‘Tis the season when bloggers, playing out the string between Xmas and New Year’s, fill the void with greatest-hits lists from the year just passed. But a question inevitably arises: how does one decide which posts to include? There are many different criteria, and preferring one to another might lead to very different lists. This is what’s known as the measure problem in blogospheric cosmology.
This year I’ve decided to confront the problem pluralistically. Thus: here we have five different Top Five lists, chosen according to completely different criteria. Let us know if your favorite Cosmic Variance post of the year somehow managed to not be on any of the lists.
First, the most crude and common measure, the posts with the most page views this year.
Next up, an equally quantitative and misleading measure of popularity: the top five posts by number of comments. (more…)
Matt Strassler’s post prodded me to look back and notice something: we really have had quite an amazing collection of guest bloggers over the years. There is a page on the site dedicated to keeping track (as well as a category), but nobody every clicks there, so I thought I would just reproduce the list here. We have a few more in the pipeline, keep your eyes peeled!
Sometime this Monday afternoon, Cosmic Variance welcomed its 10 millionth visitor. Yay us! (And yay all the visitors!)
So, it’s an annual tradition here at Cosmic Variance to participate in the Science Blogger’s Donor’s Choose event.
Donor’s Choose is an awesome non-profit that allows public school teachers to post their needs for educational materials for their students, and allows donors to choose which projects get funding. This year, like the last three years, science bloggers are participating
A list of projects we suggest is here:
Cosmic Variance Donor’s Choose Page
I’ve chosen a list of physics and astronomy focused projects in low income school districts –
chip in a few bucks (you can donate as little as $5 or as much as you like!), and make a difference inspiring the next generation of scientists!
Last year 26 of you donated more than $3500, which directly impacted 1,485 students (super impressively, the year before we managed to raise $12,000!) This is our 4th year of participating, but I was woefully slow putting this post up and getting the ball starting. I hope you dear readers will pick up the slack anyways, and give generously to these awesome projects. Luckily, between now and midnight on Saturday, there is a special bonus: the Donor’s Choose Board of Directors is matching all donations with a gift card that you can use to support any project of your choosing, so your money will go double in the next few days. Let’s see if we can beat last year’s numbers in the next 3 days, and help some students get the tools they need to learn science!
Keen eyes will notice tiny improvements in the look-and-feel of the Discover blogs today, thanks to behind-the-scenes work of our crack website team. One improvement is that the social-media buttons at the bottom of each post are a little more clear and logical. They also let you know how many people have passed along a post via each medium.
Which leads me to an entirely unoriginal observation: the internet loves Top Ten lists. Perusing our home page, it’s easy to be struck by the giant numbers for the Things Everyone Should Know About Time post. It’s true that I like to think the post was actually interesting. (People seem to be divided between whether #4 or #10 is the most striking entry.)
But still, I’ll be honest: being at the conference I hadn’t been able to blog much, so I thought it would be good to write something that would be popular but not too hard to write. Thus: a top ten list. Box office!
So why exactly is that? I’m not disparaging: a good list is a way to convey a substantial amount of information in a well-organized form. But still, would it have been as popular had it been Top Seven? What if each entry were three times as long? What if the exact same words were presented without the numbers and bold-face labels?
No grand theories here, just idle curiosity. Enjoy the tiny aesthetic upgrade.
Woke up this morning to the happy news that my post “The Fine Structure Constant is Probably Constant” walked away with the Charm Quark (i.e., tied for third place) in this year’s 3QuarksDaily science blogging prizes. Many thanks to Lisa Randall for judging and Abbas Raza and the 3QD crew for hosting. And of course congrats to the other winners:
- Top Quark: SciCurious, Serotonin and Sexual Preference: Is It Really That Simple?
- Strange Quark: Anne Jefferson, Levees and the Illusion of Flood Control
- Charm Quark: Ethan Siegel, Where Is Everybody?
