Welcome!

Quoting from Chapter 21 of The Sword in the Stone, which is Book One of T. H. White's The Once and Future King:

The best thing for being sad, replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then--to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you.

I give my students lots of things to learn. I didn't want people who aren't my students to feel left out, so here's a list of ideas to help them get started. It comes from Robert Heinlein's Time Enough for Love:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

(Relevant links at: http://www.interaktv.com/LUnE/Heinlein.html.)

If you have suggestions on how to improve these pages, feel free to send them along. In keeping with my primary mission, if you see something here that you like, learn how it works and reconstruct it on your own pages.

The sidebar is a handy navigator, but not much use in a printed version, so most pages have a printer-friendly version available. You should not be printing things out, of course, because printing is sooooo twentieth-century, but if you have to have a dead-tree version, that's the way to get it.

Be sure to visit my Link Page; it's got links to cartoons and all sorts of other important stuff.