Gems of the Web: Bestsnow.net

Tony Crocker's 'Bestsnow.net' is another all-substance, no-style labor of love that I am putting forth as an old school gem of the web. Written in simple, iframe-era HTML with no appreciation or ambition for the aesthetic of web 2.0 or the intriguing possibilities of data-visualization with something as palpably measurable and comparable as snowfall, Crocker has built a dogged and complete curation of North American ski resort snowfall data going back to the late 1990s (which, judging by the look, is the first and last time the site itself experienced any design work).

Clearly Tony and I have few things in common: a passion for skiing and fascination with weather and data. He's created a resource here that I would probably want to create myself if it didn't already exist. The painstaking data collection itself is one thing: accurate, organized and, I would suspect, mostly manually curated from a wild variety of sources as I don't think there's a lot of RSS of snowfall data going on. But there's also the analysis from a skier's point of view with a candid account of the what matters to the people seeking this kind of information: powder.

Assassin Bug

Ever since I was a small boy who chanced upon the terrifying spectacle of a pair of mating beetles on the sidewalk in Ann Arbor, Michigan, I've maintained a horror-fan's fascination with the insect world. So naturally, I was intrigued when I spotted this creeper lurking near the entrance of our house on the Eastern Shore. 

It's a buggy place out there for sure, particularly on a steamy midsummer night when the lights stay on inside and the windows become irresistible, luminous magnets for a teeming, insectoid phantasmagoria of unimaginable variety. Watch and you'll see everything from sub-tropical jumping spiders to fantastically woolly caterpillars to clambering katydids (which are apparently vicious predators). 

But none so far had topped this freaking stranger. Which is about as weird as that unidentified bastard I discovered in my shag carpet last year. So I was duly stoked at the opportunity for another cloud-sourcing experiment to uncover the nature of this little beastmaster. But for my own skills at internet searching, I quickly verified the identity of my discovery and thus spoiled the mystery while adding to my own trove of trivia.

Per the excellent website, InsectIdentification.org, (a gem of the web, no doubt) this is a 'wheel bug' of the assassin bug family of 'true bugs' of the order hemiptera and famous for the painful bite it inflicts with that absurdly large rostrum. Yikes!

Gems of the Web: Fish of Lembeh Strait

Caledonian Devilfish, Lembeh Strait, Sulawese, Indonesia, Asia, Planet Earth

From time to time I'll stumble across absolute treasures on the Internet that aren't made in Silicon Valley and it's these increasingly rare moments that keep me rooting for this grand experiment.

To wit, the link below will take you to a marvelous photo gallery of the most exotic fish in the world presented in a decidedly homegrown website which itself is a wonder as the apparent passion project of a Swiss ex-pat living on the Indonesian island of *Sulawese. So glad we had the opportunity to connect, if only virtually.

Link: Underwater Photos from Lembeh Strait

Almost as much fun as the actual discoveries themselves is the path of curiosity that leads me to these day-making discoveries. In class this evening I met an Indonesian ex-pat who's studying in Philly. He told me that once he leaves Philly, he's going back to Jakarta to run a few product-lines of his parents' polymers business. Mind blowing stuff that alone and it got me thinking of Indonesia, and all the places there I'm curious about including Bali and the scuba diving possibilities of the world's largest archipelago. Soon enough I was Googling the scuba scene in Indonesia and found a refreshing, old-school un-commercialized corner of the Web (messy, awesome and weird like it was in the late '90s early '00s) made up of fan pages about 'muck diving' in Sulawese's Lembeh Strait.

*As upheld by the fish that live there, Sulawese is in fact the most exotic place I can imagine and officially goes in the file of ultimate adventure destinations along with Borneo, the Seychelles, Kamchatka, Tierra Del Fuego, Assam and the Okavango Delta.