Blogs / Cosmic Variance

Many of you know that, in addition to my duties as scientist and blogger, I have recently started a Twitter account. This allows me to share with the world all of the deep insights, amusing trifles, and enlightening links that are just too short to fit into a blog post.

It has not escaped my attention that the world is filled with grumpy old people (of all ages) who take great joy in mocking the mode of superficial sound-bite communication that Twitter embodies. Usually this mockery is broadcast by means of their blogs or Facebook accounts, which … well, I’ll let you finish the thought. (Some of it will be broadcast, I hereby predict, in the comment section attached to this post.)

So I was going to let it pass when our wonderful new bloggy neighbor Sheril took the time to explain in great detail why she disapproves of Twitter. Different strokes, and all that. But then she went a step too far: she linked to a column by Maureen Dowd, and described it as “terrific.” Oh Sheril, how could you?

Here are some excerpts from Ms. Dowd’s foray into honest reportage — the probing queries she asked during her interview with the founders of Twitter.

I was here on a simple quest: curious to know if the inventors of Twitter were as annoying as their invention.

ME: Did you know you were designing a toy for bored celebrities and high-school girls?

ME: If you were out with a girl and she started twittering about it in the middle, would that be a deal-breaker or a turn-on?

ME: Do you ever think “I don’t care that my friend is having a hamburger?”

ME: Why did you think the answer to e-mail was a new kind of e-mail?

ME: Why did you call the company Twitter instead of Clutter?

ME: Was there anything in your childhood that led you to want to destroy civilization as we know it?

I guess these are the kinds of questions they’re teaching people to ask in Serious Journalism school these days. (The answers were a lot more polite than I would have been.)

The anti-Twitter crowd always hastens to explain that they are not, really, grumpy old Luddite curmudgeons. The reason why it’s necessary to make this point is, of course, because they are all grumpy old Luddite curmudgeons. And here’s how we know: a little-appreciated feature of the Twitter technology is that it’s completely optional! You don’t have to get involved. It’s okay, really. Nobody is forcing you. Now, when there is something new going around that nobody is forcing you to be involved with, there are a couple of possible non-curmudgeonly responses. One is: ignore it completely. Nothing wrong with that. Another is: give it a try, decide whether or not you like it; if so, your happiness has been marginally improved, and if not, leave and get on with your life. Simple!

And then there is one quintessentially curmudgeonly response: don’t try it, but take valuable time out of your day explaining to other people why they shouldn’t be enjoying it, either. The only difference between that and yelling “Get off my lawn!” is — well, there isn’t any difference, really.

For me, Twitter is mildly amusing for three minutes a day. Could take it or leave it, really. But it’s nice to get science links from the Telegraph, updates on Penn State’s spring practice from Jay Paterno, Senate gossip from Claire McCaskill, peeks at the Iron Man II set from Jon Favreau, breathless scoops from Roland Hedley, or reassurances of continued insanity from John McCain. I find it interesting, but that’s me. Again: completely optional!

The biggest substantive complaint is that we have become a society of over-sharers, and one simply doesn’t want to be continually updated about what people had for dinner. Again: fine! Just don’t subscribe to Newt Gingrich’s feed. But the claim that Twitter is nothing but mindless inanities is just as wrong as the analogous claim for blogs — in fact it’s precisely the same claim, five years later. There are other things you can do with the technology — the technical terms are “lifecasting” [here's what I had for dinner] vs. “mindcasting” [here's a thought, a question, an observation, a link to something more substantial]. And if someone else really does want to know what their friends are having for dinner, why should you be so bothered?

Twitter is not very important, on the cosmic scale of things. It’s just a fun little gadget. But it’s a small part of something very important: a changing information landscape that enables new kinds of communication. (That link via David Harris’s Twitter feed.) Nobody has any idea what that landscape is going to look like twenty years from now, but it’s interesting to watch it evolve. Not that anyone is forcing you to do so.

Do not be alarmed! The blog has not Gone Galt in protest of the encroaching socialist menace, or have we been dumping teabags in public parks at outrage over Obama’s tax cuts. Sometimes, you know, the real world gets in the way.

But the internet chugs on! Especially here at Discover. And a good thing, too. Of late:

• You may have heard the news that celebrity blogger Phil Plait and Discover CEO Henry Donahue made a bet — against themselves, basically — and lost. Or won, depending on how you look at it. The bet was whether Bad Astronomy could get two million page views in a month, and the stakes were permanent: tatoos for everyone! Phil is thinking about a galaxy, while Henry is going for something more piscatorial, in the best tradition of scientific tattoos.
• If Cosmic Variance gets over two million page views next month, I hereby promise that Julianne will get a tattoo.
• Discover has also launched its first video game: Star Formation! Just what the title says, you get to play the Hand of God, using supernovae to nudge the interstellar medium into the right configuration to make new stars. After playing, we have more evidence that I would not be any good at being God.
• Explain evolution in two minutes! It’s biology, right, how hard can it be? This is a contest to make a video that communicates the idea of evolution in 120 seconds or less.
• Quantum Diaries is back. A set of blogs by a bunch of physicists — experimental particle physicists, more specifically — who talk about the work they do and their lives as scientists. A crazy concept!
• And speaking of crazy concepts: yes, a list has popped up on the internet of the 50 Most Brilliant Atheists of All Time. No Lucretius or La Mettrie or d’Holbach or Voltaire, but Mick Jagger is on there. Sex appeal sells, baby.

