Brain Candy #11 - Odds & Ends

I was searching for information on Moe Berg, the infamous and mysterious baseball catcher, linguist and spy - who may have been authorized to kill Heisenberg during WWII - but that's another story. One of the hits that came back from the search was "Book 1102 / Moe Berg". This intrigued me so I went to the site. I found a list of every book that Ph.D. candidate Eric Leuliette has ever read. You can find it too at http://spot.colorado.edu/~leuliett/fw_table_home.html.

The top page is titled "Books Read Tables and Charts". Here Eric offers for downloading a complete list in several formats of the books he has read. He also provides several specialty tables, like the longest books he's read and his most frequently read authors, reading statistics (he reads an average of 44.56 pages a day), a chronological list of what he's read, selectable by year and also searchable by title, author or keyword. He also has an FAQ to explain himself. Perhaps the most interesting thing here is a link to many other personal book lists. I haven't looked at any of these, but I suspect that many of these are as interesting as Eric's site, if not more so.

The actual information Eric provides about the books is a bit disappointing. A book entry is just the information you would find in a library card catalog; this site doesn't tell you much about the books. But as I browsed through the list, I was fascinated. I found titles of books I once intended to read, but never got around to and then eventually forgot about. You might also think about the patterns in what he read. This isn't a site that jumps right out at you as useful, but I found it interesting. You might find it's worth a look.

The other site that impressed me is Homework Heaven at http://www.homeworkheaven.com. Somehow, I got on their e-mail list. Every week or so, I get a list of several useful research sites for the homework problems, from grade schoolers to college students. One issue of the newsletter highlighted sites such as "Cell Biology Problem Sets & Tutorials," "The History of Native Americans in West Virginia," "Medieval & Renaissance Musical Instruments" and "1763 - 1776, The Road to Independence". These sites and others like them caught my eye. They have a broader appeal than to kids doing homework, so I visited the parent site. It is organized a lot like Yahoo (http://www.yahoo.com); you start at a high-level menu of general categories. As you make selections, you get more specific menus until, hopefully, you get what you want. They have a lot of material. It looks like a site to seriously indulge your curiosity in any academic subject. Make sure you share it with your kids when they have a project.