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YK2

I know that you’ve all booked your tickets for Chicago in August, for the big YearlyKos shindig. True, it’s not exactly like going to a physics conference; the halls will be filled with candidates trying to drum up votes, and people who use words like “netroots” unironically. But if last year’s event was any indication, there should be all sorts of fun people there, even if it’s harder to find poker tables in Chicago than in Vegas. (You have to go to the riverboats in Gary.)

Like last year, the inimitable DarkSyde is making sure that science is well-represented, including a high-powered Science Panel. Last year the role of “bearded ScienceBlogger battling against creationism” was played by PZ Myers; this year it will be played by Ed Brayton. The role of “clean-shaven 4-star general who will talk about cosmology and the anthropic principle” was played last year by Wesley Clark; this year it will be me, except for the 4-star general part. The role of Chris Mooney will continue to be played by Chris Mooney. I’m honored to be participating, even if the commenters at Daily Kos are wishing it was my fiancee instead.

I hope any readers who are at the event will give a shout. It will be fun to return to the old haunts, go down to 75th Street to listen to Vonski, maybe indulge at Alinea if we save our pennies. And we all know that the weather in Chicago in August is invariably pleasant and charming, so there’s really no exuse.

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Happy Birthday, PZ!

PZ Myers — looming, hulking titan of the science blogosphere — turns an even half-century old tomorrow. Bloggers of all stripes are coming out to celebrate, with links being collected by John McKay, GrrlScientist, and Coturnix. (I’m not sure what’s the big deal about 50. The number only looks special because it’s the number of fingers on one hand times the number of fingers on both hands. A less parochially antropocentric anniversary would be 64, which is the square of the number of arms on a cephalopod. But I’m not in charge.)

I would like to give PZ a nice birthday present, as he played an important role in my life as a blogger: he gave me my first link ever. I could write him a poem, like Richard Dawkins did, but trust me you don’t want that.

So I had the great idea of sharing my favorite cephalopod-related video — this clip of a guy eating live octopus tentacles.

But then I thought about where I had actually seen this first — and, yes, it was on Pharyngula. Damn you, PZ! Still, if you’re in the LA area and are jonesing for some live tentacles, we’ll hook you up.

So finally I decided to give PZ something he’d really appreciate — his astrological chart.

PZ's Astrological Chart

The “interpretation” goes on and on about the implications that Pluto is in 28 degrees Leo, etc. (I guess they still think it’s a planet.) But here’s the punchline:

Rising Sign is in 03 Degrees Aries

You are a free spirit and you must be first at everything you do. Very energetic, self-assertive and active, things must be done your way. Even though you may feel calm and serene on the inside, you certainly do not act that way. You want to do everything full-tilt, 100 miles per hour! A great competitor, but a poor cooperator — you must learn how to lose more gracefully. Very self-confident, ambitious and passionate, you radiate positive energy. You are blunt and direct, but at times unfeeling and tactless, especially if anyone offers you any resistance. You fight for your beliefs, but your tendency to act first and think later often causes you much grief.

Man, I don’t know. Seems pretty darn accurate to me. I might become a believer, despite my principled misgivings.

Happy Birthday, PZ!

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The Tremulous Punditosphere

We have an interesting illustration of how the internet is changing the nature of political punditry, in the form of the ongoing spat between Joe Klein and the liberal blogosphere. Bloggy triumphalism can be tiresome, and the MainStream Media aren’t going to be replaced in the foreseeable future, if only because they actually put a great deal of effort and resources into real reportage. You know, calling people on the telephone, traveling to places where interesting things are happening, stuff like that. Annoying as they may be at times, the MSM are still the primary source for information about what is going on in the world.

When it comes to opinionmongering, though, we are faced with a completely different kettle of fish — ones with sharp teeth and short tempers. Journalism requires work, but anyone can have an opinion, and most everyone does. Not everyone has opinions that are interesting, or the ability to defend them persuasively using information and rational argument. That, in principle, is why we have pundits in the first place; they are supposed to be better-informed than average, and generally capable of intelligently articulating the opinions they have. The best pundits, presumably, should be those that have the most interesting opinions, and are the best at explaining and arguing for them.

Problem is, these are subjective criteria. What typically happens in the MSM is that, by some quite mysterious process, an editor or publisher decides that some particular person with opinions would make a good pundit, whether its because of the sparkle of their prose or the cut of their jib. A column or regular TV appearances are granted. And then, amazingly, they’re in forever. Rarely are columnists fired for not making sense; once they claim that status, they tend to keep it, no matter how pointless or uninformed their work turns out to be. It’s as if the NBA drafted players straight out of high school, but then they never had to play a game; they all just received long-term contracts, with salaries based on how good they look during lay-up drills and dunk contests. Maureen Dowd will be taking up space on the New York Times Op-Ed pages for decades to come.

