Roger Minick has such a wonderful collection of sightseer photographs that he’s taken over the years:

But in the end I came to believe that there was something more meaningful going on––something stronger and more compelling, something that seemed almost woven into the fabric of the American psyche. I would witness this most dramatically when I watched first-timers arrive at a particularly spectacular overlook and see their expressions become instantly awestruck at this their first sighting of some iconic beauty or curiosity or wonder.

After seeing this happen innumerable times, I began to compare what I was seeing to the religious pilgrimages of the Middle East and Asia, where the pilgrims are not just making a trip to make a trip, or simply to return home with some tangible piece of evidence that they were there––the snapshot––they have instead come seeking something deeper, beyond themselves, and are finding it in this moment of visitation. For as with all pilgrimages, they have made the journey, they have arrived, and are now experiencing the quickening sense of recognition and affirmation, that universal sense of a shared past and present, and, with any luck, a shared future.

In her article about the future of wearable devices, Jaymi Heimbuch first links to the Bluetooth Headset Douchebag website that includes photos such as the Bluetooth wedding above. Ouch.

One expert notes that we are bored of smart phones and want new toys, and wearables are the new toys we’ll seek. However, another expert, Bill Geiser of Metawatch, notes of the technology that, “I hope they lessen the time we spend with machines and increase the amount of time we spend with people.”

Lovely photo of a bismuth crystal from Beautiful Crystals (and there’s lots more at the link if you’re that sort of person). Pruned wonders if it’s natural or created in a lab:

As with most things on Tumblr, no other information is given, especially whether this sample was found naturally occurring or artificially grown. It’s most likely the latter, which would explain the highly pronounced stair-step lattice distinctive to hopper crystals like bismuth. This characteristic structure occurs due to the crystal growing faster along the edges than at the center. As more mineral molecules are attracted to the edges, leaving less and less to fill the interior sections, the crystal craters. As for its iridescent color, that is due to oxidation.

This goes against what you’ve been taught, against what you often see, what you might have the urge to do: Stretching before exercise is not the way to go. A New York Times blog reports on studies. More here:

The numbers, especially for competitive athletes, are sobering. According to their calculations, static stretching reduces strength in the stretched muscles by almost 5.5 percent, with the impact increasing in people who hold individual stretches for 90 seconds or more. While the effect is reduced somewhat when people’s stretches last less than 45 seconds, stretched muscles are, in general, substantially less strong.

They also are less powerful, with power being a measure of the muscle’s ability to produce force during contractions, according to Goran Markovic, a professor of kinesiology at the University of Zagreb and the study’s senior author. In Dr. Markovic and his colleagues’ re-analysis of past data, they determined that muscle power generally falls by about 2 percent after stretching.