the army. Oh, and a lengthy one about how De Beers created the myth of the diamond scarcity and preesssiousnessss.
Cardinal, I’d always been under the impression that fark.com was less than reputable. Am I mistaken?
Well, ehow.com is pretty cool when it’s working. And, as Sublight mentioned, howstuffworks.com.
Fark is simply a sort of blog. They give links that go out to other sites. So they’re as reputable as the sites they’re linking to, most of which I’ve never suspected of being weird.
Many of their links go to things like Yahoo news and the AP Wire site. The nanotechnology army uniform story was on the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists site, at http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/2003/so03/so03rogers.html
this one.
Occasionally urban dictionary too.
Well, agiantdwarf – Sublight, Cardinal, liirogue, skeptic_ev,and dutchboy208 seem to cover the territory well. My only suggestion is a judicious use of Google. Asking the right questions is often half the way to knowledge.
GLMRU,
—CoffeeGuy
lonelyplanet.com - I love learning about the world, and it has so much information on EVERY country and major city, its amazing. Sometimes I just pick a random country that I don’t know much about and read all about its culture and history. It’s a really informative site.
