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.
Are there other media references to CV beside this Physics World story? The more of those, the better.
OK — there is a stub there — edit away!
Sure, plenty of references to CV. We’ve been quoted or mentioned in the New York Times (more than once), Seed, the APS News, the Columbia Journalism Review, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, and are one of Nature’s top 5 science blogs (or see here).
All of which, of course, I’m too modest to bring up myself.
p.s. Thanks, Steve!
Cosmic Variance (Blog)
OK — I think there is enough there that someone (other than me) can remove the “speedy delete” template, and others can fill in more details. Cheers! –s
Got as far as the stub… defeated by the Speedy Delete, but more able minded than me can take it from there.
Didn’t see Realclimate there either…
And it’s already been vandalized! Awesome.
There was an entry earlier, which was deleted:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log/delete&page=Cosmic_Variance
How the arts and science share in the risk…
from my journal: 1982
Hilton Kramer has resigned as art critic for the NYT and announced the appearance of a new review: The “New Criterion.” In reading the publisher’s introduction, I detected a familiar tone. When I came to names from “Commentary” and the “National Review”, the source was plain.
There have been several articles and reviews on music in “Commentary” recently. They have taken a critical tack I’ve found odd and unsettling. Not criticism of individual works, but generic criticism. Attacks on jazz, on popular music, on the dilution of the teaching of “serious” (European concert) music in the curricula of American conservatories and schools of music. This seems to be a pose of writers and intellectuals, politically right-wing, with an active agenda to “correct” modern culture, which they are sure has gone miserably astray.
They are “anti-… “: anti-communist, anti-populist, anti-democratic, anti-soviet, anti-liberal (the last of whom, by design or unconsciously, are cast as the handmaidens of Marxism).
They are authoritarian elitists.
The new thing here is this emphasis on controlling culture. The arts, literature, music, theater; all are seen through a kind of backwards Marxist lens, busily purveying hidden social programs. The real purpose of criticism, it seems, is to expose the hidden social agenda, which, by their lights, is the matrix and context of the work, then to demonstrate the political/economic wrong-headedness of that context. The work itself is but a means or foil for the serious business of promoting political and social orthodoxy. Art is taken seriously, the way Marxist criticism takes it seriously–not for its own sake (whatever that may mean), not for the meaning or importance inherent in any particular work, but for the place a work occupies in the social-political matrix of which it is both example and creator-advocate.
This new-conservative, neo-classical-authoritarian criticism begins with its own dogmatic orthodoxy, but an orthodoxy that is clear and formally articulated only on the political-social level.
In other words, it’s not about art, it’s about politics. Art held up to political ideology.
Their problem is, they can’t deal with art. It’s too slippery. Like a guerrilla army in the hills. So the New Authoritarian eliminates the enemy by a master stroke; it transforms by magic thinking, art, artists, and all their supporters, into pure ideological terms. For ideological battles the Authoritarian’s rhetorical weapons are well honed.
It’s characteristic of the these guy to be more eager to attack the supporters of the arts than the artists or their work. They’re realists. They know where the money is. And in the White House, having not the slightest idea what any of this is about, they have no mere sympathizer, but a crusading general.
… and that was 1982. Twenty-five years. A quarter of a century they’ve had to dig in, when anyone who was paying attention could damn well read the writing on the wall.
What I didn’t see then… was how they would come to attack science with the same ideological chain saws.
Science and the arts are, as long as each remain committed to their very different callings, bedfellows, co-conspiriters–equally at risk in an authoritarian world.
Regarding Rien’s comment, the the deletion in January 2006 is embarrasing. I don’t recognize any of the active physics editors from that time period participating, and it shows: the “five non-notable people” claim is nonsense.
But anyway, all is fixed now; being referenced in the New York times and other publications ought to suffice to make a blog notable.
I just read the ‘cosmic variance’ (not blog) entry. I wish somebody will go and delete the last line there that says “This problem is closely related to the anthropic principle”, since cosmic variance has nothing to do with the “A” word.
/lazy
Mostly harmless
Jacob,
“Rock and Roll is here to stay”
e.
cosmic variance has nothing to do with the “A” word.
lol… They say that willful ignorance, and/or denial is/are the first obstacle(s) to be overcome in order to progress through any good twelve-step program, which I would highly recommend for anyone who agrees with Eugene.
whew!
Oh, my bad… I’ll bet that Dr. Lim “believes” that inflationry theory is a hard proven fact too.
From the Wiki:
This is important in describing the low multipoles of the cosmic microwave background and has been the source of much controversy in the cosmology community since the COBE and WMAP measurements.
That need to be changed to read:
This non-evidenced and unproven speculation is important in explaining away the observed evidence for a strong anthropic constraint on the forces.
Like… backwards creationists