Neat Stuff from the Librarians' Internet Index

As I often tell my students, nobody can index the entire Internet--at least, not in the way that, say, a disciplinary index or database is organized. It's too big, too diverse, and too weird. Aboutness is much easier to determine from within a subject or disciplinary context, and even there it's problematic, as Patrick Wilson told us in Two Kinds of Power (which I recently re-read).

But that doesn't mean that there aren't useful portals out there for purposes of browse and discovery, and the Librarians' Internet Index is one such. You can even get their New This Week sent to your e-mail or RSS feed. That's how I discovered the following:

• I live in Washington State and hike frequently, though I haven't done real backcountry in years. Nonetheless, the Park Service's guide to safety in bear country might well come in handy someday. (A friend of mine once clued a bear to his presence--you want to avoid startling them--by playing his harmonica.)
• Iron Man is out, which (if you're me) leads to consideration of comparable real-world technological developments. Someone at IEEE had the same idea, and provides a rundown of exoskeletons in commercial development. Neat.
• Frontline's Merchants of Cool. I first encountered coolhunting in William Gibson's novel Pattern Recognition. I wonder if real-world coolhunters develop brand allergies, too.
• Government materials and websites can be confusing to navigate, and Congress is no exception. Get help from UC Berkeley's Congressional Research Tutorials.
• Worried about the price of rice lately? So is the International Rice Research Institute.
• Real Petroleum Prices, from the Energy Information Administration.