BlogCatalog

Today's spotlight is perhaps less of a blog promotion and more of a commercial service promotion, but I was fascinated by the concept of having my own personal historian, because that's how Dan Curtis describes himself: a personal historian, and an award winning documentary filmmaker for the past two decades, who assists individuals who want to preserve their family stories so that treasured memories are saved. He offers a wide range of services, which include creating Video Memoirs and Personal History Books as well as offering workshops on writing personal histories and ethical wills.

It took me a while to find it, but today's Spotlight is a long standing blogger. In fact, his blogging career started on November 20th, 2005. That was the day when Chris MacDonald, who teaches Philosophy and Business Ethics at Saint Mary's University in Halifax, Canada, started The Business Ethics Blog. The reason was simple enough, he hadn't found a good business ethics blog yet, so he decided he had to make one himself. Isn't that how many great bloggers start in the first place? And for sure,  Chris has now become one of those great bloggers.

What has BlogCatalog done now? Here I am, getting ready for tonight's BlogCatalog Spotlight posting, looking forward to browse my favorite "Academic" category, only to find that it's now a "Education and Learning" category, and the Science category, which used to be a category of its own, is now incorporated into "Education and Learning". What gives? Obviously, someone at BlogCatalog decided to do some house cleaning, I only wish they had told me first. Anyway, time to browse the new "Education and Learning" category to see what the search for the ultimate blog brings up this time.

Today I have ventured into the "Science" category of the BlogCatalog directory. Interestingly, there is sub-directory named "Supernatural Science"... now, if it's "supernatural", is that really science? Anyway, I decided to stay away from that particular sub-directory, so I explored the "Space" category instead, hoping to find something that would entice the BlogCatalog readership. After considering a couple of great astronomy blogs, which I will come back to in some later reviews, I ended up reading post after post on The Lunar Landing Hoax, a blog dedicated to the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 70s, and to debunking the conspiracy theories that surround the lunar landings.

Those were the days. When planes were real planes, flown by real men. And when flying really felt like flying like a bird, without the high-tech and with all the elements right in your face, literally. The WWI Student Project maintained by Ted Tide is a blog that tells the story of how the groups of students at the eight campuses of the Aviation Institute of Maintenance (AIM) each build a working single-engine WWI aircraft as part of their training to become aircraft technicians. No boring classroom lessons trying to understand how a plane works, this is real-life hands-on training. I guess it's true that if you can make a real plane fly, then you can fix any broken plane.

Browsing the 'Academic' blogs section for this weeks BlogCatalog Spotlight I could not help but stop at this political science blog from Norway, particularly since I'm from Norway myself. It's called Nachspiel at Polemarchus by Sverre Midthjell. Polemarchus may be familiar to anyone who has read Plato’s work The Republic, one of the most fundamental works of western political philosophy, but what is this Nachspiel?

This is my first post to the BlogCatalog Blog as a Blogger’s Advocate, and as a researcher living my days in an academic environment  I obviously feel very much at home scouring the 'Academic' and 'Science' categories. My intention is to show that life in academia can indeed be fun. We may be stacked away behind piles of books and papers, but our lives are no less entertaining than that of most people around us. However, after searching the Academic category back and forth for a while I realized that it wasn't going to be easy to find a good blog for the BlogCatalog Spotlight.