Blogs / Cosmic Variance

Frankly speaking, I am not big on change. Oh yeah, the Obama business was pretty good, and I recognize that change is necessary for progress, blah blah blah, but man, it doesn’t come easy for me.

I was made excruciatingly aware of this by my stubborn refusal to log into CV’s back end at our new home. Why? Because it was going to be <cringe>different</cringe>.

I actually can’t make any sense of this behavior on my part, because science is all about change. I have no problem changing topics and points of view in a scientific context. Want to know what I’ll be working on in 5 years? It’ll probably be found in the set of things on which I am currently not working, nor have ever worked on before.

But technologically-driven changes in my day-to-day behavior? Scaaaaaary. One of my students mistakenly assumed that I was a bleeding edge of technology sort of person, based on my spiffy new MacBook Air. However, the only reason I have a new laptop is because after six and a half years, my old one was sufficiently dented that I couldn’t close it anymore, and it made ominous noises when writing to disk. Oh, I could have afforded a new laptop at many points in the intervening years, but then I’d have to install software or learn to use Leopard, and that, my friends, is not change I can believe in.

So, this post is my attempt to get past the queasiness and start defining this as the new normal.

And hey! Did you see the new images of extrasolar planets?!

Ok. That didn’t hurt a bit.

Faithful readers, welcome to our new digs here at Discover. And stalwart fans of Discover, welcome to Cosmic Variance. We are thrilled to hear that our change in color scheme portends the Death of the Blogosphere. Who knew we had such power? Blogs are yesterday’s news, anyway, but we’ll putter gamely on for a while, just to keep up appearances.

To any new readers who might wander by, feel free to poke around a bit to get a feeling for the place; the archives are accessible from the sidebar, and we also have an About page. This is an extremely bloggy blog, in the sense that we are guided by whatever we want to talk about at the moment, rather than any externally-imposed idea of what should be talked about. Everyone should read one of the following two paragraphs, but not the other one:

One of the features of Cosmic Variance is that we are all working scientists, whose main activity involves doing research. We try to bring some of the excitement and inside scoop of the research process as it occurs. True, we change things up now and then with non-scientific posts, but that’s the price you must pay to attract the eyeballs of the common folk; the meaty posts about the glory of Science will always be a mainstay (and you can even use equations!).

One of the features of Cosmic Variance is that we are all working scientists, but we are also human beings. We try to highlight the human side of the scientific enterprise as we explore the wider world of ideas. True, there are occasional technical posts about some point of current scientific contention, but that’s the price you must pay to keep your academic credibility; the playful, discursive, interdisciplinary excursions will always be the fun part of the blog.

Hope that makes everything clear.

There may be some shaking-out process as we complete the transition over to the new site, so let us know if things work less effortlessly than usual. (Some of the last few comments might have been lost — sorry about that.) We’re happy to have found a new home.

Change we can believe in: starting Monday, Cosmic Variance will be bidding adieu to its life as a plucky independent blog, and huddle into the warm embrace of Discover Magazine. There will be a very brief transition period in which the blog disappears entirely, but hang in there — we’ll be back online before you know it.

Now, we know what you’re thinking: you knew us back when we were indie rock, keeping it real, and now we’re going all corporate? Yes, yes we are. If for no other reason than the thankless task of keeping the blog from crashing and handling the technical end of things will be put in someone else’s capable hands, not our clueless ones.

But there are other reasons. Hopefully the association with Discover will open up new opportunities, and bring new readers to our discussions. And we’re happy to be joining an elite community of blogs that are already up and running at Discover:

• Bad Astronomy: Everyone knows Phil Plait and his enthusiastic dissections of what’s right and wrong in astronomy and much more.
• The Loom: Carl Zimmer is another old friend, the go-to guywhen you have questions about E. coli (among other things).
• Reality Base: a great blog by Melissa Lafsky on science, politics, and the wider world.
• Science Not Fiction: Stephen Cass, Sam Lowry and Eric Wolff cover futuristic technologies in reality and in fiction.
• Better Planet: Benjamin Nugent specializes in portents of disaster environmental news.
• Discoblog: dispatches from the quirkier side of science.
• 80 Beats: Eliza Strickland scoops up the best science news of the day, and doles it out in bite-sized morsels.

