Overlooked Links

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Added to collisteru.net on June 08, 2024

This is a list of high-quality online resources that are good to know about but hard to stumble across.

Maybe they aren’t maintained often but remain relevant. Maybe they’re personal blogs with good content but few keywords.

Whatever the reason, this is their place to shine.

Rules for Inclusion

  1. Only free resources.
  2. Some degree of obscurity required. They shouldn’t be the first thing you see when you search something like “biology.”
  3. No resources for which strictly-better alternatives exist.

Have something to add? Submit an article here.

Is a link broken? Let me know!


Encyclopedias

Books

  • Greater Books – This union of many “great books” lists also tracks which books make the cut most often.
  • The Greatest Books – Ditto, but with more lists and less editing.
  • Faded Page – A Canadian eBook archive.
  • Oxford Reference – Offers previews of today’s best print reference works.
  • Google Books – An attempt to catalog every book ever written. Offers previews of many of them.

Class Notes and MOOCs

  • MIT OCW – Class notes from MIT'

Charts and Diagrams

Journals

Miscellany

  • Internet Search Tips
  • Web Whiteboard – A whiteboard web app. I like this for conferences and Zoom calls.
  • LessWrong – Online forum dedicated to improving the art of human cognition. Mainly focused on AI, but there’s also plenty of discussion on subjects like physics, computer science, and cognitive science.
  • Bozeman Science – Great resources for the high school curriculum.
  • DIYGenius – Online self-education website.
  • Piero Scaruffi’s Knowledge Base – It may be easier to list the subjects this blog does not cover. Scaruffi is one of the most prolific writers on the web.
  • Nintil – Longevity, philosophy, social science, and more…

Other Lists

Textbook Archives and Repositories

Specific Subjects

History

Geography

Note: I don’t list them here because they tend to be overly specific, but university map collections are great for rare historical and geographical information.

Arts and Culture

Music and the Performing Arts

  • Music Theory – The web’s canonical music theory resource.
  • IMSLP – The canonical source for sheet music.
  • 8notes – Sheet music and an app to play it.
  • Piano Lessons – Free piano lessons
  • 52 Composers – Covers the essential composers and their works.
  • ABC Notation – ABC notation can render music fully in ASCII. This website catalogues ABC-notated songs, especially folk songs.
  • Similar Songs Finder

Literature

  • The Literature Network – A literature forum.
  • The Phrontistery – Rare words, lost words, studying words, carrying words, color words, nonsense words, speech styles, units of measurement. This site’s scope and quality inspires awe, opening the websurfer’s eyes to the cacophonous diversity of English.
  • The Writing Center – A general paper-writing resource.
  • Online Etymology Dictionary – Comprehensive and very high quality.
  • Silva Rhetoricae – A nice, introductory resource on rhetoric.
  • Shakespeare Online – Analyses, quotations, sources, etc.
  • Urbigenous – A nice little collection of works. Focuses on science fiction and cyber culture.

“Classic” or “Great” Books

Poetry

Other Art and Culture

Practical Skills

Skills that aren’t taught in school but are still important, such as soft skills, survival skills, home economics, and self-management.

Natural Sciences

Biology

Medicine

  • Drugs.com – Info on drug safety, interactions, and side effects
  • WebMD – Online compendium of medical information

Psychology

Sociology

Political Science

Economics

Legal Science

Languages and Linguistics

Latin

French

The Physical Sciences

Astronomy

Earth Sciences

Physics

Blogs

Chemistry

Philosophy

Mathematics

Logic

Religion and Mythology

Abrahamic Religions

Christianity

Islam

Judaism

Other Religions

Buddhism

Hinduism

Mythology

Puzzles

Puzzlehunts

I’m obsessed with puzzlehunts and have therefore collected a disproportionate number of websites on them.

Let’s define a “puzzlehunt” as any self-contained group of sequential puzzles that don’t always fall into well-established formats like Sudoku or Masyu.

Asynchronous Puzzle Hunts

These puzzlehunts never ran on a specific date, having sprang fully-formed from the minds of their creators. They now exist embedded in a timeless void of infinite replayability.


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