So our gift from Cosmic Variance to you is — new blogs! New to us, anyway. First up is inkycircus<\/a>, a very fun site from three British journalists who are in the process of starting their own science magazine (found at Element list<\/a>). The twist is that Anne, Katie and Anna<\/a> 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<\/a>, even if it is somewhat unrepresentative of the larger project and despite the fact that Jon Stewart makes the list and I don’t.<\/p>\nFinally, I note that Cosmic Variance is currently ranked 374th in the Truth Laid Bear ecosystem traffic rankings<\/a>, one slot above HorsesAss.Org<\/a>. Draw your own conclusions.<\/p>\n Happy holidays, everyone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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. So our gift from Cosmic Variance to you is — new blogs! New to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9398"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9398\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
The other new site worth checking out is systemic<\/a> by Greg Laughlin<\/a>, discussing the search for extrasolar planets. (“systemic” is the name of a Java apple<\/a>t 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.<\/p>\n