We’re happy to welcome The Intersection, featuring the bloggy stylings of Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum, to their new home here at Discover Blogs! Anyone who isn’t already following their excellent work is encouraged to go have a look.

It’s great timing, as Sheril and Chris are experts in the intersection of science and journalism (among other intersections), and that’s going to be a hot topic in the days to come. There was something of a dustup a few months ago, set off by dueling Bloggingheads dialogues, first from science bloggers Abbie Smith and Ed Yong, then by journalists George Johnson and John Horgan. Apparently Abbie was questioning the role of journalists in an era where scientists can reach out themselves through blogs, and George responded in a somewhat intemperate fashion. (He later apologized for the tone, although not really the sentiment.) Much back-and-forth ensued — see responses by Brian Switek and Chad Orzel. And just last week, Geoff Brumfiel at Nature wrote a feature exploring the relationship between science journalism and science blogs, with the tagline: “But can the one replace the other?”

Well, no. Science blogging will never replace science journalism, any more than other kinds of blogging will replace other kinds of journalism. (Of course blogging can include just about any kind of writing, including what we usually call “journalism”; I’m thinking here of the specific case of people whose day job is doing science, and who blog in their spare time.) They have very different roles. Journalists are paid to cover stories of wide interest, to get multiple perspectives on new results, and to be as objective as possible in separating the wheat from the chaff. Science bloggers are sometimes going to blog about something newsworthy, but most can’t be bothered trying to cover every interesting story, and years will pass before a typical blogger picks up a phone to interview a source before posting. Instead, they bring a special expertise and inside knowledge to a field that no general-purpose journalist can hope to match.

I’m not sure what the source of controversy really is. It seems perfectly obvious that science blogging should enrich and extend conventional science journalism, not aspire to replace it. (See also sensible takes from Jessica Palmer at bioephemera and Curtis Brainard at the Columbia Journalism Review. [Hey! A blogger and a journalist!]) Movies didn’t replace live theater, airplanes didn’t replace cars, mammals didn’t replace birds. These are things that serve different functions.

The conversation we should be having is how the two forms can work together. How great would it be, for example, if major newspapers regularly linked to relevant blog entries by real experts when a big science story broke? It might actually require some effort to make something like that happen, just because of the way journalism these days works, including the tradition of embargoed results. When the Bullet Cluster results indicating the existence of dark matter were first released, I was lucky enough to be a participant in the original press conference, so I had access to the papers before most people did. Consequently, I was able to write an informed post that could be pointed to by people looking for an expert-level discussion. But ordinarily, such pre-embargo access is only given to professional journalists. If the communities worked a bit more closely together, we might be able to more regularly combine the reportage and explanatory skills of professional journalists with the in-depth perspective of professional scientists.

Meanwhile, newspapers are dying. CNN shut down its science division. The amount of real science journalism is shrinking dramatically, and any scientist who thinks that’s a good thing for the field as a whole is living in crazy land. The old ways of doing business are crumbling, and we have to find new ways to work together.

The end of February marked five full years of blogging for me. And did anyone send me a cake? No, they did not.

After a half-decade, I can slack off a bit while I finish the book. But here are some other goodies to keep you entertained on the internets:

A few months ago, friend-of-the-blog George Musser from Scientific American visited us here in LA, and had some fascinating stories about the process of equipping his house with solar power. We were like: dude, that is totally bloggable. And so it is! George is telling his tale in a series of posts at the SciAm 60 Second Science site.

Malcolm MacIver, a versatile engineer/philosopher/neuroscientist at Northwestern University, also flew out to LA a short while back to help the Science and Entertainment Exchange with a consultation for the upcoming sequel to TRON. He is now blogging about the experience at Northwestern’s Science in Society blog: here, here, here.

The 2008 edition of The Open Laboratory, collecting science blog posts from around the web, is now on sale. Thanks to Bora Zivkovic and Jennifer Rohm for doing the heavy lifting.

As always, use these threads to pimp out other things people should be reading.

I sometimes forget that we don’t all read the same blogs, and that it’s good to recommend some of the fun stuff out there on the internets. So let me give a shout-out to Matt Springer at Built on Facts, who had the brilliant idea of discussing a different function every Sunday. Functions are one of those things that are as necessary to math and science as breathing, but which don’t necessarily percolate into the wider world. And he (quite correctly, I think) interprets his self-imposed mandate fairly liberally, taking the time to talk about various issues in middle-level mathematics. Here are some selections from Matt’s series:

• Exponential
• Arctangent
• Witch of Agnesi
• Stirling’s approximation
• Continuous but almost-nowhere differentiable

Consider this an open thread to recommend other stuff we should all be reading. Or your favorite functions.

