Blogs / Cosmic Variance

‘Tis the season to be giving link love to new blogs. Beats coming up with content on your own.

My favorite recent new blog find: On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess, by Dr. Isis. She manages to say important and interesting things without being so all-fired serious all the time, a skill I wish I had mastered myself. Also, shoes. As a gesture of cross-gender solidarity, here’s a pair of cool shoes for you guys out there to contemplate with desire.

Fig. 1: Jo Ghost Men’s Lima Shoes. $877 at Amazon. No, I don’t own anything like this; I’d be too afraid to wear them.

Eric Drexler, author of the book Engines of Creation that helped spark interest in nanotechnology, has started a blog: Metamodern. Expect knowledgeable commentary about all things nano-, but also on broader issues at the intersection of technology and society.

Ted Bunn has a blog! Who knew? It’s called Ted Bunn’s Blog. Ted is a cosmologist at Richmond. He wrote an interesting post on entropy and evolution, in response to this paper by Daniel Styer, which I first noticed at Pharyngula. I haven’t gone through the issues myself, but it seems like an interesting attempt to attach some quantitative ideas to the blindingly obvious claim that evolution is not incompatible with the Second Law.

I know you’re already all reading Resonaances, but just in case, you really should check out Jester’s recent post on anomalies in astroparticle physics. If you’d like to delve deeper into the experimental puzzles Daniel mentioned a while back that may or may not be hints of dark matter, this is the place to go.

Also not really a new blog, but now that you’ve read this far, you’re helpless: the National Academies are doing a survey concerning what kinds of educational materials would be most useful to put on the Web. Their blurb:

What topics in science, engineering, and medicine matter most to you? The National Academies are interested in developing useful and engaging print and web-based educational materials on the topics that you’d like to learn more about. They invite you to participate in a brief survey. You can find that survey here.

In the 2-minute survey you’ll be presented with a list of topics and asked to select the five that matter most to you. At the end, you can see how your answers compare with the results so far. And you can enter a drawing to receive a National Academies tote bag!

Let the National Academies know what topics you think they should focus on so they can be sure to provide you with materials that are informative and useful. Your participation is greatly appreciated.

Now, I love the NAS and all that, but when they list their topics you might possibly care about, things like “Physics,” “Astrophysics,” “Cosmology,” and “Mathematics” are nowhere to be found. Happily, there is a write-in box, so this is the chance to give them a piece of your mind.

Also: tote bags!

Readers of the science blogosphere would have to be living under a rock to have missed the rise of fabulous geek-friendly web comics. Everyone’s fave Xkcd has been getting CV love for a couple of years now (and I’ve been remiss in linking to the latest size-o-everything visualization). PhD Comics is also a consistent source of relevant comics, though we’ve never linked to one of my early favorites. I’m also a long time fan of My New Fighting Technique is Unstoppable, and in particular this one, which is sadly too foul mouthed for me to show to any of my intro astronomy classes. Web comics have even produced entropy-confused dinosaurs and explorations of the anthropic principle that Sean has linked to, and my favorite piece of science-themed clothing (from Achewood).

Recently, the creator of Abstruse Goose is using his/her powers for good, by endorsing CV’s Donors Choose efforts through Scienceman. You may know Abstruse Goose through the immortal lines “You don’t find the Higgs Boson. The Higgs Boson finds you.“, or perhaps “Science. If you ain’t pissin’ people off, you ain’t doin’ it right“, or maybe because it’s the only place in existence where you’d find me and Ed Witten given comparable levels of respect. If you found your way here through AG, perhaps you should just move right along to Donors Choose and give the kiddies and their teachers a little love. Scienceman would want you to.

Aquaman, however, wouldn’t give a rat’s patootie.

Update: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is sending folks to CV’s Donors Choose as well! Go Web Comics! Go!

I had the pleasure the other day of talking with science writer Jennifer Ouellette, blogger at Cocktail Party Physics, who also happens to be a black belt in jujitsu (!), and Sean’s wife. The conversation was recorded for Bloggingheads.tv, which is a (to me) peculiar project to record bloggers talking to each other. I admit to being baffled that people actually want to listen to bloggers talk into their computers. However, people seem to actually watch these discussions, and given that I enjoy talking about science (and had never had the opportunity to meet Jennifer before), it seemed like a fun thing to do. If you’re interested, the discussion is here:

