Webspector’s Site and Blog Inspection

Today we are reviewing a site about one of the great characters from the time of the silent movies: Louise Brooks. She is well known for her participation in the german silent movie Pandora’s Box where she played the role of Lulu.
Have a look at the image at the left and notice Louise’s characteristic haircut.
This site is called after her most famous movie: pandorasbox.com and is a nice site without any ads from google or other sponsors. This alone is very rare to find in the internet of the beginning 21st century where almost every site now serves as a surface for publicity.
But the site is not only ad-free, it is very comfortable to surf. It includes a biography of Louise and a chronology of her work in about 38 movies from the silent movie era. It also includes a huge amount of photographs of the movie star, ordered by shooting sessions which offer a good impression of the age of beginning cinematography. Louise’s outstanding beauty was captured by many of the leading photographers of her time: George P. Homme, Edward Thayer Monroe, Otto Dyar, Alfred Cheney Johnston, Edward Steichen, James Abbe and Nickolas Muray. Here you can see examples of their work.
We enjoyed visiting this site and our webspectors agree to rate it with 5 of 5 stars for it’s simplicity which doesn’t mean poorness.

This site has hundreds of fotos of tropical plants

This time we are going to review a site that shows that not all commercial web pages are the same. To begin with, Rain-Tree offeres such a big deal of information about tropical plants, with explanations, drawings and photos that it could be regarded almost as a website about plants or biology.  Of course the owners use the site to sell their products, which are pharmaceutical products obtained from the vast variety of tropical plants growing in the rainforests of the earth. However the company shows an ecological approach to making business with the resources of the rainforest. While using the land for cattle or timber harvesting destroys the rainforest, there are other ways of gaining profits from the rainforest: harvesting sustainable resources such as medicinal plants. There is a good question pointed out by the site owners: “How can we in rich developed nations tell poor developing tropical countries that they cannot exploit their resources to service their debts and feed their people when our own economies have been built on the extensive exploitation of our own natural resources?” They give an answer: economical viable alternatives must be provided. Surprisingly the alternative even makes more economic sense: an estimation states that sustainable harvesting of rainforest can result in profits of $2400 per acre per year which contrast dramatically to the poor $400 for cutting timber and $60 for cattle grazing.
The botanical products sold by the company are based on plants used for centuries by the inhabitants of the rainforests.
The company also claims to be protecting these plants form being pateted by a single company, since they put the informtion into the public purview, and what is public kowledge cannot be patented any more. This argument has already been used successfully in the denial of U.S. plant use patents.
This site shows us some good information about sustainable economy. We simpathize with the content of the site, but that is not the reason why we give it a full five stars out of five: The site is content rich, shows different faces of a situation, has lots of well taken photos and is easy to navigate.

We are convinced that everybody should have a look at this site with its marvellous photographs of the earth, our planetary system, the galaxies and clusters of galaxies brought to the public by the NASA on a daily basis. Since 1995, this has been a free service of the North American Space Agency for the general public. They started publishing these great photos in June 1995 with an image called ‘Neutron Star Earth’, followed by the Pleiades Star Cluster, the Supernova 1987a Aftermath, Earth from Apollo 17, a Gamma Ray Sky Map, Jupiter from Voyager, the Spiral Galaxy M100, the Cat’s Eye Nebula, the Hooker Telescope on Mt. Wilson and ‘Ida and Dactyl: Asteroid and Moon’, and have been publishing a photo a day ever since.
They published the first photographs made by the famous Hubble Space Telescope and have brought amazing pictures to the eyes of amateurs and people somewhat interested in deep space phenomena. This month the looked into the archieve and published a photo of the Earth with transiting Moon taken from a distance of 50 million kilometers (31 million miles) by a probe sent to space in July 2005. A clever combination of different wavelengths and obtained a photo with surprising details of continents, oceans and clouds.

One of the galaxies

The NASA doesn’t limit the publications to just photos: they always include a little caption with interesting technical details of the photo or photographed object, including contextual links for further reading.
This site gets a full five stars our of five from us because of the beauty of the images, the simplicity of the page and because they don’t have any ads or commercials on their site. We wish there were more web sites like this one.

The Astronomy Picture of the Day is also available for inclusion into the sidebar of WordPress-Blogs and we certainly recommend it’s inclusion go to your plugin page and add it right away,
And just in case you don’t see the Astronomy Picture of the Day in the sidebar, just throw away your Internet Explorer and get a real browser: Firefox.