So what does this mean for you, our cherished readers? Nothing, pretty much. You should still be able to get here by pointing your browser at “http://cosmicvariance.com/”; indeed, all of the archives should still be available under their old addresses. Likewise the RSS feeds should work as before; in particular, go here:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/feed

And of course our characteristic sprightly insouciance will continue undiminished. Admittedly, the glamorous blue theme we’ve sported since our humble beginnings will be traded in for an orange and white palate. But we’ve always been about the substance, not superficial appearances. Right?

Time is running out! October is careening its way toward Halloween, at which point the month devoted to the Donors Choose Blogger Challenge will be over. As of this typing, we’ve received $6,110 worth of donations, which, I must admit, is extremely awesome. Even better, out of 23 proposals we chose for support, 13 have been fully funded! Still, it falls a bit short of our $10,000 goal. And this despite the fact that we’ve been fortunate enough to receive boosts from the following awesome blogs and quasi-blogs:

• Shores of the Dirac Sea
• Hot Chicks Dig Smart Men
• Morning Coffee Physics
• 3 Quarks Daily
• Optimus Waffle
• BioCurious
• Abstruse Goose
• High Energy Mayhem
• Peculiar Velocity
• Ron Hsu
• Twisted Physics
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
• Cocktail Party Physics
• US/LHC Blogs (unofficially)

And what is more galling, despite this groundswell of support, Uncertain Principles has pulled ahead! And he’s only one blogger (plus a dog). Are you going to stand for that?

It’s a great program, and you feel great after you donate. It’s the swank $200 donations that get all the glory (and we’re very grateful for them, don’t get me wrong), but — following the lead of the Obama campaign — we’re running a people-powered donation drive here. For the starving students out there, consider throwing in $10. Contributions that size would really add up if everyone chipped in. A small price to make the world a better place.

But hey, I know how it is. Money’s tight, and in times like this you have to look out for yourself. We understand that, and we won’t be bugging you any more. I just wanted to point out to you this little missive on the subject of charitable giving.

You see Flavor Flav there? That’s you. You are Flavor Flav. Hey, it’s your choice.

Did you know that there are other ways to educate students about science than planetaria? They’re called classrooms! With teachers in them! And those teachers need your help. They’re asking for your help directly, with no earmarks involved! For the 9,950 of you that stopped by yesterday but didn’t donate to Donors Choose, consider making the plot below just a little bit happier.

Each year, DonorsChose does a Blogger Challenge, where they harness the power of the internet to bring money to deserving classrooms in public schools across the U.S. In the past we have wimped out and supported other bloggers, but this year we’re stepping up to the plate. Big time.

Cosmic Variance Challenge 2008

It’s a simple and compelling model: individual classrooms isolate a pressing need, and donors can choose which projects to support. We’ve picked out a number of great projects that will help students learn about science in fun, hands-on ways, and we’re going to be adding a few more soon.

We’ve set a fundraising goal of $10,000 over the next month. That sounds like a lot, but it is enormously less than the capacity of our readers; we get about 5,000 hits per day, so that’s a pitiful $2/visitor. But most visitors, we understand, are wimps. So if we get $20/person from the 10% of visitors who are not wimps, we hit the goal. But it’s okay to go over! If we fall short, you should all feel embarrassed.

Mostly we just want to crush the folks at ScienceBlogs, who have put together their own challenge. Crush them, I say. Sure, they have a zillion blogs, several of whom have many times our readership. So what? This is a matter of how awesome the reader are, not how many of them there are. We will also be asking other friendly bloggers to either set up their own donation pages, or hop aboard our bandwagon — if anyone wants to advertise the challenge, we can list them as an affiliate on the challenge page.

