July 16th, 2007 
admin 
Technology’s first cousin-twice removed “Information” may well be the most helpful thing you will ever encounter in your life. My friends, thanks to the lovely entity named “lifehacker“; a MASSIVE list of government resources has emerged. While touting some fan favorites (www.nasa.gov), this list contains one of the most varied and comprehensive gatherings of information short of a database backup of Wikipedia and Google Cache. It’s pretty invigorating to someone, as myself, who’s obsessed with being informed, and especially obsessed if the information is relevant. Notably absent from the list was OpenCongress, which I mentioned a small while back, but I’ll insert that here for redundancy’s sake. Here’s a truncated list of the entries; the full link can be found below…
This handy link can literally tell you anything you would ever (within reason) want to know about a country. I’m not sure “Biggest exporter of cheese” would net any results, but figures from GDP to crime rates to the internet code for a website based from the country are available. Cambodia, for instance, has an internet code of .kh. Don’t leave college (or high school, for that matter) without it.
ForecastFox does come in handy for a quick look at what weather you should expect in your area, but there’s a huge plethora of information stemming from the National Weather Service’s live Doppler suite. Base reflectivity, storm velocity, rainfall; all kinds of stuff. However, word of warning, this site does not make forecasts, it only presents the data it receives from the radars. In a related link, you might want to check out the NWS‘s Geosynchronous Satellite Server.
NSA Declassification Initiatives
You guys from Washington will love this one. The NSA has a public portal displaying recently declassified documents and a link to an archive containing over 4,900 other entries at the time of this posting! Under provisions from Executive Order 12958, the NSA reviews all classified documents 25 years or older to determine if they are fit for declassification. Once a document is declassified, it’s handed off to the National Archives. The NSA maintains a link to digital versions of the declassified documents, which can be seen here.
Not much needs to be talked about here. OpenCongress is a front-end information retrieval engine for Thomas, the Library of Congress’ website, where important texts, under consideration or not, are posted for observation. If you’ve never been to Thomas, let me tell you, it can be pretty daunting. OpenCongress makes analysis and exploration easy, and when dealing with politics, every bit helps.
Picture courtesy of: Google U.S. Government Search
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