Art thieves can’t hide

Search for stolen treasure http://artloss.com

Your Degas has disappeared, your Van Gogh has vanished. Who are you going to call?

You might try Julian Radcliffe, the founder and chairman of the Art Loss Register, the world’s largest private database of stolen art.

The 15-year-old register contains records of more than 175,000 stolen objects, from paintings and sculptures to jewelry and rare antiques. Since its founding in 1991, the company has been involved in the recovery of more than $138 million in purloined art.

“We just found a pair of cannon on eBay – French 18th century,” said Radcliffe. “eBay is just stuffed full of stolen goods.”

Several high-profile cases have put the rarefied world of art thievery in the spotlight recently, including the theft of Norwegian master Edvard Munch’s iconic painting, “The Scream” from Oslo’s Munch Museum.

Better weather forecasts www.ForecastAdvisor.com

This site not only gives you the five-day weather forecast, but it also tells you how accurate weather service forecasts have been in the past.

For example, last year the Weather Channel was most accurate in Brooklyn (76 percent), but in San Diego, the best results came from MyForecast (79 percent). Pop in your ZIP code or city to get your forecast — and the most accurate sources for it.

No two alike — really www.snowcrystals.com

Kenneth Libbrecht, a physics professor at the California Institute of Technology, started studying snowflakes up close when he became a physicist.

“You’re more likely to study snow when you don’t have a shovel in your hand,” joked the North Dakota native.

Libbrecht got interested in how crystals grow, and snow seemed a logical place to look. He began making chambers to produce snow crystals in the lab, and began photographing them when he realized that there weren’t a lot of good images available.

He also uses a high-resolution digital camera attached to a specially designed microscope to photograph snowflakes “in the wild.” Four of his images appear on this year’s U.S. Postal Service holiday postage stamps.

Tune Your Guitar www.710.com/reload/fun/tune.htm

Here’s yet one more thing you now can do on the ‘Net: tune your guitar, provided your computer has a sound card with speakers or headphones.

You simply load the page, pick the six different string tones and adjust your own strings to match the pitch of what your computer’s producing.