Carl's Favorite WWW Sites

This is the site I use to get current information about what is going on in the world at any time during the day... as opposed to local news at set times from local broadcasters.

This is the weather site that I use (thanks to a tip from my brother Peter several years ago) that has an excellent presentation of weather including radar displays of 6 frames (every 20 minutes) that I use to track thunderstorms in order to turn off / unplug our computers, audio equipment and digital high def television to avoid lightning damage. This link is actually to the outer level of the site, before entering one's zip code to get a customized variation. My browser's bookmarks for wunderground are to specific cities, organized along routes of travel for U.S. auto trips.

When Jean and I travel to foreign cities we even get local English language weather information on our laptop(s) in hotels, to the extent that Wunderground can tap into international weather information on the internet.

Weather Underground also has an excellent Tropical/Hurricane section that includes “Dr. Jeff Masters' WunderBlog” about current news of Atlantic and worldwide tropical weather . He usually updates this blog once a day, but more frequently as in 2005 which had a very busy Atlantic hurrican season.

This the “science news “ site of the journal Nature. I like to read this site daily during the week, to fill in fast breaking news between reading the latest printed issue of Nature that arrives via snail at our home.

This is the Dow Jones site I use to get current information about what is going on on Wall Street.

This is the site of one Richard Russell, who has been publishing a stock market newsletter of its name since before I entered high school in the early 1960's. I learned about Dow Theory Letters from an office mate colleague at Intermetrics Inc. (Cambridge Ma) in the early 1970s, Dan Fylstra. I started subscribing to Richard's then print newsletter that came every three weeks. A few years ago the now octogenarian Richard Russell started his current WWW site. While a subscription to his site costs a pretty penny, I like his constant daily stream of remarks about current events, economic, stock market and otherwise.

An aside: Dan Fylstra after BYTE had been going for a couple of years was co-entrepreneur of the world's first personal computer spreadsheet program with his MIT/Harvard Business School friends Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston. I still see and converse with Bob Frankston each April in California at the Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop, which both Jean and I attend and give our traditional participants 10 minute talks.

The following is a list of WWW sites that I have special ties to... There is not particular order to these sites – the list just grew as I mused from day to day over the last month or two I visit these sites less frequently than the first group of sites that I listed above:

This is my brother, Peter Helmers' site. Peter and his wife Sarah live a half an hour or so away from Jean and I in a different town near Rochester New York.

This is John Mauldin's entry page for his weekly “Thoughts From The Front Line” commentary on general economics and market matters. I have been getting John's free weekly e-mail commentary for a number of years – recently, the e-mail version has been missing lots of charts and graphs so I have used it as a reminder to visit his WWW site which is also free – for the price of leaving your e-mail address...

This is the site of the Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music in East Sullivan, NH.

Apple Hill's executive director Eric Stumacher has been my piano teacher for weekly lessons circa 1999 to 2002, yearly after that. Apple Hill is a 501C3 non-profit organization which runs an annual summer chamber music camp with Eric et al's "Playing For Peace" meme as a guiding idea.

Eric is also piano teacher for Alan Kay, one of the original Xerox PARC small talk interactive object oriented computer environment/ language gurus. [See a 2007 image of an instance of their 1970s small talk machine at Xerox PARC Alto Computer on my site.] in my notes our April 2007 visit to the Computer History Museum.] As a result, I have for the last few years, spent a week each year at the annual "Squeak" [AKA contemporary open source small talk] conference [see Alan Kay's notes from Squeak.org ]

The Apple Hill players travel around the globe to locations of strife giving chamber music concerts at locations on both sides of the conflicts in question. At each sojourn, they recruit music students from both sides to come to Apple Hill for its summer program to live and play chamber music together.

The Apple Hilll Center for Chamber Music is supported by generous private benefactors and (recently) funding from the U.S. government state department. I first went to my first of many Apple Hill summer chamber music concerts during my BYTE era in the late 1970's and served on its Board of Directors from 1999 until 2005.

Squeak is a modern, open source, highly portable, fast and full-featured implementation of the powerful Smalltalk programming language and environment.

When Smalltalk was created more than 35 years ago it defined the term object orientation and is the first language in which everything is built from objects. Smalltalk is deeply inspired by ideas from especially Simula, Sketchpad and Lisp and even today Smalltalk sets the bar for object oriented dynamically strongly typed interactive languages and environments.

You may be familiar with other open source languages like Ruby or Python, but Squeak takes these concepts much, much further offering a true uniform fully reflective environment - real live objects.

"The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn't started yet. Don't be misled by the enormous flow of money into bad defacto standards for unsophisticated buyers using poor adaptations of incomplete ideas."