And don’t think that we don’t appreciate your efforts. Once all is said and done, we’ll put up a post that lists and explicitly thanks anyone who donates more than $100 (unless you ask not to be listed). And if anyone donates more than $500, I’ll send a copy of my Teaching Company Lectures on dark matter and dark energy. Which aren’t cheap, let me tell you.

Reading through the list of projects is guaranteed to break your heart. In a world where we can “lose” $15 billion through fiscal malfeasance in Iraq, it’s painful to see public-school teachers go begging for a frikking LCD projector or a couple of microscopes. It’s not that hard to click the link and send a few dollars their way. The classrooms make a special effort to write back to every donor to thank them — it will put your heart right back together again.

Holy crap our blog is three years old.

The task was to predict how the popular vote in the 2008 Presidential Election would break down, expressed as Obama’s fraction of the total votes that will go to Obama+McCain, and also to give a standard deviation. The winner will be the prediction whose Gaussian distribution function has the largest value at the real fraction, whatever it turns out to be.

Entries are now complete, and here they are, in handy graphical format:

Pretty, isn’t it? But a tad cluttered. Zooming in a bit:

And, in case you are one of those jumbled in the middle there, zooming in a bit more:

The mean (unweighted — sorry) prediction was that Obama would win 53.6 percent of the McCain/Obama popular vote, while the median was 53.2. The average standard deviation was 1.2%. Clearly, for predictions anywhere near the popular values, a fairly small standard deviation was required for one’s curve to poke up past the crowd; indeed, some predictions with large errors are already mathematically eliminated. Like — me. That’s what you get for going first. Here is an even closer zoom, vertically as well as horizontally, centered on my 55.5 +- 1.5 prediction:

See that aqua-colored bell curve, reaching a peak of about .27 at 55.5? That’s me, swamped by narrower neighbors. Confidence pays! I think there are about 20 entries out of 61 that have a nontrivial chance of winning.

(If we were serious and respectable, we would have kept the predictions [and, crucially, the total number of entries] secret until they were all announced. We are neither serious nor respectable.)

See you in November.

CV’s spam filter has been a tad bit overenthusiastic these days, so I’ve recently had to troll through the spam to retrieve misfiled comments. As expected, the spam is a morass of viagra ads and truly horrid lists of porn-related search terms (where “horrid” means “things that Dan Savage would not approve of”). But lurking in there is a new breed of affirmation spam:

Warm greetings! Thanks for all the information, a very nice and well done site! Cheers.

I’d just like to thank you for taking the time to create this internet website. It has been extremely helpful

Moreover, now that they’re tired of thinking only of on-line casino gambling, spammers seem to wish to join the CV conversation:

Hey!, what made you want to write on Best Calculator Ever | Cosmic Variance? I was wondering, because I have been thinking about this since last Sunday.

I couldn’t understand some parts of this article Post: Juan Collar on Dark Matter Detection | Cosmic Variance, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.

I am not sure that I can completely understand your comments. Would you be so kind as to expand on your reasoning a little more before I comment.

Sometimes, though, the spammers enthusiasm for our work transcends their usual respectful admiration:

Hello, What a beautiful and awesome site. I adore what you’ve done with your setup and graphics. Thanks you so much.

You really poses much expertise on nalize Public Schools | Cosmic Variance. I really enjoyed going through your posting. I really appreciate it.

I love everything about this site!!

And at least among the spammers, our work is being appreciated.

Thank you. You have helped someone more than you could know.

And we’re back! The blog, that is — I’m still on vacation. But we were down for about 24 hours. Plausible explanations include:

1. Mitt Romney said something nice about atheists, and God was pissed.
2. Julianne said something nice about Mitt Romney, and the universe didn’t know how to react.
3. Computers are mysterious and complicated things, and frankly nobody understands how they work.

We should be in working order, although some comments were lost — sorry about that.

Here is a clip of Dianne Reeves singing “Stormy Weather.”