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.

The Truth Laid Bear has an “ecosystem” to rank blogs, using both inbound links and traffic as indicators of popularity. Here’s the top ten as of this afternoon:

Higher Beings

1. Daily Kos: State of the Nation (6587) details
2. Michelle Malkin (4935) details
3. Instapundit.com (4928) details
4. Cosmic Variance (4863) details
5. Tricia’s Musings (4712) details
6. lgf: helping moonbats sleep soundly (3906) details
7. Boing Boing (3762) details
8. Talking Points Memo (3314) details
9. Power Line (3041) details
10. Wanderlust Sha (3027) details

Okay, there seems to be a bug somewhere; we’re not really the fourth-largest blog on the Internets, by any plausible way of counting. Unless they are counting by awesomeness. But then we would have Instapundit and Malkin beat handily.

Choose your favorite frame of reference, collapse your wavefunction, and estimate your error bars — we have a highly nontrivial day ahead of us. After years of contemplation, Talk Like a Physicist Day is finally here, as predicted. (Falsifiably!)

Even the biologists are celebrating (intentionally or not), learning the joys of frictionless surfaces. And some handy reference guides have been provided.

There is also a Facebook group, which I mention so that I can quote the comment left there by Phillip Fernandez:

Wow, this is like being in the ground state of a harmonic oscillator potential. It just doesn’t get any lower than this.

That’s the spirit! On ordinary days, you would goof off by playing video games; but today, you can goof off by simulating special relativity. (Inspired by this post, I am reliably informed.)

And today, instead of getting stuck in traffic, just tell your boss you were captured in a compression wave!

I’m sure you don’t need much more inspiration than that. But just to be sure…

We’ve been remiss at updating the blogroll, which I hope to do shortly. Here are some fun new physics-leaning blogs for you to watch out for.

• Imaginary Potential is a group blog by five young (postdoc/grad student level) physicists in a variety of fields. This should be awesome, would love to see more like it.
• The Inverse Square Blog is by Thomas Levenson, a science writer, film maker, and faculty member at MIT’s Graduate Program on Science Writing. He obviously needed blogging to fill all that spare time.
• From the Bench is a new blog by Michael Banks. He is an editor at PhysicsWorld, which for you Americans is sort of like Physics Today, although perhaps a little less boring.
• Resonaances has been around for a while, and I’m sure I’ve linked there before. But not enough; Jester does a great job in relating particle theory talks and happenings with a spirited style.

Not to mention all the great non-physics blogs that keep popping up, of course. Feel free to promote (yourself or others) in the comments.

Update: Chad Orzel and Michael Nielsen join in the fun, suggesting blogs and asking for pointers to ones they haven’t noticed. So go there too and make some noise.