Blogs
drorzel | January 12, 2008Taking my time to copy a meme from Dave, here's the list of cities where I spent at least one night in 2007:
Niskayuna, NY (duh)
Whitney Point, NY
Tewksbury, MA
Mineola, NY
Boston, MA
New York, NY
Holland, MI
San Rafael, CA
Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Cruz Bay, St. John, USVI
Kyoto, Japan
Yokohama, Japan
Takayama, Japan
Osaka, Japan
We also spent sigificant time visiting Tokyo, Nikko, and Himeji, but didn't spend a night in any of them.
2007 was a pretty busy year. 2008 hasn't really taken shape yet, but I confidently expect to spend time in State College, PA and Lewisburg, PA, along with the…
drorzel | January 6, 2008The context for this would take too long to explain, so I'll just throw it out there:
Can anyone think of an example of an Internet troll changing their opinions or behavior because of the savage wit of people responding to their comments?
I ask this because I spent a good seven years on rec.arts.sf.* before moving to blogdom, and I can't think of one, either on Usenet or in a weblog's comments. I can think of a few people who made flame-tastic debuts on one group or another and later turned into reasonable regulars (Tshen comes to mind, for the RASWR-J crowd), but they always had a spark of…
drorzel | January 1, 2008Because it's not science without graphs:
That's the traffic for this blog for 2007. If you integrate the area under the curve, you get a total of 833,275 page views for the year, which is, frankly, kind of astonishing. That's up from last year's total of 574,676, so I guess the goal for 2008 is to break a million.
The top ten posts for the year, in terms of traffic:
Many Worlds, Many Treats: 52,667 (of course)
Bunnies Made of Cheese: 14,068
Stealth Creationists and Illinois Nazis: 9,048
It's Turtles All the Way Down: 5,539
New "Meme": Manly or Self-Sufficient?: 5,213
Why Do Polarized…
drorzel | December 18, 20072006 Was Just This Year, You Know: I lost a lot of weight, read a lot of books, taught a lot of classes, did a bit of research, and oh, yeah, I got tenure.
Dorky Poll: Favorite Tool: In the comments to the post where I noted how many more people had least favorite textbooks than favorite ones, dr. dave writes: "Textbooks... particularly SCIENCE textbooks, are not really written to be ENJOYED by anyone."
Maryland vs. Duke: One-sentence review of this game: I don't think I've ever seen so many two-foot shots missed in a Division I game.
On the Superiority of String Theory: As we look at…
drorzel | December 12, 2007Over at Page 3.14, they're marking the launch of the German-language site scienceblogs.de (for real, this time) with a poll about language skills: they want to know what languages other than English ScienceBlogs readers speak, and what you think they should target next.
Current sentiment is running in favor of French or Spanish next, but personally, I'd go for Japanese or Chinese-- we've already got some presence in Europe, but Asia is wide open. I wouldn't be able to read a word of it (not that I get much out of the German site), but it'd be cool to see Seed and ScienceBlogs move into a…
drorzel | December 12, 2007One of the alternately entertaining and depressing things about the culture wars in the US is the existence of a sort of parallel academic universe, in the form of vanity universities like Oral Roberts University, Bob Jones University, and Jerry Fallwell's Liberty University. These provide both a thin veneer of credibility for pseudo-academic nonsense and a launching point for hilarious academic misconduct.
There's really nothing comparable on the militant atheist side. But here's your chance, Pharynguloids: Myers University is for sale:
Don't write the obituary for Myers University yet. The…
grrlscientist | December 11, 2007Everyone knows that the universal language of science is English, which is not to say that scientific papers are not published in other languages, but if the author wants his or her papers to be widely read, they must publish in English. However, the citizens of the world speak many different languages and their lives are impacted by scientific research just as much as English-speaking peoples' live are .. so, ScienceBlogs is launching a German-speaking counterpart and now they are wondering .. which language should they focus on next? They have a very short poll (2 questions) for you to…
drorzel | December 11, 2007Dave Ng over at the World's Fair is at it again, asking what sort of science background Santa Claus has:
So the premise is that Santa is at least several hundred years old, and you've got to assume that somewhere along the line, he spent some time in academia and probably got a degree or two. Now, I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that he is a man of science, but I guess the question to ask is in what way specifically?
Now, you might think that there are lots of ways to go with this. You could note the flying reindeer, and say that they're clearly the product of either genetic…
drorzel | December 6, 2007John Scalzi is talking a big game:
I was just taking one of those Internet tests to see how much of a geek I am, when I suddenly thought, what the fuck am I doing? I'm a published science fiction writer. Do not pass "go," do not collect $200, you know? Just go straight to the geek win.
That's right, I win at geek. Tell me I'm wrong.
All I have to say is, "Enjoy it while you can, Heinlein boy."
I'm writing a book based on talking to my dog about quantum physics. Scalzi holds the title for the moment by virtue of actually being published, while my book is still pending.
