H2G2

Well, I recently discovered an amazing website: www.h2g2.com. For any of you who are familiar with the genius of Douglas Adams (author of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in its myriad of multimedia forms, such as a BBC radio drama, a BBC television miniseries, five books, a computer game, and most recently, a feature film), this may be worth checking out. It's a site he founded in the late 90's, based around his idea of a vast encylopedia of knowledge, written by roving researchers all over the place, in an informal and humourous style. It's amazing how much of what Adams predicted came to pass: the "Sub-Etha Net" of the books (written in the 1970's) closely resembles today's internet, and his "Babelfish" translator later became the moniker of a highly succesful search engine's translation device (www.babelfish.altavista.com). Anyways, this is a very cool website: it's basically an online encyclopedia on most things that you could want to know, with articles written by real people (I know it sounds similar to Wikipedia, but I'm pretty sure Adams came up with this first). You can read any entry without signing up for anything. If you want to post comments in a discussion, or contribute your own articles, you can become a member for free. The site is now run by the BBC, who seem to have done an excellent job of maintaining Adams' vision and goals for it. There's great articles on everything from Kevlar to Murphy's Law to kissing technique (you know, I have to research this stuff in case the opportunity ever comes up;)!). Check it out!