Blogs work on a different model. Despite various well-documented biases and ossification of hierarchies, the blogosphere is still largely a meritocracy, in which success is driven by the free market of links. Say things that are interesting, well-informed, and thoughtfully presented, and someone will link to you. Word will spread, and you can be a success. Admittedly, you can also be a success by spouting complete nonsense, if you do it in a way that enough people approve of. The point is not that what rises to the top is exclusively meritorious; it’s that merit is one of the ways in which you really can rise to the top.

Joe Klein, longtime columnist for Time magazine and anonymous author of Primary Colors, is doing his best to inadvertently prove the dramatic superiority of the blog model for developing pundits. Klein has never been a favorite among lefty bloggers; although purportedly liberal himself, he comes off more as a smug apologist for accepted Washington consensus than as a shrewd analyst. On the Iraq war in particular, he’s shown something other than courage; in fact, what ever the opposite of courage is, he’s pretty much shown that. Now that the war has turned out to be a disaster on all fronts, he insists that he was against it all along. Which is funny because, in all of those columns he regularly penned for our largest-circulation newsweekly during the time when the wisdom of going to war was actually being debated, he forgot to mention it. He was asked about the issue point-blank at the time, by Tim Russert on Meet the Press, and replied “This is a really tough decision. War may well be the right decision at this point. In fact, I think it–it’s–it–it probably is.” Somewhat short of a full-throated denunciation.

But what’s a little weak-kneed simpering among friends? You don’t have to go on the Sunday talk shows every week, and in a few months whatever you said at the time will be forgotten anyway. But now Klein has embarked on a new adventure — he’s blogging, as part of Time’s group effort called Swampland. We begin to perceive the outlines of an actual conversation; there are comments on his posts, and other bloggers can link to him and offer critiques (with explicit citations) practically in real time. And they’ve been calling Joe Klein on his crap. (Or, I should say, “calling him on his shit,” since one of the standard fallacies wielded against bloggers is that they shouldn’t be taken seriously because they use curse words.) It’s like all those young draft picks had to suddenly start playing games, and not against the Washington Generals, either.

The results haven’t been pretty. Atrios, in particular, has been tireless in combatting the idea that mainstream journalists are just liberal mouthpieces, and is quick to point out how often supposedly-liberal pundits like to carry water for Republicans. Most journalists probably do self-identify as liberals — but, much more relevantly, they are part of the professional political class. With a few notable exceptions, they tend to cozy up to power, and try their best to reflect the conventional wisdom of their friends in the same class. Smart political operatives have learned to play them like very loud fiddles, so that the desired message can be broadcast under the cover of neutral journalism.

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Science Blogging Anthology

Science Blogging AnthologyIn the shortest turnaround time for a book ever, Bora “coturnix” Zivkovic (of Blog Around the Clock fame) has put together The Open Laboratory, a collection of the greatest science blogging of all time. Which is a little bit less impressive than it sounds, since science blogging hasn’t been around for that many centuries. Still, it’s a fun concept, to take all of those words on the internet and bind them between covers. I’ll admit that I nominated my own quantum puppies post, in the tradition of all great media shamelessness.

For those of you not quite willing to pay for what you find for free by pointing and clicking, you can peruse all 50 of the selected posts, or the complete list of nominees, without ever leaving your computer. For those of you who are willing, here you go.

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Resolving to Do Better

Anne and Anna, the similarly-named subset of the inkycircus collective, have launched their shiny new online science magazine, Inkling. Aimed at women, but everyone is welcome. (Unlike much of professional science, which is aimed at everyone but only welcomes men!)

One of their first features is to collect some science New Year’s resolutions. For example,

  • Not publish, in the same week, two major epidemiological studies on the health benefits of eating fish that givetotally contradictory advice.
  • Not call something a planet unless I’m really really really really sure.

You get the idea. But they need more physics in there! Public input is solicited, so go do your part.

Elsewhere in internet/reality crossovers: Physics World has come out with a special issue on physics and the web. It includes a piece by me on the joy of blogging (with a few run-on sentences that crept in during the editing process, I swear), and the first of what promises to be a regular feature reviewing individual physics blogs, starting off with Uncertain Principles (this one I managed to come up with all by myself). And on this side of the puddle, the American Institute of Physics has put together what looks to be a great new cosmology-themed site, Cosmic Journey. If you have universe-curious friends, you could do worse than point them there.

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Arbitrary Chronological Signifiers

Well, I found a new job, moved across the country, and got engaged. What did you do this year? (On the other hand, I finished an anomalously low number of actual research papers. That should change in 2007, as I’m settled down and back in a groove.)

One of the nice things about 2006 (broadly construed) was that I got to meet a lot of people in person whom I had first come to know through their bloggy internet manifestations. So I thought I would share with you the inside scoop on some of the personas behind the web pages.