While I enjoyed the actual discussion, I confess to finding it disconcerting to have a recording of myself floating around the internet. I still have a bit of the anxious 13 year old stuck in my head, replaying years-old conversations where I wish I hadn’t said something, or said something different. The rational 40 year old part of me knows these conversations were long forgotten by everyone but me, but with the internet, they’re actually not. Instead, people can replay them over and over, and (even worse) comment on whether or not I misused a particular word (I did — I said “spurious” when “serendipitous” would have been more appropriate), or whether or not it’s distracting that a hunk of my hair tends to fall down and cover my one non-functional eye. It’s like my middle school nightmares actually coming true. I’ve progressed enough in the intervening two decades that I’m not paralyzed or depressed over it, but the desire to get everything just right, and feeling faint flips in the stomach when you fall just a little bit short, has never completely gone away.

Let’s see. The bailout bill was scuttled.

The stock market is tanking.

The Hubble repair mission is delayed.

The LHC is on ice until the spring.

John McCain is still running for President.

But that’s all okay, because:

Michael Bérubé is back.

From Andrew Jaffe, I just learned that Peter Coles has a new blog:

• In the Dark

Peter is a theoretical cosmologist at Cardiff, in the UK, and the author of various interesting books.

And in case you didn’t notice it in John’s last post, there is a new blog by particle theorist Ben Lillie:

• Peculiar Velocity

Ben’s thesis advisor was our very own JoAnne, so this is practically our blog-offspring. And it also reminds me that I never properly introduced the blog of my own former student, Eugene Lim:

• When In Doubt, Do

Finally, for those who don’t scan the comments as well as the posts themselves, CV commenter (and distinguished string theorist) Moshe Rozali has joined David Berenstein at

• Shores of the Dirac Sea

Putting them all together, amount of blogging by respectable physicists has taken a substantial leap forward. We still have a long way to go to catch up to the economists.

Let’s welcome David Berenstein, physics Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, to the blogosphere. David is a particle physics/stringy sort of theorist, and I encourage you to drop by and check out his new blog, Shores of the Dirac Sea.

ScienCentral is an interesting organization. They are a production company that focuses, unsurprisingly, on science. The kind of thing they will do is to haunt the hallways of a big science conference, and snag interviews with scientists, and then turn them into short news stories that can play on local TV stations around the country (and be seen by millions of people in the process). And of course they do longer-form pieces as well.

And now they have been upgrading their web presence, and the site has a lot of goodies (including a nascent blog). Here is a fun clip featuring Leon Lederman sitting on the sidewalk and answering science questions from passers-by. (This doesn’t usually happen.)

Apparently this is some newfangled technology by which pajamas-wearing loners can share their deep thoughts with strangers. New examples keep appearing, as if the existing blogs don’t already say more or less everything worth saying. Here is a long-overdue blogroll update, conveniently sorted into categories:

Physics-y Blogs

• Twisted Physics
• Science After Sunclipse
• Swans On Tea
• Built On Facts
• The Gauge Connection
• High Energy Mayhem
• I Am the Kitty
• NEQNET: Non-equilibrium Phenomena
• symmetry breaking
• The e-Astronomer
• The First Excited State
• Fine Structure
• Quantum Moxie
• Talk Like a Physicist
• When in Doubt, Do
• The Mind of Dr. Pion
• Sciencegeekgirl
• Today in Particle Astrophysics
• Soul Physics
• Susskind’s Blog

Yes, Leonard Susskind has a blog. No, he doesn’t update it. But he was answering questions in comments there for a while.

Blogs Not … Physics. Some Not Even Blogs.

• Ross Douthat
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
• Anthony Bourdain
• Chronicle Blogs: Footnoted
• Marc Ambinder
• Girl Genius
• Ben Rosen
• Dinosaur Comics
• Overcoming Bias
• PostBourgie
• Abstruse Goose
• Radosh.net
• Sociological Images
• The Edge of the American West
• Tom The Dancing Bug
• Economist: Democracy in America
• xkcd
• Strange Maps
• Ta-Nehisi Coates
• The Bad Plus
• Gilbert Arenas
• Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science
• Skeptobot

No, I don’t read all of these blogs, not to mention all of the others on the blogroll; it’s more fun to rotate through different ones occasionally. And it’s absolutely crucial to use a newsreader, either Bloglines or Google Reader (or whatever). Infinitely easier. In the future, sleazy guys in bars will be asking not for your number, but for your RSS feed.

Nevertheless, there remain people out there who pine for the days of paper cuts and text you can underline. Female Science Professor has noted this proclivity, and turned some of her greatest blog hits into a book. Maybe we should do that someday?

