Blogs / Cosmic Variance

I’m going to take a vacation from blogging for a little while. Partly a mental-health break, partly a need to get other stuff done. But there are many things I would love to blog about! So here is a list of recent stuff I’ve saved — you can fill in for yourself all the illuminating and entertaining words that would undoubtedly accompany a full-blown discussion.

• Algae! The Editors chide me for carelessly conflating ethanol and biofuels. Fair enough. If algae are a clean and efficient way to capture and store energy from the Sun, I’d be all for it.
• Meanwhile, we continue to heavily subsidize corn for ethanol, and as a result people are dying.
• Don’t like your government? Take to sea and create your own!
• At some point I will say more about Ben Rosen’s great blog, and especially Harold Rosen’s great entry for the Google Lunar X-Prize, about which Deborah Castleman blogs here. Private ingenuity will be crucial to the future of human spaceflight, especially when NASA can’t remember how to replicate its heat shields from the 1960’s.
• I was going to score some non-partisanship points by criticizing Barack Obama for peddling nonsense about autism and vaccinations, just as John McCain does. (Hint: there is no connection!) Then I noticed that Hillary Clinton does the same thing, sadly. And, worse, Clinton has bought into John McCain’s panderiffic notion of declaring a summer holiday on gas taxes — at least Obama has come out squarely against that. (Encouragement to burn more fossil fuels is probably not sound policy.)
• You might also be interested in Michael Berube’s rundown of the candidates stances on disability issues. McCain’s, you’ll be unsurprised to hear, consists of exhortations along the lines of “Hey, disabled folks! Suck it up!”
• John McCain doesn’t want you to forget that Barack Obama is the preferred candidate of Hamas. He’s also the preferred candidate of nearly everyone outside the U.S., but whatever.
• At The Corner, Michael Novak continues Jonah Goldberg’s project of portraying Fascism as left-wing. His evidence is that a friend of Albert Camus’s joined the Nazi Party because everything in the world had lost its meaning. Novak seems to miss the fact that this anecdote proves the opposite of his point — Camus’s friend became a Nazi because the Nazis provided “a meaning in the destiny of our nation,” not because they denied the existence of objective meaning. But keep trying!
• Gerard ‘t Hooft proposes a locally finite model for gravity. A related discussion of whether the universe is continuous or discrete appears in an article from FQXi, which is annoyingly only available in pdf. I actually think the universe really is continuous, not discrete, for reasons that might become clear if I can just get this paper finished.
• Tomorrow, April 29, is Duke Ellington’s birthday. He was the master.

  And here is the orchestra, with Paul Gonsalves on tenor.

• Oops, almost forgot this one: Cosmo Girl! suggests you should design your own religion, just like you design your favorite Starbucks coffee beverage. (Simile theirs.)

Be excellent to each other.

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.

Today is my first true blogiversary — Preposterous Universe opened for business on Leap Day 2004, so I only get to celebrate once every four years.

Here is a random collection of some favorite posts, although this is off the top of my head so who knows what hidden gems were missed?

• Hallucinatory Neurophysics
• The World Is Not Magic
• Is This a Date?
• The God Conundrum
• Quantum Interrogation
• Feminism: Destroying the Planet
• How Did the Universe Start?

Here’s to the next four years!

Update: The post below was written back when CV was on its own. Here on the new Discover site, the way to put something into Latex is to start with

$latex

and end with a simple

$

This stands in marked contrast with the previous system, explained below.

——————————————————-

For a long time I was reluctant to joint the many other sciencey blogs that had integrated equations by providing support for LaTeX, the technical typesetting system that nearly every physicist and mathematician uses. Possible reasons for this attitude include:

1. We felt it was important to remain accessible to a wide range of readership, and feared that the appearance of equations would put people off (and tempt us into being unnecessarily technical).
2. It sounded like work.

You can decide for yourself which is more true. The good thing is, there is no wrong answer!

But right now I am uninspired to blog because my brain is preoccupied with real science stuff. So I thought of posting about some of the fun ideas in quantum mechanics I’ve been learning about. But there’s really no way to do it without equations. So for that reason, and in belated honor of Donald Knuth’s birthday, I went and installed the LatexRenderer plugin. (Amazingly, InMotion Hosting already had LaTeX installed on our server. Yay for them!)