  • PZ Myers of Pharyngula — I was expecting a mild-mannered Midwestern biology professor, and here it turns out he’s a fire-breathing atheist! Who knew?
  • Melissa McEwan of Shakespeare’s Sister — from the blog you’d think she was a kind soul with a soft spot for Al Gore and a mysterious ability to inspire talented individualists into productive group action. Right you are!
  • Rob Knop of Galactic Interactions — rumored to ride a unicycle into work. Rumors are always true. He totally should have won.
  • Bitch Ph.D. of the eponymous pseudonymous blog — red-haired, beautiful, juggles multiple men while raising precocious child. And has a Ph.D.! You are right to be afraid.
  • Chris Mooney of The Intersection — young, intense, focused on saving the world. Thank goodness somebody is.
  • Eszter Hargittai of Crooked Timber — much taller in real life than on the internet! Has been known to put orange juice in the microwave oven.
  • Dan Drezner of the eponymous blog — like me, booted out of the UofC under inexplicable circumstances. Understands what it’s like to be written about in major news media for reasons other than the reasons you’d really like to be written about.
  • Jennifer Ouellette of Cocktail Party Physics — she seems nice.
  • Lindsay Beyerstein of Majikthise — shorter in real life than on the internet! Of course, on the internet she is a towering figure, far beyond what seems appropriate in one so young.
  • Michael Bérubé of the eponymous blog — who knows? He speaks in a rapid stream of French and Latin puns. But I have the vague impression that he is as engaging and impressive in person as you might surmise from the virtual persona.

And here, in traditional year-ending list-making style, are some of my favorite posts from the year past. Feel free to mention your own, in the unlikely event that I’ve missed something really good. And my lazy good-for-nothing co-bloggers are welcome to choose their own!

You’ll notice that I couldn’t limit myself to the traditional just one per month. Count yourselves lucky that I resisted the temptation to list them all.

Here’s to a joyous and interconnected 2007!

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Navel-Gazing Links

Following in JoAnne’s footsteps, I’ve been in the midst of arguably my most exhausting bout of insane traveling ever — nine different stops over the course of less than a month, two of which involved two talks in one day! And one of which was at my old Philadelphia stomping grounds, where the people of the great-but-occasionally-confused state of Pennsylvania had recently rid themselves of the creepy menace that is Rick Santorum. (Actually, Michael, it’s a great-but-occasionally-confused commonwealth, but you’re a Francophone carpetbagger so that’s okay.) And where I was greeted, upon driving out of the airport, by a lovely billboard proclaiming Santorum is Good for Senate (sic). With snappy slogans like that one, perched precariously at the grammatical cutting edge, I can’t imagine how he lost.

I’m looking forward to settling back down to bucolic LA and churning out the high-quality blogging that CV readers expect. In the meantime, a couple of links distinguished by the fact that they link to us!

We should just start a separate blog, and have every post on each consist of links to the other site. Just for balance, one link that doesn’t link to us:

  • A great explanation of the Beyond Einstein program by Charles Daney at Science and Reason (via Steinn). We complain all the time about government agencies cutting funding for basic science, but here we’re really seeing a wholesale gutting of NASA astrophysics in action.

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Things You Should Read On the Internet

Collected links, moldering in my bookmarks:

  • Eszter Hargittai writes about a new book by her father, István Hargittai, called The Martians of Science. It’s a heartwarming tale of five Jewish-Hungarian kids who studied physics and changed the world: Theodore von Karman, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann, and Edward Teller. (Okay, so I’m guessing that the Teller story isn’t completely “heartwarming.”)
  • Coturnix announces a Science Blogging conference to be held in North Carolina on January 20, 2007.
  • Rob Knop gives an example of egregious scientific male misbehavior, in case anyone was skeptical that any such examples existed. The truth is, the number of senior male physicists who regularly hit on attractive younger women physicists is … well, it’s a very long list. And that’s only one kind of misbehavior. I once had a professor who wondered out loud (to a group of male students in his class) why the female students were doing better than they were on the problem sets. The possibility that the female students in that particular sample were just smarter, and that this was not really cause for a news bulletin, had apparently never occured to him.
  • An archive of the Top 100 Images from the Hubble Space Telescope. This one is my favorite:
    V838 Monocerotis
    but this one and this one ain’t too shabby. The big news this week was that there will be a servicing mission to HST, which should keep it alive for several more years. I have slightly mixed feelings about this. HST has been an amazing instrument, and I was pushing to save it from my earliest blogging days. It does cost money, though, and NASA is in the midst of a budget crisis that is leading it to dismantle much of its astrophysics program. I was part of the committee that set up the original Beyond Einstein program, which proposed a program consisting of five near-term and mid-term missions: Constellation-X (an X-ray satellite), LISA (gravitational waves), Dark Energy Explorer (using either supernovae or weak lensing), Inflation Probe (looking for tensor modes in the CMB), and Black Hole Finder. Now we have a National Academies panel that will be looking over all of these to decide which one of them to actually go forward with. Still, the money spent on science is not a zero-sum game, so I’m happy to see Hubble saved for a while.
  • Best Google search to ever lead someone to Cosmic Variance (and there have been some doozies, let me tell you): sex. Apparently we are about the 320th best place to look on the web for information about sex. Whereas, for information about “physics,” we’re not in top 500 or so (I stopped looking). A lot of you suspected this, but now Google has provided incontrovertible proof.

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