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.”

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 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.