California Home Page (Topics include Travel & Vacations, Doing Business, Living & Learning, Working, Natural Resources, Environmental Protection, Your Government, Emergency Relief)

California State Insignia (was at library.ca.gov/california/cahinsig.html) (State Animal, Bird, Color, Dance Fife and Drum Corps, Fish, Flag, Flower, Folk Dance, Fossil, Gemstone, Insect, Marine Fish, Marine Mammal, Mineral, Motto, Nickname, Poet Laureate, Prehistoric Artifact, Reptile, Rock, Seal, Soil, Song, Theater, and Tree)

Catholic Encyclopedia

Fact Monster, from Information Please 

Contains an encyclopedia, World and News, U.S., People, Word Wise, Science, Math, Sports, Cool Stuff, Games and Quizzes, and Homework Cenbter.

Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing 

Contains a glossary of computer terms.

Put in "Printer Cable", and you'll get Prince Albert.  Not bad.

The absurdity of partisanship

Lying in Ponds is an attempt to quantify and analyze partisanship in the American punditocracy. Lying in Ponds believes that a lack of excessive partisanship is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for constructive punditry. The views of pundits who are excessively partisan cannot be taken seriously, because their ulterior motives or uncontrolled biases are certain to frequently contaminate their judgements.

Lying in Ponds currently tracks the Democratic and Republican biases of all of the regular political columnists from the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post

If you live in Southern California, and you feel an earthquake, click Did you feel it? to report it.

Additional links: Main page is

Files for each state have the following data for each feature:

Feature ID Number (FID)
State Alpha Code
Feature Name
Feature Type
County Name
State Number Code (FIPS Code)
County Number Code (FIPS Code)
Primary Latitude (DMS)
Primary Longitude (DMS)
Primary Latitude (decimal degrees)
Primary Longitude (decimal degrees)
Source Latitude (DMS)
Source Longitude (DMS)
Source Latitude (decimal degrees)
Source Longitude (decimal degrees)
Elevation
Estimated Population
Federal Status
Cell Name

Note: Feature Type of "ppl" is a populated place, such as a city or town.

Go to the section labeled "Delimited Format Files using pipe symbol", and find the file for the state you're interested in, and then either save it in a text file (right click, save file as...) or copy sections of it, and paste them into Excel.  Then use Data -> Text-to-columns, giving the pipe character (|) as the delimiter.  Note the latitude and longitude for input to the more accurate information provided by the USGS Datasheets.

NGS means National Geodetic Survey.  To find information about any point, first determine its coordinates.  Example: Mt. Whitney is 36º34'42" N, 118º17'33" W, so enter the coordinates as N363442, W1181733.  Then adjust the radius -- if your coordinates are accurate to the second, then you should set it to 0.1 because a second is 0.02 miles.  If only the minutes are accurate, then set the radius to 3 miles, because a minute is a little over a mile.  Then click "Select all", then click "Get datasheets".  You will then see the datasheets, concatenated together.  Each datasheet is numbered, and contains "CURRENT SURVEY CONTROL" information giving longitude, latitude, and elevation in meters and feet.  Near the bottom of each data sheet is a verbal description of the marker, or "station", whose position is identified by the data sheet.