A little over a year ago we had great fun with Lurker Day, in which folks who read the blog but rarely comment were invited to bust out of their shell a little bit, say hi, and tell us why they think the blog is so wonderful. (At Cosmic Variance, we’re all about positive energy.) Now we are informed by Dr. Free-Ride that the second week in January has been declared De-Lurking Week. A whole week! Just to de-lurk. Seems a bit extravagant, but we must go along with what the blogosphere orders.
So leave a comment, especially if you usually don’t. This should fill some time while I am presently too busy to complete planned posts on gourmet chocolate, how to write a research paper, path-dependent utility, nationalism, understanding, moral humanism, and the beginning of the universe. There’s some incentive for you.
Note: Following Phil Plait’s suggestion, we’re experimenting with the wp-cache plugin. This speeds up performance by storing pages in a cache, rather than dynamically generating them each time they are accessed. The downside seems to be that comments don’t show up as long as the pages are cached. So we’ve set them to be cached for about three minutes, after which your comments should appear. There’s got to be a better way…
A retiree with no science background, but I really enjoy outreach lectures and popular books on astronomy/cosmology. Some topics fly over my head, but there are a good mix of topics here to entertain everyone.
American scientists seem to be forced into the ID/creationist debate probably much more than they would like to engage themselves in. It is a bizarre feature of an otherwise so technologically advanced nation.
I do also like political topics every once in a while. For a nation engaged in a major war longer than the WWII, producing over a million refugees and possibly 500,000 Iraqi deaths, it does seem to me the homeland is somewhat dissociated from all that.
Thank you for such a fascinating site.
I am probably one of the younger readers of Cosmic Variance – a high school freshman from Hong Kong. Been reading this blog since September 2006, and I have to say that I find it immensely interesting. What I don’t understand is why I seem to be the only one at school who is interested in physics enough to read about it.
Anyway, back to lurking…
Hi!
I’m a Math and Physics student from central Europe (Austria). I’m just enjoying to read the great posts in this blog.
thx
Pingback: Star Stryder » Blog Archive » Getting your Blog On
Hello!
Medical student lurker here. I’m interested in just about all branches of science and love reading about the latest scuttlebutt in the parallel scientific world of physics/astronomy/mathematics. The closest I got to the physics on this blog was a brief and stormy affair with quantum mechanics in my physical chemistry class in undergrad. Phew, I’m glad that’s over! Keep up the good work, educating the unwashed masses.