'Research' on the Internet

It’s reading period at Harvard, and true to style, even Crimson columnists, tireless public servants though we may seem, do occasionally turn our minds towards ways to improve our academic lots in life—which is to say, our GPAs. There are, in this modern era of curved grades carefully designed to hide their obvious inflation from prying eyes, precious few ways left to do this. One could, of course, study harder—write a better paper, read even the sourcebook articles that have been overlooked in section and so on—but this seems like an option for saps and people trying to make it into Phi Beta Kappa. Still, I could come up with only one alternative: if I’m not going to be studying more, I have to do my best to ensure that all of you (and particularly those of you in my classes) are studying less.

If you’re still reading at this point (at least two of your friends, you know who they are, just dropped the paper and made a mad dash back to their books), I thus present you with my carefully culled collection of ways to use the Internet for the one purpose it achieves better than any other: wasting time. I won’t bother to give too many column inches to the old standards—surely anyone reading this online has already checked their e-mail twice and read the away messages of everyone on their buddy lists—but when none of your friends on thefacebook.com have written anything on your wall in a week and you’ve already read all of the stories on The Onion (www.theonion.com) and every other legitimate newspaper that has a web site (www.nytimes.com), you’ll always have the things on this list to fall back on.

By far the easiest way to lose a few hours online is by playing mind numbingly stupid flash games, a great source of which is www.addictinggames.com (don’t mind the name—they’re kidding, I promise). You can’t go wrong (or right…) with any of the hundred or so options they present. Some of the more interesting include “Kitten Cannon” (kittencannon.html at the above address), where you shoot a kitten out of a cannon at trampolines, spikes, and kitten-eating plants, and “The Helicopter Game” (addictinggames.com/helpicopter.html), in which you ‘pilot’ a helicopter through a tunnel while avoiding ominous-looking hovering green blocks. My roommate’s high score in the latter game is 3,458, and if you can beat it and take a screenshot for proof, I’ll do my best to give you a shoutout in a future column.

Ec concentrators will appreciate “Fishy” (www.ebaumsworld.com/fishy.html), in which you start out as a small guppy and eat your way to dominance of your pond, and budding physicists will enjoy “Cannon Ball” (www.2flashgames.com/f/f-52.htm), which has you aiming a cannon to account for wind speed and firing over a mountain at an enemy castle. Those without the competitive edge can “play” Tetris 1d (www.tetris1d.org), a game that’s impossible to lose (think about it, or just visit the site).

If you’ve never given up on anything before in your life, grab a soft drink and enough food to get you through the next few days and head over to www.holdthebutton.com, which isn’t quite a game but I promise it’ll be a humbling experience for those who are always above the 80th percentile on everything they do.

There exist more artistic wastes of time as well—www.createbands.com allows you to build an ensemble that would fit in perfectly well in the indy music scene here at Harvard, and the Farmer Shop Quartet (which I’ve conveniently linked at tinyurl.com/2d8m to make up for the fact it has a horribly long address) allows you to make one that would fit in at Cornell. At www.isketch.com, you can pit your drawing talents against those of your roommates (or those of complete strangers, if your roommates are more responsible than you are) in a game that very closely resembles Pictionary.

There are also a number of online resources where Harvard is dolefully under-represented and could use some love from our neck of the woods; not the least of these is www.profquotes.com, which highlights funny things that professors have said—surely they’re all scrawled in the margins of your notebook anyway, so you might as well put them (anonymously, if you like) where your peers, your professors, and the national press can read them.

Before I leave you all to your bottomless pits of procrastination, the somber educational side of me feels it my duty to provide some links of more genuine value to adequately counterweight the drivel I’ve thus far laid down. The Harvard Library web site, geeky a suggestion as it may be, is actually a nice place to waste time—ProQuest Historical Newspapers can get you the complete content of a handful of widely syndicated newspapers, advertisements included, from any date back as far as the mid 19th century, and the Naxos Music Library is one (perfectly legal) way to listen to some 85,000 songs (not Billboard top 100 stuff, but a good collection of classical and jazz works) all from the comfort of your desk chair. Both are accessible through the e-resources page at lib.harvard.edu. And if you want to feel like a good person, www.thehungersite.com can help: every time you click the button on their page they donate ad revenue to good causes. Just think how much harm you’re doing the world whenever you aren’t clicking…

I’m going to sneak quietly back to my studying (though not before checking to see if anyone has changed their profile in the past 15 minutes), but before I do, I’d like once more to encourage the following kind of thinking: it’s Friday and your exams don’t actually start for nearly a week. Go out, hang out with your friends, put off your work a bit longer so that I can catch up, and remember when you get back that the online version of beer pong (http://www.2flashgames.com/f/f-593.htm) is almost as much fun as the real thing.

Matthew A. Gline ‘06 is a physics concentrator in Quincy House. His column appears regularly.