The gift of blog

14 Comments / Internet

Count me among the staunchly pro-Christmas atheists. I may not be religious, but I’m all about the loot. If the price of getting presents is the ostentatious display of a few borrowed pagan images around Winter Solstice time, I can deal.

inkycircus So our gift from Cosmic Variance to you is — new blogs! New to us, anyway. First up is inkycircus, a very fun site from three British journalists who are in the process of starting their own science magazine (found at Element list). The twist is that Anne, Katie and Anna are all women, and seem to be having a great time with the whole operation. (Men would feel the pressure to be all ponderous and serious-sounding, if I may venture an unsupported generalization.) My favorite category of post is men whose babies we want to bear, even if it is somewhat unrepresentative of the larger project and despite the fact that Jon Stewart makes the list and I don’t.

light pollution map The other new site worth checking out is systemic by Greg Laughlin, discussing the search for extrasolar planets. (“systemic” is the name of a Java applet for analyzing data collected in the search for such planets.) In addition to cool science, it’s full of great images like the one at left. Unfortunately this is a map of light pollution in the vicinity of Lick Observatory (see the Bay Area coastline outlined in white?), but it’s still a great image.

Finally, I note that Cosmic Variance is currently ranked 374th in the Truth Laid Bear ecosystem traffic rankings, one slot above HorsesAss.Org. Draw your own conclusions.

Happy holidays, everyone.

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14 Comments

14 thoughts on “The gift of blog”

  2. Katie

    Hi Cosmis Variance team – it’s really nice to meet you! Thank you for linking to us – we’re really glad you like what we’re up to. We’re making it up as we go along… We hadn’t seen your blog before, but we’ll definitely be back. See you around, x the inkycircus girls. Ps Happy Christmas!

  3. spyder

    It must be partly because i read Cosmic Variance before logging onto Horse’sAss; it covers my local and regional political arenas and battlefields. And thanks for the link to inkycircus: any bloggers who know that josh weldon grew up in an all feminist household and made his TV and film efforts reflective of those views, are just too cool and perfect to read.

  5. Sean

    Katie, we’re not so much about the spelling around here. I’m enjoying your blog, and wishing you the best for the magazine. Keep dropping by!

  6. CW

    Speaking of which, Sean, I owe you an apology for nitpicking about typos in a recent post—you probably know the one I’m thinking of.

    (I have a coworker who is nearly reached the point of violent retaliation for similar comments of mine about some of his emails.)

  7. Pyracantha

    As the proprietor of the ELECTRON BLUE blog, and putatively a female, I nevertheless retain my tendency to be “all ponderous and serious-sounding.”

  8. FP

    An off-topic question; Is the CV team already on vacation except for Sean ?
    Clifford has not posted in a long while …

  9. Suz

    Count me among the staunchly pro-Christmas atheists. I may not be religious, but I’m all about the loot.

    Christmas usually annoys me, at least the way I experience it in shopping malls, airports, and train stations. But I confess I like Christmas jingles, even whatever it is they play in the Macy’s commercials.

  10. Ed

    Thank you for the “inkycircus” link. I added it to my favorites. Anyway, one may refer to me as one of the “lurkers”, but being neither a physicist nor a genius I fear that I don’t have much to contribute; however, I am still fascinated by supersymmetry, string theory, multiverses, etc., so hope no one minds that I keep “lurking”.
    Nice to know that I am not the only atheist that enjoys the “holidays” [OE, holy days]/familial get togethers without believing the other myths (my opinion). I feel like quite the outsider at work as I am quite in the minority.
    Enjoy your site, and keep on blogging.

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