Internet

The end of February marked five full years of blogging for me. And did anyone send me a cake? No, they did not.

After a half-decade, I can slack off a bit while I finish the book. But here are some other goodies to keep you entertained on the internets:

A few months ago, friend-of-the-blog George Musser from Scientific American visited us here in LA, and had some fascinating stories about the process of equipping his house with solar power. We were like: dude, that is totally bloggable. And so it is! George is telling his tale in a series of posts at the SciAm 60 Second Science site.

Malcolm MacIver, a versatile engineer/philosopher/neuroscientist at Northwestern University, also flew out to LA a short while back to help the Science and Entertainment Exchange with a consultation for the upcoming sequel to TRON. He is now blogging about the experience at Northwestern’s Science in Society blog: here, here, here.

The 2008 edition of The Open Laboratory, collecting science blog posts from around the web, is now on sale. Thanks to Bora Zivkovic and Jennifer Rohm for doing the heavy lifting.

As always, use these threads to pimp out other things people should be reading.

Yeah, I got a Twitter account. Part of my continuing plan to take over all forms of modern social media. And besides, if I am struck by a deep thought while sitting in an airport waiting for a delayed flight, don’t you deserve to know about it right away? Of course you do.

And emails like this make it all worthwhile:

Hi, Sean Carroll (seanmcarroll).

Karl Rove (KarlRove) is now following your updates on Twitter.

Check out Karl Rove’s profile here:
http://twitter.com/KarlRove

Best,
Twitter

Now if I could get Shaq to follow me, I’d hit the big time.

(Note that Rove has 13,373 followers, and is himself following 13,369 feeds. Clearly there are four Twitterers out there who really pissed him off.)

p.s. I am a lagging indicator, so if you’re not already using Twitter, you are hopelessly backwards.

I’m hoping that, for many of our readers, New Year’s Resolutions include getting off their duffs and starting a blog of their own. It’s certainly not hard; at the minimal level of effort, hop over to Blogger and set up your own free blog in a couple of easy steps. Only after you’ve established yourself can you hope to sell out to the Man and thereby cause the Death of the Blogosphere, like us.

But there are obstacles, for example: what to call the blog? We’re here to help. I was leafing through some old emails, and stumbled across the conversations we were having in the days before Cosmic Variance even existed. The heady days of youth, when we were trying to come up with good names for our new venture. Of course there are many types of blogs, from individual rants about the state of one’s personal life and recent dining experiences to focused discussions of the prospects for health care reform at the national level. We (including Clifford) wanted something that reflected our identity as scientists, but would attract and intrigue non-scientists as well, as we have always hoped to cast our discoursive net more widely than our particular disciplines. So we were looking for titles that played off scientific concepts, but didn’t come off as complete gobbeldy-gook to non-experts. Shores of the Dirac Sea is an excellent recent example of the genre — very much a physics in-joke, but one that isn’t completely off-putting to outsiders. If you call your blog “Laplace-Beltrami Operator” or “Gravitino Propagator,” you might amuse yourself, but your audience will be limited. (Apologies if there are any blogs out there with those names.)

Of course we came up with more than one, before settling on our perfect choice. But what was imperfect for us might fit you just fine. So, offered up free of charge, here are some of the names we were bandying around, plus some extras I came up with since.

• Tycho’s Nose
• Higher Dimensional Operators
• Extremize The Action
• Critical Phenomena
• The Residue Theorem
• But No Simpler
• De Revolutionibus
• Smooth Tension
• Ultra Deep Field
• Outside the Light Cone
• Primeval Atom
• Left As An Exercise
• The Error Bar

Personally I’m partial to Tycho’s Nose, but The Error Bar is an awesome name. That blog practically writes itself. So what are you waiting for?

Those who are too lazy and/or timid to start their own blogs are encouraged to suggest additional names in comments.

‘Tis the season to be giving link love to new blogs. Beats coming up with content on your own.

My favorite recent new blog find: On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess, by Dr. Isis. She manages to say important and interesting things without being so all-fired serious all the time, a skill I wish I had mastered myself. Also, shoes. As a gesture of cross-gender solidarity, here’s a pair of cool shoes for you guys out there to contemplate with desire.

Fig. 1: Jo Ghost Men’s Lima Shoes. $877 at Amazon. No, I don’t own anything like this; I’d be too afraid to wear them.

Eric Drexler, author of the book Engines of Creation that helped spark interest in nanotechnology, has started a blog: Metamodern. Expect knowledgeable commentary about all things nano-, but also on broader issues at the intersection of technology and society.

Ted Bunn has a blog! Who knew? It’s called Ted Bunn’s Blog. Ted is a cosmologist at Richmond. He wrote an interesting post on entropy and evolution, in response to this paper by Daniel Styer, which I first noticed at Pharyngula. I haven’t gone through the issues myself, but it seems like an interesting attempt to attach some quantitative ideas to the blindingly obvious claim that evolution is not incompatible with the Second Law.

I know you’re already all reading Resonaances, but just in case, you really should check out Jester’s recent post on anomalies in astroparticle physics. If you’d like to delve deeper into the experimental puzzles Daniel mentioned a while back that may or may not be hints of dark matter, this is the place to go.

Also not really a new blog, but now that you’ve read this far, you’re helpless: the National Academies are doing a survey concerning what kinds of educational materials would be most useful to put on the Web. Their blurb:

What topics in science, engineering, and medicine matter most to you? The National Academies are interested in developing useful and engaging print and web-based educational materials on the topics that you’d like to learn more about. They invite you to participate in a brief survey. You can find that survey here.

In the 2-minute survey you’ll be presented with a list of topics and asked to select the five that matter most to you. At the end, you can see how your answers compare with the results so far. And you can enter a drawing to receive a National Academies tote bag!

Let the National Academies know what topics you think they should focus on so they can be sure to provide you with materials that are informative and useful. Your participation is greatly appreciated.

Now, I love the NAS and all that, but when they list their topics you might possibly care about, things like “Physics,” “Astrophysics,” “Cosmology,” and “Mathematics” are nowhere to be found. Happily, there is a write-in box, so this is the chance to give them a piece of your mind.

Also: tote bags!

Let’s see. The bailout bill was scuttled.

The stock market is tanking.

The Hubble repair mission is delayed.

The LHC is on ice until the spring.

John McCain is still running for President.

But that’s all okay, because:

Michael Bérubé is back.

From Andrew Jaffe, I just learned that Peter Coles has a new blog:

• In the Dark

Peter is a theoretical cosmologist at Cardiff, in the UK, and the author of various interesting books.

And in case you didn’t notice it in John’s last post, there is a new blog by particle theorist Ben Lillie:

• Peculiar Velocity

Ben’s thesis advisor was our very own JoAnne, so this is practically our blog-offspring. And it also reminds me that I never properly introduced the blog of my own former student, Eugene Lim:

• When In Doubt, Do

Finally, for those who don’t scan the comments as well as the posts themselves, CV commenter (and distinguished string theorist) Moshe Rozali has joined David Berenstein at

• Shores of the Dirac Sea

Putting them all together, amount of blogging by respectable physicists has taken a substantial leap forward. We still have a long way to go to catch up to the economists.