So now it’s easy to include equations; they should even be available in comments. All you have to do is type [tex], then your LaTeX commands, then [/tex]. So for example

[tex]R_{\mu\nu}-\frac{1}{2}Rg_{\mu\nu}=8\pi G T_{\mu\nu}[/tex]

should produce

.

There are a million online tutorials; try this list of commands to get you started. Use comments to this post to try it out. (Sadly, no preview, so be careful, and this post will remain open for playing around.) One thing I’ve noticed: don’t use linebreaks within the formulas, just put everything on the same line. And use “\displaystyle” if you want the look of a set-off (rather than in-line) equation.

But now I should get back to work. So to keep you thinking, here are a couple of equations from the stuff I’m thinking about and hopefully will explain soon:

Kind of beautiful, in an austere way, don’t you think?

Posting is slow, partly because of other commitments, and also because my co-bloggers are poopyheads. So this is as good a time as any to resurrect our occasional de-lurking threads, in which loyal readers who tend not to comment on ordinary posts can peek their heads up and introduce themselves. If you see your shadow, it’s six more weeks of winter.

Don’t worry, there are great things ahead, including some potentially very cool guest blogging (you know who you are). And you are welcome to take the opportunity here to advertise important events or links that you think people should know about — for example, Chanda points us to the 2008 joint annual meeting of the National Society for Black Physicists and the National Society of Hispanic Physicists to be held in Washington DC on February 20-24, 2008. And I can point you to the upcoming Categorically Not in Santa Monica on January 27, featuring what promises to be a lively discussion on Hollywood Physics. Stuff like that.

Some people spend their holiday vacations catching up on reading, or spending time with relatives. I like to take a day and devote it to fixing up my web pages, which tend to get sadly neglected over the year. (The erratum page for my book is embarrassingly out of date, I really should fix that.) This year I sat down and made a list of my favorite blog posts ever, from the heady and innocent days of Preposterous Universe to the practiced maturity of the blog you see before you today. Actually I tended more toward the “potentially useful” than simply my favorites. I think the Anatomy of a Paper series was the best of this year — much of my recent blogging has been of the short throwaway variety, but occasionally I work up the energy for something more substantive.

Interestingly, I still don’t know what to think about blogging in general. I read them all the time, and can’t seem to stop myself from posting even when things get busy. (It’s the quality that deteriorates, not the quantity, it seems.) But the technology is still quite new by any sensible standards, and the kinks have yet to be worked out. In the blogs I read, there seems to be some degree of shaking-out going on — the more successful blogs are ones where there are at least a couple of posts every day, and that’s a hard rate to keep up. It either means that you become a professional blogger, or at least a semi-professional for whom blogging takes up a majority of your attention. (As already admitted, I can’t seem to stop blogging, but at the same time I can’t really imagine devoting more than half an hour a day or so to the practice.) And very few people, of course, have quite so many novel and interesting things to say, so we find a lot of repetition or reacting to stories generated elsewhere. Some of the more casual and informal voice of the earlier days may be being lost. There’s no necessary reason for this, given the easy access to newsreaders like Bloglines or Google Reader — one could certainly imagine subscribing to an eclectic collection of provocative and unpredictable bloggers who only post a few times per month. But how do you find them? I think there’s a great opportunity out there for clever aggregators, who can figure out an efficient way to collect the best of what is already going on throughout the blogs and bring it to the appropriate readers.

Science blogging, I think, still has yet to find its comfort zone, despite the growing numbers of impressive science bloggers. There are important questions about how to you conceive of your audience, the best way to conduct research discussions in a public forum, and how to deal with comments generally. We’ve talked a little bit about this before — here, here, here — but I think this is a conversation that is very much ongoing. A sadly effective demonstration of the difficulties can be found in the Garrett Lisi thread, where everyone (including me) got snippy and annoyed at everyone else. The real problem there, in my judgment, was not the occasional bits of rudeness or nonsense, but the insistence on responding to the rudeness and nonsense, making the thread about the meta-conversation instead of sticking to the actual conversation. It’s pretty elementary internetology that the best way to deal with low tone is to raise the tone by being relentlessly high-minded, but that’s a strategy that requires almost everyone to go along for it to work. Or to have someone who is willing to spend their time carefully moderating hundred-comment threads, which our blog doesn’t have. Of course we could be very dramatic, requiring that commenters register, or disallowing anonymity entirely. Those sound like drastic steps that would likely change the feel of the blog beyond recognition. In any event, we’re still trying to balance our goals of conducting interesting conversations about ideas in a public forum, without actually spending much time on it — we’ll see how it goes.