And remember, if you have a blog that you would like to see on our blogroll, just let us know. We’ll forward the suggestion to our crack team of blog critics and reviewers, who will subject the blog to a rigorous screening program, after which we will forget about it for six months and perhaps update the blogroll.

It’s fascinating to read the GLAST blog, written by Steve Ritz and featuring the exploits of everyone’s favorite new gamma-ray observatory. Not that it’s perfectly transparent — it’s full of breathless exclamations along the lines of “Very early this morning the LAT and GBM flight computers were powered on and booted successfully. Later this morning, the process of turning on the LAT detectors will begin!” But you kind of get the idea, even if the acronym-heavy NASA-ese is not a model of accessibility. And so far, things are looking just great — in fact, the LAT (my guess is “Large Aperture Telescope,” and I’m too proud to look it up) just took it’s first science data! Which is indeed an event worthy of exclamation points.

Steve is a friend of mine, and a good choice for a blogger, but I have to admit that I prefer the blogs that are by the experiments themselves, rather than the people working on them. This is a path blazed by NASA’s Opportunity Mars Rover, which had a (now sadly defunct) LiveJournal that made the Red Planet come to life: “The article also talked about my little, ahem, driving accident and implied that I am getting old and creaky — OMG so embarrassing!!! What if he read them!!”

What about the new Phoenix Lander? There was one of those boring human-based blogs for the landing, but the craft itself doesn’t seem to have it’s own blog. That’s because Phoenix is totally ahead of the curve, and eschews the outdated blogging format in favor of a Twitter account! And, of course, a Facebook profile. Good call, Phoenix — very cutting-edge.

So I want the Large Hadron Collider to have a blog. Humans are fine in their own way, of course, but I’d rather hear from the machine itself, or at least one of the experiments — an ATLAS or CMS blog would be fine. There is a Hardware Commissioning webpage, which makes the GLAST blog read like Dr. Seuss. (They’re cooling the thing down, and it seems to be going well.) There is also LHC Countdown, which seems less connected to facts on the ground.

Anyway, we are entering the home stretch, and the LHC should actually be injecting protons in July or maybe August. The beam won’t be at full strength yet, and there is going to be a lot of work to shake down the detectors and get everything in working order. After that, it’s up to Nature, who will decide whether to give us some interesting physics discoveries early, or really make us work for them.

In the meantime, a blog would help keep us up to speed. Now that we know that the LHC won’t destroy the world, it could use a media-friendly makeover. That’s all I’m saying.

Here at Cosmic Variance we’ve been having a bit of an internal review of our comments policy and have decided to implement a few new guidelines. These are intended to improve the quality of the discussion, minimize any insulting or inappropriate behavior, and generally make the comments section a more interesting and hospitable place.

Our existing comments policy reads

“We love comments and aim to cultivate a lively and enjoyable space for discussion. To this end, we will not hesitate to delete comments or ban commenters who are excessively impolite or who otherwise derail the discussions. Disagreement with anything we may say is welcome, so long as it is civil and constructive. We’re all about light, not heat.”

We’d like to clarify and supplement this with

1. Since our comments section is not intended for protracted discussions of individuals’ pet theories or personal hobby-horses, we will be deleting comments that attempt to reorient the discussion towards such directions. When we are talking about science, questions from non-experts are especially welcome. However, this blog is not the proper venue for non-experts to present their revolutionary new theories of the Universe, and attempts to start such discussions will generally be deleted without warning. The blogosphere is a big space, and people are always free to start their own blogs to discuss such theories. In fact, many have already.
2. Frank and challenging discussions are a good thing. Indeed, disagreement with the substance of posts or comments is acceptable and even encouraged, as long as it is constructive and polite. A review of most comment threads provides ample evidence that many different viewpoints are allowed. Nevertheless, “criticize” and “disagree” are not the same as “insult”, and we do not think it is appropriate to use the comments section to truly insult others. We will be deleting comments that do that.
3. We will do what we can to ban commenters who repeatedly violate these, or any of our other guidelines. Blogging is our hobby, not our job, and we have little desire to enter into detailed discussions about why this or that comment is inappropriate. Better to be safe than sorry.

To be frank, we feel that a number of personal disputes, off-topic comments and people using our comments section to conduct public discussion of their own pet theories and issues is lowering the quality of the discourse, and we would like to avoid this as much as possible in the future. We won’t be perfect at this, so bear with us, and hopefully this policy will serve its purpose.