Blogs
drorzel | September 6, 2006There was a flurry of activity yesterday, while I was working to get ready for the start of classes, regarding a flawed contest to select the hottest science blogger. Clearly, when some pasty English dude wins, there's a problem with the methodology. Like, for instance, basing it off a blog aggregator that doesn't include physicists...
I'd try to cobble together a "hottest physics blogger" contest, but really, who needs that?
Also, classes start today. Whee! Posting will probably be light for a few days.
drorzel | August 20, 2006Verizon, in its wisdom, has decided that Chateau Steelypips is not, in fact, in need of DSL service this weekend. We've been without Internet connectivity since mid-afternoon yesterday. This is probably for the best, as my neck and shoulder are starting to suffer some twinges indicative of muscle spasms brought on by too much typing, so after this quick trip into the office to check email and do a quick blog sweep, I'm going home to lie on the couch and watch tv, the way God intended us to do on Sunday.
If you're wholly dependent on my recommendations for your entertainment, here are a couple…
drorzel | August 17, 2006Some new additions to the physics blogroll:
1) Not all that new, but I keep forgetting to post a link: Clifford Johnson has spun off Asymptotia from Cosmic Variance, to house his own brand of bike-riding, concert-going, vegetable-buying physics blogging. If you read Clifford's stuff at Cosmic Variance, you know what you're getting. If you haven't read his stuff, well, go check it out.
2) A new group blog: The n-category Cafe, featuring John Baez, David Corfield and Urs Schreiber. It's a little tough to say what this will really be about, since they only have two posts up, but they all have…
drorzel | August 17, 2006True Lab Stories really are everywhere these days. Via Inside Higher Ed's Around the Web, a blog called "What the Hell Is Wrong With You?" offers True Lab Stories: The Party Game (my name, not hers):
Back in the good old days, when La Blonde Parisienne and I were bright young grad students working in the same genetics lab, we used to play a little game called "Too Stupid To Be A Scientist." The game goes like this: you do something stupid, and you tell the other person what a stupid thing you did, and they cheer you up by telling you something even stupider they did. For example, one day I…
drorzel | August 13, 2006Well, it's as good a guess at a collective noun for "kerfuffle" as any other...
There have been three moderately heated bloggy controversies that I've been following over the past week, that I haven't commented on. Mostly because I don't really have that much to add to any of the arguments, or at least, not enough to merit a blog post.
I do want to note their existence, though, and maybe by combining them together, it won't feel so much like a pointless fluff post. So if you're dying to know my opinions on the crimes of fanfic, Oliver Stone's casting decisions, or Hooters, click on through to…
drorzel | August 11, 2006I usually try to post some lighter material on Fridays-- dorky polls, random tracks, that sort of thing-- and this week, I thought of three different topics that are all basically hooks for comments. So, I'm declaring it a theme for the day, because, well, I can do that. I doubt this will become a regular Friday feature, as I'm not organized enough to commit to that sort of thing, but it might be fun for a day. Or it might be a complete flop-- tough to say.
First up: Who are you people, and where are you coming from?
OK, that deserves some more background. We use Google Analytics for the…
drorzel | August 7, 2006I'm very pleased to report that in the month of July, no less than 35 people found this site by searching for some variant of the phrase "Queen of Niskayuna." The dog's going to be insufferable when she hears this. I'm also pleased to report that Aaron Bergman no longer shows up in the top ten results-- Chris Mooney does show up before I do, but at least I'm the second proper name in the search terms list.
Of course, a disturbing number of people also got here by searching for some variant of "butt propellor" and, in one case, "balloon ass." I really, really, didn't need to know that.
Anyway…
drorzel | August 6, 2006Over at Making Light, the Nielsen Haydens stumbled upon a video of the Hurra Torpedo version of the Bonnie Tyler/ Jim Steinman kitsch masterpiece "Total Eclipse of the Heart," which absolutely boggles the mind. Of course, the weird thing is that their re-invention isn't actually any weirder than the original video, which Teresa also attempts to explain. All this together inspired Matt McIrvin to one of the best post titles ever.
But the really fascinating thing about this is the "explore more videos" feature on YouTube. From the original video, you can find links to several live versions of…
drorzel | July 5, 2006As you've no doubt seen elsewhere on ScienceBlogs, Nature posted a little story about popular science blogs that included a list of said blogs, including a link to yours truly (tied with Deltoid for 11th in their list by Technorati rank order.
My ranking has actually climbed slightly since then (#8312 accoring to my most recent vanity search), but I had noticed the quote ranking of #8,365 last week, and I have to say, I'm absolutely gobsmacked to be in the 99.98th percentile of blogs ranked by Technorati. It's sufficiently surprising, in fact, that I need to resort to British slang.
OK,…
drorzel | June 21, 2006Over at the Examining Room of Dr. Charles, one of the newer ScienceBlogs, there's a post reminding me that I want nothing to do with medical research. I mean, how do you sort out what's a cause, and what's an effect in data like this:
Another recent study, published in Diabetes Care this past March, looked at the relationship between hours slept and the risk of developing diabetes. Researchers followed 1,100 middle age men starting in 1987 up through 2004. The men who slept 6 hours or less per night had double the risk of developing diabetes as compared to those who slept 7-8 hours per night…
drorzel | June 19, 2006The big event of the moment in physics, at least on the high energy/ theory side, is the Strings 2006 meeting in Beijing, which will feature the usual suspects talking about the usual topics in string theory. This comes on the heels of the SUSY06 meeting, which was extensively blogged by Clifford and others.