- Alan Kay

Ideally, given my experiences and what I know, I should have started my www.helmers.com site using the open source Squeak as the basis for the set of tools I use to create it... But the short term easiest and least expensive course for me to achieve an quick WWW presence was to build off the existing Microsoft toolset I had available April 2006. Possible transition to Squeak remains a goal on my future horizons as I begin to spend some time learning smalltalk (AKA Squeak). The process of doing that transition to Squeak based tools from this initial FrontPage avenue to my WWW presence will provide possible editorial fodder for commentary as I do so...

This is the home page of my graphic artist friend Robert Tinney, the cover artist with whom I worked during my BYTE magazine years from 1975 to 1980. I met Robert circa 1971-72 when I worked for a Cambridge Massachusetts NASA contractor and as a resi;t lived nearly a year in Houston Texas. In that youthful libertarian intellectual scene that gave birth to the Libertarian Party while I was there, if I correctly recall, Robert and I met at a libertarian's intellectual hangout called the “Taanstaafl Bookstore.” The store's name was of course inspired by that phrase from Robert Heinlein's classic “The Moon is A Harsh Mistress” which like Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is a stop on every late 20^th century free-thinker's philosophical evolution in life.

After I started BYTE magazine (first issue September 1975) I asked Robert if – in the spirit of Maxfield Parrish or Norman Rockwell, he would be willing to give a stab at working with me to develop covers for BYTE – of which as editor I needed a monthly stream of dynamic expressions of content ideas.

Due to startup enterprise economics, at BYTE we were constrained initially [remember startup computer/high technology magazines are even shakier than startup dot-com companies in silicon valley] to a couple of process colors and could not afford the charge for a full color separation. So Robert's first cover for the December 1975 issue set the tone for several subsequent covers in 1976. They all were basically ink on paper line drawings with one or two process colors by tracing paper ink overlays. Robert used this technique through most of his half dozen or so 1976 covers with the exception of one...

By the time we began planning the July 1976 issue in the spring of 1976, we decided to spring for a color cover experiment for the July 1976 American Revolution Bicentennial Issue – so Robert's first full color cover was an oil painting of the revolutionary era libertarian intellectual Thomas Paine (or Thomas Jefferson according to the American political class's elementary school legends of my youth) sitting at a fanciful quill pen DECWriter printer terminal composing the DEClaration of Independence.

That first BYTE color cover painting is one of my favorites – the framed original oil painting hangs in a prominent place in our western New York home. As I recall at this writing [August 15, 2006] this was the only time Robert did a BYTE cover with oil paint media -- oil paint takes much longer than water based paints to dry! I have a large collection of framed originals of Robert's BYTE covers from the late 1970's as well as all the originals of occasional covers he executed for my subsequent publications.

This is Robert Tinney's site where he has many limited edition prints of BYTE covers available for sale.

This is the site of the Reason Foundation, a think tank devoted to small "L" libertarian thought, also publishers of Reason magazine.

This is the site of the refreshing, wonderful, often satirical and often quite amusing weekly writings of Robert L. Park, who is a professor of physics and former chair of the Department of Physics at the University of Maryland. The site is refreshing in its direct and to the point discussions of various trendy pseudo science topics that come his way from the common weal. Dr. Park often points out common fallacies in public understandings of the meaning and content of scientific topics so important to our high tech civilization. Professor Park now devotes himself to helping the public distinguish genuine scientific advances from foolish and fraudulent claims. A frequent guest on news programs, he posts a provocative and widely-read weekly column on the internet, and is the author of �Voodoo Science: the Road from Foolishness to Fraud. Dr. Park divides his time between the University and the Washington, DC office of the American Physical Society, which he opened in 1982. He is author of more than a hundred technical papers on the structure and properties of single-crystal surfaces. [Material here adapted from text located at www.bobpark.org by CH..] I have been getting Dr. Park's weekly e-mails since the late 1980's and have recently taken to just goint to this URL every weekend to read his latest commentries.

This is the site of the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, a nexus of information on debunking of tomfoolery regarding the claims of psychics, cold fusion believers and other assorted theists of traditional "name" religions / nut religions. This organization also publishes The Skeptical Inquirer magazine.

This is the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra's site. Jean and I frequently attend RPO concerts in the University of Rochester's Eastman Theater where we get our doses of live symphonic music...

This is the site of "The Hacker's Diet," 2005 edition, a wonderful book written by my acquaintance from my BYTE magazine days, John Walker, who founded AutoDesk. At a lunch in California in the 1980's at the annual Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop, we compared notes on how each of us had respectively lost significant percentages of our peak body weight. I wholeheartedly endorse John's one dimensional Kalman filter method of weight control fully coverd by this site. I had – in parallel before that lunch conversation – invented a crude approximation of John's method using arithmetic moving averages rather than the exponential weighting ideas of a Kalman filter.

I think in the same conversation, or a similar one a year or so later at another AMW John recommended a simplified form of his AutoCAD program, called AutoSketch, which I have been using as my CAD tool progressing from version 2 through the current version that I use (Version 9). I used AutoSketch to create all my CAD drawings that illustrate projects on www.helmers.com.