Blog Crawl Gems

This Week's Treasures

Sandatlas has a very nice post about blogging.  I have been "seriously" into it for three months and am seriously hooked, for all the reasons noted in the post:  I like to write, blogging is effective practice, I learn things and it's a “great motivator”.  “Is there anything bad also?” asks Sandatlas.  For me that would be the “great motivator” -- blogging sucks time away from work as it is much more interesting, fun, satisfying.  Since I’m self-employed working at home, I have to set limits.  He goes on to encourage others to blog -- I heartily agree.

One thing I personally enjoy is seeing that people from all over the world are reading my essays!  This still amazes me, and is something really wonderful about our online world.

Reading blog posts is as fun and interesting as writing them.  There are soooo many fascinating things in the blogosphere!  This Blog Crawl Gems series features some of my favorite posts each week.


Galileo's Pendulum convinced me that I had no idea how mirrors actually work.  But now I do.  Did you know that "mirrors actually don’t reverse left and right ... The mirror is actually reversing front and back!"  It's true, I tried it.  But that's for flat mirrors, there are concave mirrors and convex mirrors and experiments with spoons!  This is a fun post.

Another neat post from The Artful Amoeba:  the First Book of Photographs.  Published in 1843, this book was authored by a woman (the photographer), surprising for the times.  It is a collection of cyanotypes of algae, specifically British seaweed.  This is one of the "old, rare or valuable" scientific books on display in the current Treasures of the Royal Society Library exhibit.  Cyanotype to right is Desmarestia ligulata, Flattened Acid Kelp (courtesy the British Library).






Finally, I especially enjoyed the December 27 Earth Picture of the Day -- a "close-up" of the Horseshoe Bend, an entrenched meander on the Colorado River.  Why?  because it is so beautiful, and this time of year so inviting!

Horseshoe Bend southwest of Page, Arizona, USA, as viewed via Google Earth.