And we have a Facebook group. Still don’t know what to do with that, but it’s great to see pictures of some of our regular readers. Happy New Year to all!

Just curious about how easy it is to set up a poll. Why not find out toward whom the CV readership is leaning these days? We promise your answers are not binding.

Updates: We are a famous physics blog!

And Ron Paul supporters have perfected a special brand of annoying.

And polls on the internet are useless.

None of which really qualifies as startling new information, I guess.

In our on-going quest to satisfy the demands of our readership, we introduce the launch of http://cosmicvariance.spreadshirt.com, where you can find clothes and accessories imprinted with the soon-to-be-immortal words of Mark Trodden:

“Once you have tenure, it’s all edible panties, firearms, and blow.”

Shirts with the CV logo are also available. (Note that the graphic we have for the logo is on the small size. If you order one, and it looks like crap, let us know and we’ll discontinue the logo shirts until we make a bigger version.) Any profit will be quickly reinvested in some combination of edible panties, firearms, blow, and paying our web hosting overlords.

We now have a Facebook group for Cosmic Variance! But let me work up to it.

I had heard about Facebook many times, but had effortlessly resisted the temptation to learn anything about it or get involved in any way. It’s a social-networking site, allowing people to keep each other up to date with stuff they are doing. A pastime in which I pretty much have no interest, despite what one might gather from the fact that I have a blog and all that. While I’ll tell stories about travel or amusing anecdotes for purposes of local color, and mention the occasional big event, for the most part I prefer to use the blog to talk about ideas and keep the fascinating details of my everyday life a tightly-shrouded mystery.

But at some point, the “everyone is doing it, how hard can it be, and maybe it could even be fun” argument kicks in, and in a moment of weakness you sign up. I blame Carl Zimmer, who just joined himself, with the usual disclaimers. It’s free, and easy as pie — you sign up, post a photo if you like, and that’s it.

The basic point of Facebook, according to my limited understanding, is to have “Friends.” That is, a set of other Facebookers with whom you have (mutually) agreed to allow access to your profile and information. There is a quite brilliant application via which, if you choose to allow it, Facebook can zip through a conventional email program (Gmail, apple, etc) looking for email addresses of other people with Facebook accounts, and let you ask them to be friends. And then there are networks of common interest and all that stuff. The obvious use is that you can simply tell Facebook when you’ve decided to quit your job and hike across the Andes, rather than emailing all of your friends individually.

But there is a deep problem of postmodern community ethics here — who is a “Friend,” in the official Facebook sense? One group would be, you know, your actual friends. Another would be people with whom you have some less tangible, but nevertheless pretty mutual and well-defined, relationship — maybe you’ve exchanged emails, or comments on each others blogs. It’s all up to you where to draw the line.

But personally, I wouldn’t count someone as a “Friend” if I had simply read their book, or visited their blog, or listened to their radio show, without them knowing me at all. And vice-versa. I mean, I think — to be honest, I’m new at this, and have no idea what the standards are. It might be very natural, for example, for regular CV readers to want to be my friend, but I’m not really sure it fits my notion of what friendship is really all about.

Then I noticed that Crooked Timber has its own Facebook group. Which seemed, at first, like the dumbest thing in the world — why do you need some proprietary social network when you already have the damn blog?

Upon digging deeper, however, I realized it was actually the smartest thing in the world. (A very fine line.) With the Facebook group, people can come together and share pictures, or relevant stories or rants, without being “friends” and dealing with constant updates about what they all had for dinner last night. (Although advancing to friendship — or more! — is always possible.) And in fact there are lots of blogs that have their own Facebook group.

So, now, so do we. Go ahead and join up. Upload your photo (or not). Share videos and pictures from the regular “Fans of CV” get-togethers which I’m sure happen all the time. The Pharyngula group has over a hundred members — you don’t want to be shown up by a bunch of godless cephalophiles, do you?

But there’s no way I’m ever having a MySpace page.

Update: Seems to be working! Over a hundred members, and the irrepressible Mark Jackson has even started a conversation about physics-related movie titles.

Did you know that there is a new Wikipedia entry for ScienceBlogs? And that there is even an entire category for blogs about science?

And yet there is no entry for Cosmic Variance. Just an unobtrusive little mention at the bottom of the entry on the actual concept of cosmic variance (not the blog).

Hint hint.