John McCain has a twitter account. Yes, that’s horrifying enough, but then there’s the actual content of what he writes. At least he is using in creative and productive ways! No, he isn’t. Yesterday he announced:

Tmr I am gonna tweet the TOP TEN PORKIEST PROJECTS in theOmnibus Spending bill the Congress is about to pass

Love it when Senators play cool. Love it. So today is the big list, and guess what comes in at number two?

#2. $2 million “for the promotion of astronomy” in Hawaii – because nothing says new jobs for average Americans like investing in astronomy

Sure, earmarks are dumb, and it would be nice to have a rational way to decide how best to prioritize federal spending. But don’t deny the obvious: when Republicans hear “science,” they think “something to be mocked in the service of burnishing our just-folks credentials.” Ask Bobby Jindal. Or, for that matter, John McCain.

In the progression from magazines to blogs to Twitter feeds, the tea leaves are clear. I think we need a new social network, on which updates will take the form of nothing more than a single “0″ or “1″.

We can call it “Bitter.”

Yeah, I got a Twitter account. Part of my continuing plan to take over all forms of modern social media. And besides, if I am struck by a deep thought while sitting in an airport waiting for a delayed flight, don’t you deserve to know about it right away? Of course you do.

And emails like this make it all worthwhile:

Hi, Sean Carroll (seanmcarroll).

Karl Rove (KarlRove) is now following your updates on Twitter.

Check out Karl Rove’s profile here:
http://twitter.com/KarlRove

Best,
Twitter

Now if I could get Shaq to follow me, I’d hit the big time.

(Note that Rove has 13,373 followers, and is himself following 13,369 feeds. Clearly there are four Twitterers out there who really pissed him off.)

p.s. I am a lagging indicator, so if you’re not already using Twitter, you are hopelessly backwards.

As the year breaks, the internets are abuzz with deep thoughts!

What will change everything? is this year’s Edge Annual Question. Many interesting answers, as you might expect. Choose from Massive Technological Failure (David Bodanis), Breaking the Species Barrier (Richard Dawkins), Coordinated and Expanded Computational Power (Lisa Randall), Faster Evolution (Jonathan Haidt), Happiness (Betsy Devine), Synthetic Biology (Dimitar Sasselov), and more. The book of last year’s question is out soon.

The blog posts to be reprinted in the Open Lab 2008 anthology have been announced — only 50 selections from over 500 nominations, I’m glad I wasn’t responsible for making the tough choices. Also glad that they chose one of my posts, The First Quantum Cosmologist. You can also read about The Igneous Petrology of Ice Cream (Green Gabbro), Expect the Unexpected (A canna’ change the laws of physics), How do cave bats know when it is dark outside? (Pondering Pikaia), and perhaps the most courageous blog post of all time: Liveblogging the Vasectomy (Terra Sigillata). Some sort of new journalism” going on there.

Finally, if all those ideas are weighing you down, play with the David Lee Roth ‘Runnin’ With the Devil’ Soundboard (via Cynical-C). Deconstructed from this classic track.

The complete version is here, but it only detracts.

I’m hoping that, for many of our readers, New Year’s Resolutions include getting off their duffs and starting a blog of their own. It’s certainly not hard; at the minimal level of effort, hop over to Blogger and set up your own free blog in a couple of easy steps. Only after you’ve established yourself can you hope to sell out to the Man and thereby cause the Death of the Blogosphere, like us.

But there are obstacles, for example: what to call the blog? We’re here to help. I was leafing through some old emails, and stumbled across the conversations we were having in the days before Cosmic Variance even existed. The heady days of youth, when we were trying to come up with good names for our new venture. Of course there are many types of blogs, from individual rants about the state of one’s personal life and recent dining experiences to focused discussions of the prospects for health care reform at the national level. We (including Clifford) wanted something that reflected our identity as scientists, but would attract and intrigue non-scientists as well, as we have always hoped to cast our discoursive net more widely than our particular disciplines. So we were looking for titles that played off scientific concepts, but didn’t come off as complete gobbeldy-gook to non-experts. Shores of the Dirac Sea is an excellent recent example of the genre — very much a physics in-joke, but one that isn’t completely off-putting to outsiders. If you call your blog “Laplace-Beltrami Operator” or “Gravitino Propagator,” you might amuse yourself, but your audience will be limited. (Apologies if there are any blogs out there with those names.)

Of course we came up with more than one, before settling on our perfect choice. But what was imperfect for us might fit you just fine. So, offered up free of charge, here are some of the names we were bandying around, plus some extras I came up with since.

• Tycho’s Nose
• Higher Dimensional Operators
• Extremize The Action
• Critical Phenomena
• The Residue Theorem
• But No Simpler
• De Revolutionibus
• Smooth Tension
• Ultra Deep Field
• Outside the Light Cone
• Primeval Atom
• Left As An Exercise
• The Error Bar

Personally I’m partial to Tycho’s Nose, but The Error Bar is an awesome name. That blog practically writes itself. So what are you waiting for?

Those who are too lazy and/or timid to start their own blogs are encouraged to suggest additional names in comments.