But he's just keeping…
drorzel | November 25, 2007There are two things creating some buzz at the moment on ScienceBlogs that I don't intend to write about because I've already commented on them. They're oddly similar, too, though they're being approached in different ways.
One is this op-ed by Paul Davies, which is basically a shorter and more contentiously worded version of one of the arguments in Cosmic Jackpot. I reviewed the book back in January, and I really don't have anything to say about this Cliff's Notes version that I didn't say then.
The other is this silliness from the Telegraph about shortening the life of the Universe by…
drorzel | November 14, 2007Over at the World's Fair, Dave is asking people for their scientific eponyms, that is, the formula they would like to have named after themselves. These are, of course, entirely made up.
Here's my contribution, from the scientific study of pick-up basketball: the Orzel Teammate Desirability Factor (TDF):
The Factor ranges between positive and negative infinity and is a quantitative measure of how much I want to have a given player on my team. The components going into this are:
P is the average number of points scored per game
ρ is the player's career shooting percentage
A is the average…
drorzel | November 13, 2007The indefatigable Bora Zivkovic is soliciting contributions for the science blogging anthology The Open Laboratory. He's titled the post "Last Call for Submissions," but the actual deadline is December 20th. On or about December 19th, I expect a post title along the lines of "Wolf! Wooooolllllfffff!!! Oh My God, a Wolf!" but that's neither here nor there.
Being a commmitted advocate of Open Science, Bora has posted the full list of submissions to date. Looking it over, my main reaction is "Where's the Physics?" It's not just that this blog isn't nominated, but a general lack of physics posts…
drorzel | November 13, 2007ScienceBlogs is now available in a German version.If you sprechen the Deutsch, update your blogroll accordingly.
Me, I don't get more than the occasional word. I am, however, amused to see that the pull-quote on the front page is in English, and from one of my posts...
drorzel | November 9, 2007A question from the Corporate Masters:
Is there a 'typical ScienceBlogs reader'? Who are these people? Why do they read Sb? What do they get out of it?
So, well, who are you people? Other than, you know, physics nerds.
My vague impression, based on what I know of the people who comment regularly, is that my regular readers tend to be grad students or post-docs, with a scattering of college faculty and professional scientists/ engineers. But I could be way wrong, so you tell me. Leave a comment, or send me an email and tell me about who you are and what you get out of reading this blog.
drorzel | November 8, 2007Ethan Zuckerman (who is on the Wikimedia Advisory Board) has a post discussing Wikipedia's recent fundraising drive, with some comparative numbers:
In the past 17 days, the [Wikimedia] Foundation has raised over $478,000 in online gifts. That's a pretty amazing number, on the one hand, and a concerning one, on the other hand. If Global Voices could raise that much money online in a month, I'd be out of a job, as our annual budget is not much higher than that sum, and I spend far too much of my time convincing generous individuals, corporations and foundations to support our efforts.
On the…
drorzel | November 6, 2007This is somewhat belated, as it's no longer active, but I had a bunch of other things to do last week, and never got around to posting about Blog My Wage:
HOPE asked Houston City Council member Peter Brown to spend a week living on the wage of a city worker. Council Member Brown took the challenge and lived -- and blogged -- on the wage of city employee Belinda Rodriguez, who has just $23.03 a day to buy food, gas and clothing for herself and her three children.
Better late than never, though. It's a brief but fascinating look at what being poor is like. I've been fortunate enough in my life…
drorzel | November 5, 2007Dave Bacon has been assimilated. He only has one post up at the moment, but I'm sure there'll be more soon. Update your bookmarks and RSS readers, and go visit his new digs.
drorzel | October 30, 2007You may start seeing these little icons showing up on your favorite science blogs. So, what's the deal?
Dave Munger of Cognitive Daily has been marking posts that discuss published articles in detail for quite a while now, but there was mroe general interest in having a service to tag and vet such articles. So, Dave and some other people have launched BPR3.org, Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting, and produced these little icons.
The idea is that these icons will be used to mark posts reporting on peer-reviewed publications, and discussing them in detail. Not just throwing in a…
drorzel | October 27, 2007Bora has tagged me, and nagged me in comments for this "Happy Hallowmeme" thing where people post links to clips from their favorite scary movies. The problem with this is that I really don't have that much interest in horror in general, or scary movies specifically.
I do, however, retain some affection for 80's cheese, which includes some of the campier scary movies of that era, along with this gem:
Can't you just smell the hair spray?
I saw this as half of a double feature at a drive-in (!!) during the summer after my senior year of high school. The other movie was one of the Nightmare on…
drorzel | October 24, 2007Dave at the World's Fair has an idea for a "meme":
[Y]ou will attempt to find 5 statements, which if you were to type into google (preferably google.com, but we'll take the other country specific ones if need be), you'll find that you are returned with your blog as the number one hit.
This was, surprisingly, fairly easy:
Bunnies Made of Cheese
Many Worlds, Many Treats
True Lab Story
Physics Funding Fundamentalism
"Show Me the Pony" (requires quotes)
Of course, my own name also works, but that's kind of a cheat...