I found this over at Recommended, which is an excellent site, even though the owner never responds to comments, or to my fan mail. . . doesn’t return my calls. . . won’t even leave the house when she sees me standing outside it at 3 in the morning.

Some people, sheesh.

But I digress. The Gmail Spam-tracking trick is a terrific way to see if websites you leave your email on are really following their own privacy policy. Go check it out.

Okay, book fans! This one is for you:

I found this over at a new blog discovery of mine: Whirling Open.

LibraryThing.com is a website that allows you to catalog your books online, and find people who read similar books, and get recommendations from them as well. It also includes widgets you can add on your blog or web page to display random books from your Online Library.

I know what you are thinking: “Entering all my books sounds incredibly tedious – Are you Nuts?”

The answer is. No it isn’t, and yes I am. Entering your books is as easy as entering the author or part of the book title. LibraryThing will search and display a list of matches. All you need to do is click on a match and it is added to your online library, along with all of the information about the book, including a cover-shot!

Its social bookmarking for books, and its addictive.

You can see the books i’ve entered by clicking on my “About Me” button in the upper left hand corner. .. fyi

Today is Original Cindy’s Birthday. (We won’t say how old she is)

Happy Birthday, my Love!!

Tony Writes:

Hi, Im 14 years old and Chemistry really is my favorite subject in school,
and out. I had a question about CO2. Is it possible to break the bonds that
hold the CO2 molecules together?
ex.passes through something and carbon is trapped and air passes on?
Thanks a lot

Yes, it is possible to break the bonds that link the carbons to the oxygens in CO2. However, doing so is not easy, and outside the laboratory there is only one practical way to do this. CO2 is very stable and non-reactive, which is why it survives so long in our atmosphere, and contributes to global warming.

Scientists are working on a method for transforming carbon dioxide (CO2) into fuel, using catalysts and sunlight. However, it could be decades before this can be done on a large scale So there still really is only one way to convert large amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) into oxygen (O2) – Photosynthesis.

Yep. What scientist have been able to do only with great difficulty – and usually with dangerous substances and expensive equipment – nature has been doing for a billion years with ease.

I know that “plant a tree” wasn’t the answer you were looking for, but photosynthesis is still the most efficient way to purify CO2, and it probably will remain so for another century or so.

The following is a Sponsored Post:

I’ve never considered blogging for money. Seriously. I like having lots of readers, and I very much enjoy the feedback from my adoring fans, but I don’t do this for money. I don’t put google ads or Amazon.com links on my site. I don’t get paid to post anything.

Until Now.

ReviewMe is a site / service that pays bloggers to write reviews on their blogs. Advertisers will pay a certain amount of money for a review of their product or website, the ReviewMe folks get half of the money, and the blogger gets the other half.

It almost seems too good to be true, and I can’t help but wonder what the catch is. However, frequent visitors to these pages know that I am always trying new things here on my blog, because that is half the fun of blogging. So I’m going to give this service a shot, and I will post more as I move forward.

In fact, this post is what the ReviewMe folks call a Test-Run of their service. To get you started, they will pay you your blog’s going rate (going rate is calculated based on a number of criteria) for a review of their ReviewMe Site. This is a really good idea, since it can help any interested bloggers to get their feet wet, so to speak, and learn a bit about writing reviews.

The “test-run” also gives the blogger a chance to see how responsive the ReviewMe folks are, and how quickly they pony-up the money. I will probably have more on this later, but for now, we’ll wait and see if this is worth pursuing. If not, then my relationship with ReviewMe will go the way of “Ask a Chemist” and my “Forums” page.

Cheers!

A Canadian advertisement for Science World:

With a Kiss

Pretty funny. . .