I already have a great nominee for next year’s contest. One of the most confusing things in particle physics is the notion of “chirality.” The related notion of a particle’s “helicity” is relatively easy to explain — is the particle spinning in a left-handed or right-handed sense when compared to its direction of motion? But a massive particle need not have a direction of motion, it can just be sitting there, so the helicity is not defined. Chirality is the same as helicity — left-handed or right-handed — for massless particles moving at the speed of light, but it’s always defined no matter how the particle is moving. It had better be, since the weak interactions couple to particles with left-handed chirality but not ones with right-handed chirality! (And the opposite for antiparticles.)
It all gets a bit heady, and you can’t give a real explanation without going beyond simple pictures and actually talking about the quantum wave function. But Flip Tanedo at Quantum Diaries has given it an heroic effort, which I insist you go read right now. I don’t want to reproduce the whole thing — Flip was more careful and thorough than I ever would have been, anyway — but I will tease you with this one picture.
Isn’t that the cutest pair of elementary particles you’ve ever seen? I smell a Quark in this lepton’s future.
Loyal reader Mandeep Gill points out that I wrote “prevarication” when I clearly meant “equivocation” in the consciousness post. It’s now corrected. Very annoying, as I do like to use words to mean what they’re supposed to mean. I think I have a pretty good track record with “begging the question.”
While I have your attention, fellow loyal reader Richard O’Connell points us to a poem relevant to that post: Robert Browning’s Caliban upon Setebos. It begins:
‘Will sprawl, now that the heat of day is best,
Flat on his belly in the pit’s much mire,
With elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin.
And, while he kicks both feet in the cool slush,
And feels about his spine small eft-things course,
Run in and out each arm, and make him laugh:
There’s a lot more.
Also! Flip Tanedo points out that Brian Hill’s transcription of Sidney Coleman’s lectures on quantum field theory have finally been LaTeXed (pdf). Thanks to Bryan Gin-ge Chen and Ting Yuan Sen for undertaking this thankless task. I took that course a couple years after the notes were made, and every student in the class had a photocopy. Yes, Sidney did gripe a bit that nobody laughed at his jokes any more because they had all read them in the notes.
That’s all I got right now. Just trying to lower the bar so our co-bloggers will be encouraged to contribute more frivolous posts.
Some minor but nice improvements to the look and feel of the blog today. We have a shiny new banner, so that it’s easy to tell what blog you are actually reading. And if you find to your horror that you’ve been reading Cosmic Variance when you meant to be reading Not Exactly Rocket Science, there’s a helpful widget in the right column that can take you directly to any of the other Discover blogs. Thanks to the crack team at Discover for the upgrades.
I’ve also added a widget that keeps you updated on our Twitter feeds. Right now that means mine and Daniel’s, as well as the Cosmic Variance feed (mostly, but not exclusively, links to each new blog post), and one I set up for From Eternity to Here. But who knows what the exciting future may bring? Actually I worry a bit that the blog has become less likely since I started with Twitter, since one-liner-type links to interesting things generally go there rather than here. Leaving all the more substantial stuff for the blog, which is great, but there’s only so much time for substantial stuff, so the posting frequency has gone down. Or maybe I just worry too much.
In older but no less fascinating news, we have a Facebook fan page. And — it’s down a bit, so you may have missed it — the long-lamented “recent comments” widget has reappeared.
Last summer we passed our fifth year of blogging at Cosmic Variance, and didn’t even really notice. Here’s to many more years!
When we do our more-or-less annual Donors Choose drive, we’re always pleasantly surprised at how many readers are willing to throw in a few bucks to help school kids in poor areas learn science. So now we’re not asking for money — we’re just saying thanks. (Of course there are always good projects looking for donations.) The best part of the process is the thank-you letters that trickle in from the classes that are helped. Here are some pictures from a few of those classes, using their new materials.
Ms. D’s classroom in Ohio bought science fair supplies.
Mrs. P’s class in Texas purchased a binding machine and plastic binding strips for use in repairing paperback books.
Mrs. L’s classroom in Texas purchased thermometers.
Ms. M’s classroom in Nevada bought “Fun Math Centers.”
Thanks to everyone who donated. You never know what kind of impact you may have had.
Have you folks seen Ed Yong’s massive multi-part year-end round up at Not Exactly Rocket Science? Let’s just say he’s currently on Part Nine, with little sign of slowing down.
