So, for anyone coming to this blog post because of the nice stratification you see at the bottom of the latte in the picture above — do you know the process causing the layers is very similar to the one that caused the awesome fingers and rings in my tea the other day? You should check out this blog post for what’s going on there exactly!

And now that you are here, let me tell you a little about why I am blogging, since I’ve been asked about this a lot recently.

First and foremost, I blog because I need some way to archive my thoughts and materials on mainly #kitchenoceanography and #wavewatching, but also on relevant literature in STEM teaching and outreach, and some other things I find interesting. Short, anything that relates to my “Adventures in teaching and oceanography” (which is actually the name of my blog, even though my website admittedly doesn’t make that very clear right now). As you can probably imagine, I take tons and tons of pictures of waves (that never end up on the blog, which I should probably just delete, but it seems easier to mark the ones I like and upload them rather than deleting all the stuff that isn’t quite right) or of drinks (coffee or tea, doesn’t matter) or all kinds of other stuff that is vaguely oceanography-related. I take them because I just find them fascinating (FASCINATING! FASCINATING!!!), but also because I will want to maybe use them some day for either teaching, or science communication, or maybe for a new edition of my book. Or something else, who knows? But anyway, I am taking them for myself, and publishing them on my blog, where I can tag them and put them in categories and search for them easily seems to be the easiest way to do so.

But even though organising my stuff for myself is my main motivation day to day to take and upload pictures, I know that there are surprisingly many people following this blog, and also I believe that science communication and sharing fascination is super important. And while my blog started out with readers being mainly colleagues-that-were-also-close-friends, by now it’s also a lot of people that I have never met personally. And for you — anyone who is fascinated by water and all its forms and all its processes, or for you who stumbled on this blog and has no idea what’s going on but is kinda intrigued by it — I try to put more than tags and key words on the posts, and I add posts like the one on Pierre and my not-so-recent-anymore article on how to teach about the Coriolis force. Because I hope that people might either find something that is interesting to themselves and makes them want to learn more about the ocean, or because they are looking for teaching resources and then find pictures they can use to illustrate phenomena with, or ideas, or explanations, that will hopefully inspire others. And that’s what I am doing on those Saturdays on my sofa: making my blog accessible to people other than myself in the hope of spreading the fascination with the ocean :-)

Ok, that’s it for today. I’ll leave you with the picture below that I took the same day and that I really liked because of the colors and the way the building is peeking in on the right edge of the picture (did I mention I NEVER use filters and I hardly ever even crop my pictures? Yep, that’s how lazy I am). Looking at the picture below, we could of course talk about how we can see the wind on the water, or the reflection of the sun, but the picture isn’t really suited for that, there are better ones on my blog already to show that stuff. It’s just a pretty picture, and because it’s my blog, it may stay ;-)