A Blog Around The Clock

In the wake of great success of the Classic Science Papers Challenge, gg of Skulls in the Stars and I have decided to turn this into a regular monthly blog carnival.

Thus, gg has set up a carnival homepage and issued the call for posts and hosts.

You can read more about the carnival - named "The Giants' Shoulders" - on the About page. In brief, once a month, the carnival will alight on one of the participating blogs. What kinds of blog posts are eligible?

Classic Papers - your blog post should describe what is in a paper that is considered to be a classical paper, or explanation why you think the paper should be considered classical, or foundational, or monumental, or seminal, or mind-boggling/earth-shaking/paradigm-shifting, or just plain cool. Then place the work in some kind of context: historical, philosophical, theoretical, technological, political, social. Try to persuade the readers that the paper is fascinating and really important. The paper cannot be younger than 10 years (thus, a moving target if this carnival lives a long time).

People - analyze the importance of a person in the historical development of science. Most people will cover the famous - Darwin, Newton, Linnaeus, etc. - but it is really cool if you dig out someone more obscure who nonetheless did something really important and we can see the importance from the present perspective.

Concepts - track the development and evolution of an historically important scientific concept and how the attitudes and understanding by the scientists (or lay audience) changed over time due to new discoveries.

The very first edition of the carnival will be held here, on A Blog Around The Clock, early morning on July 16th, so I need your entries by the end of July 15th (deadline is midnight EDT). Send your entries to me at: Coturnix AT gmail DOT com. Later we will have automated submissions through blogcarnival.com as well.

As this is the first edition, there is no requirement for a post to have been written 'since the last edition', thus, old blog posts are eligible. Also, in order to start the carnival with a Bang!, we will accept multiple posts by the same author, as well as posts that have already been included in the Classic Paper Challenge (I'll take them automatically unless you say No). So, dig through your archives for posts that match the above criteria. I know there are plenty of those - several have already been included in the two Science Blogging Anthologies (I recently browsed them and noticed this).

Please spread the word about the carnival, bookmark the homepage, submit entries and think about topics to write about in the future.

Also, tell gg or me if you want to host a future edition - there should be one every month around the 15th of the month.