This would probably be a good time to post a long entry about how string theory is all a bunch of crap, as that's been a reliable way to generate traffic in the past, but I just don't really have the heart for it. From my outsider's perspective, the big issues seem to be exactly the same…
drorzel | June 17, 2006It's been a while since I looked at the search engine keywords on Goggle Analytics for this site. It's a little depressing to find that PZ Myers turns up three times ("pharyngula," "Pharyngula," and "PZ Myers") before my own name. Worse yet, Aaron Bergman, who doesn't even have a blog any more, also shows up three times before I do. Aaron, start blogging again. Or get a LiveJournal account, given that "aaron bergman livejournal" is the fifth most popular search term on this site. Give the people what they want, already.
There are also lots of people wanting to know how many substitutions you…
drorzel | June 9, 2006A big event took place at noon Eastern time today. That's right, the soccer World Cup has started, and as I type this, Germany leads Costa Rica 2-1.
Oh, yeah, and because the science nerds need something to do while the sports fans are all obsessing over soccer, the new, improved ScienceBlogs front page launched, along with a whole host of new blogs joining the ScienceBlogs family. They're still a little light on physicists, with Dynamics of Cats being the only other physics type, but the drive to absorb all halfway decent science-themed blogs out there continues.
Should be plenty of stuff…
drorzel | June 2, 2006Matt Welch has a nice post-mortem for the 2001 blogging boom, in which he recalls the days when the whole post-September-11th-attacks thing seemed like it would really shake up American politics, and that weblogs were at the forefront of a grand realignment. That failed pretty spectacularly, didn't it?
It's a good piece, both recalling what things were like then (I didn't have a general-purpose blog yet, but I was booklogging, and regularly reading most of the top blogs of the day), and lamenting how far we've fallen. Sadly, I discovered this via Ted Barlow's farewell post. Another one, as…
drorzel | May 26, 2006Today finds Kieran Healy counting words, and Hedwig the Grrlscientist tallying visits, so that must count as a blog statistics meme. Or something.
Out of curiosity, I checked the Google Analytics stats for this site, and was bemused to discover that as of sometime this morning, there have been 141,183 unique visits to this site since the site went live in January. That's a pittance compared to PZ's two million plus, but I find it slightly boggling.
Back when we were working on the transition, Kate and I spent a little time trying to determine the traffic on the old Steelypips site (…
drorzel | May 17, 2006The question for the week from the Seed overlords is:
"Will the 'human' race be around in 100 years?"
This is basically a Singularity question, and as such, I think it's kind of silly. But then, I think the whole Singularity thing is sort of silly-- as a literary device, it makes for some good SF, but as serious prognostication about the future, I think it's crap.
Razib lays out the basic logic of the options: 1) Nerd Jesus arrives and spirits us all away in a cloud of nanobots, 2) We're all gonna diiiieeee!!!, and 3) We muddle along more or less as always. PZ is more pessimistic, and also…
drorzel | May 13, 2006It's a grey and rainy weekend morning, and I'm facing a day at work trying to put things in order before I leave for DAMOP on Tuesday, so I'm not in a big hurry to get moving. Of course, I'm not feeling all that inspired, blog-wise, either, so I'm going to fall back on one of the staples of lazy bloggers everywhere: funny search engine requests.
There's something a little odd about the way Google Analytics counts these, as "probability+of+fixation+of+neutral+mutations" comes in at #2, which is just sad-- searches for things relevant to this blog are completely dwarfed by PZ's sloppy seconds.…
drorzel | May 5, 2006Well, OK, they're mostly not new, just new to me. I'm vaguely ashamed at having to rely on Sean Carroll to point out new blogs to me, especially since one of the authors comments here moderately regularly, but my defense is that unlike faculty at semester schools, who are winding things down, I'm right in the middle of the most hectic part of the academic term. I barely have time to post original stuff, let alone read other people's blogs.
Nevertheless, Sean points out some good new blogs, that have gone into the RSS aggregator, and will make it onto the sidebar when I finally get around to…
drorzel | April 26, 2006Bora/ coturnix over at Science and Politics has generated a lot of conversation via his taxonomy of science blog posts, mostly relating to the call for people to start publishing data and hypotheses on blogs. Much of the discussion that I've seen centers on the question of "scooping" (see, for example, here and here), but there's a wide range of reaction linked from the end of the original post.
Bora seems to regard it as a Bad Thing that people don't post data (though I should note that I did post some data during the Week in the Lab-- calibration data only, granted, but it's data...). I don…
drorzel | April 26, 2006I'd just like to note that I'm inordinately amused to find a blog called Mormon Philosophy and Theology linking me. I also seem to have picked up a sidebar link at Cocktail Party Physics, which reminds me that I really need to update the blogroll...
These minor revelations brought to you by ego-surfing on Technorati...