Here at Cosmic Variance we’re not nearly as prolific as Ed (there are only seven of us, and one of him), but the idea of a year-end wrap-up is a good one. I.e., it seems to create content in the slow intra-holiday period, without actually coming up with anything new. So here are some of my own favorite posts from the last year, with a few guest posts thrown in for good measure.
- We made it four days into the year before discussing science and religion. I started off by arguing that atheists don’t need to be obnoxious to strongly defend their beliefs, in Being Polite and Being Right. On the flip side, in The Truth Still Matters, I suggested that organizations like the NCSE and NAS should stay away from offering theological advice and arguing that science and religion are compatible. But I tried not to be obnoxious while doing so.
- I took some issue with James Cameron’s Avatar in Black and White and Blue All Over. Still patting myself on the back for that title, but I think come off as too harsh in the post itself. This might be because I subsequently saw Cameron on a panel at Caltech about the science of Avatar, and he was fantastic. Anyone who is that committed to and knowledgeable about their material deserves some slack.
- Time Travel in Lost: The Metaphorics of Predestination. I loved Lost, although I was one of the many who felt let down by the finale. There’s still room out there for a time-travel/alternate-reality story that really grapples with the issues of predestination.
- It took us until late February, but finally a pure-science post that I really liked: Energy is Not Conserved. Actually even this turns out to be more about language than about physics, but there’s some good physics lurking underneath.
- In Free Energy and the Meaning of Life I strayed way outside my expertise, hopefully without screwing things up too badly. The underlying issues are fascinating but controversial even among experts.
- A behind-the-scenes look at the news show with the best science coverage out there, in Report from Colbert.
- Sam Harris and I got into a scuffle about deriving ought from is, leading to three posts: The Moral Equivalent of the Parallel Postulate, Sam Harris Responds, and You Can’t Derive Ought From Is. There are a lot of good things in Sam’s new book, and it’s a shame that he detracts from the interesting parts of his discussion by leading off with an unnecessary philosophical mistake.
- A nostalgic look at my undergraduate research, and some amazing cutting-edge new data, in My Favorite Star. (Interestingly, there is not strong evidence for a mid-eclipse brightening in the most recent data, contrary to what I would have expected. Evolution within the disk filled the central hole?)
- In case you’ve been wondering, The Universe Is Not a Black Hole.
- A foray into (fairly simple) math in Non-Normalizable Probability Measures for Fun and Profit.
- I recount a trip to the Linda Hall Library in A Shrine to Science on the Missouri River.
- We know the basic laws of physics governing how the everyday world works. An extremely impressive accomplishment, but not something that should count as a controversial claim; personally, I think it should be taught in junior-high physics classes. But it took three posts to lay it all out, not without some redundancy: The Laws Underlying the Physics of Everyday Life Are Completely Understood; Seriously, The Laws Underlying the Physics of Everyday Life Are Completely Understood; and One Last Stab. Some of the ramifications of this fact for our wider public discourse were discussed in Reluctance to Let Go.
- As an experiment I made a video to relate that Stephen Hawking Settles the God Question Once and For All. Response seemed to be largely positive, and I still hope to do more videos (with slightly higher production values), but it does take a bit of work.
- The Fine Structure Constant is Probably Constant. Explaining some of the theoretical prejudices that make physicists more skeptical of some claims than others.
- Is Dark Matter Supernatural? No, of course not. But it’s a good example to keep in mind when discussing what questions science can address.
- Picking up the theme of taking on famous movie directors, I had a skeptical take on J.J. Abrams’ TED talk in A Mystery Box Full of Red Matter.
- In our annual Thanksgiving post, we offered gratitude for the effectiveness of effective field theory. Kind of an obvious choice, I’ll admit.
- While my intent was to stick just to my own posts, I can’t resist pointing to two guest posts: our recent one by Matt Johnson on Observing the Multiverse, and Eugene Lim’s summer entry on Calculus in Haiti. Thanks to all of our guest bloggers for adding new dimensions (as it were) to our discussions.
If I were a braver person, I’d do a corresponding list of my worst blog posts of the year. And if my grandmother had wheels, she’d be a trolley.
Happy New Year, everyone.
