About 6 years ago, I wrote about a wonderful interactive website that explored the creatures of the sea, organized by depth. The website was courtesy of Neal.Fun, which continues to deliver unexpected interactive web-based delights running the gamut from total (but entertaining) wastes of time to more obviously educational interactive explorations of random topics. What fascinates me the most is that I found myself happily interacting with these adorable mini-websites and unconsciously learning things! That takes a real talent, like hiding a dog’s medicine in cheese. Sure, you’ve taken the medicine, but hey, cheese!

Here’s a quick rundown of the fun, interactive things Neal.Fun offers:

• The Password Game – This one felt VERY familiar. It asks you to choose a password and keeps adding new and increasingly more difficult standards for the password. We’ve all been there!
• Space Elevator – Like The Deep Sea, but an exploration of the skies instead
• Wonders of Street View – My current fave, this one lets you do Google Street View-type exploration of places of which I’d never heard!
• Draw a Perfect Circle – Exactly what It sounds like. My best score was 94%!
• Asteroid Launcher – I honestly found this one a little disturbing. You start with a map of where you are and decide where to drop the asteroid. It tells you how many people were killed. Next…
• Days Since Incident – Really interesting. Tells you the number of days (and the location and magnitude) since events like earthquakes of varying magnitudes, solar flares of varying classes, interplanetary shocks, hurricanes, etc. We live in a messy, chaotic place!
• Design the Next iPhone – Just what it sounds like with all the standard features, but with fun additions like googly eyes and copter blades
• Absurd Trolley Problems – You choose whether or not to pull the lever. If you pull it, you save the 5 people on the tracks, but you then destroy/kill an ever=increasing list of persons and/or things. Weird but not uninteresting
• Earth Reviews – One of my faves. Read other people’s reviews of things like sleep and sweating and dogs and write your own for others to read
• Let’s Settle This – You get to vote on various famous and infamous internet debates, then learn if your opinion agrees with the popular opinion
• Ambient Chaos – Mix your own soundscape using ambient noises. Fun idea, but I had a hard time hearing some of the noises
• Ten Years Ago – Shows you what various popular websites looked like on the current date 10 years back
• Rocks – Balancing rocks of varying sizes on each other to create virtual cairns. Surprisingly soothing activity
• Sell! Sell! Sell! – A visual list of the best selling items, billed as the products that “won capitalism”
• Universe Forecast – Tells the future of the universe, including things like the next coming of Halley’s Comet, the ETAs of various man-made space crafts, stars set to explode, and the eventual extinction of all life on Earth (don’t worry, according to this site, it’s 800 million years away)
• The Auction Game – Guess the most recent sale prices of major works of art
• Printing Money – A visual representation of the revenues of everything from minimum-wage workers to major corporations’ earnings
• Life Stats – This one was really interesting. You put in a birthdate and it tells you things like how many times your heart has beaten and how many breaths you’ve taken. It also tells you about the increase (or decrease) of various metrics since your birth. For example, the number of people living in extreme poverty has decreased by 80% since I was born!
• The Deep Sea – Still my fave. Sea creatures by maximum depth
• The Size of Space – A visual guide to scale in space starting with a human and going all the way up to the observable universe
• Share This Page – Just what it sounds like, but with some surprises
• Dark Patterns – This one educates us about how some websites try to trick or mislead you into interacting with their sites without you realizing it. A good lesson for us all
• Who Was Alive? – Site that lets you plug in a year and see which famous characters were knocking about at that time
• Where Does the Day Go? – This mini-site helps you analyze how you spend your days and even makes suggestions for how to improve your waking hours. Surprisingly fun and definitely made me think
• Life Checklist – Exactly what it sounds like. Felt good to check things off the list. I’ve completed 57 out of the listed 66 items!
• Speed – lets you know how fast you’re moving through the world and through space
• Paper – This one, I didn’t really get. You can keep folding a piece of paper to learn the equivalent of its folded thickness. Why do I care?
• Draw Logos From Memory – Okay, this one is a total blast. Exactly like it sounds. I am way less observant than I thought!
• Progress – Visual representation of your progress towards things like the next minute and next Valentine’s Day. Seems kind of like a coding class exercise, but not unpleasant
• Spend Bill Gates’s Money – Just what it sounds like. You can virtually buy and sell everything from a Big Mac to an NBA Team using $100,000,000,000 of Bill Gates’s money.
• Baby Map – This is a fun one to watch for a while. It’s a world map with countries lighting up every time a baby is born in that country. You can also scroll down and see each country’s newborn stats for the day. While I’m writing this, India is in first place, gaining 1 newborn per second, with China in second place, getting a new baby about every 2 seconds. Interesting and also sobering

You can check out all the micro-sites above on the Neal.Fun website.