Blogs
drorzel | January 11, 2011It occurs to me that I'm kind of dropping the ball on my shameless self-promotion because I haven't mentioned that one of my posts made the cut for this year's fifth edition of the best-of-science-blogging anthology The Open Laboratory. The post included is Science Is More Like Sumo Than Soccer, a discussion of the importance of avoiding jargon.
I was a little surprised at that one, but re-reading it to copyedit the text for publication, I guess it is pretty good. It wasn't one of the top posts of last year, traffic-wise, but I think it's useful, and am happy to have it included.
(It's…
drorzel | January 4, 2011There was a faintly awful essay by Melissa Nicolas at Inside Higher Ed yesterday, giving MLA job candidates advice on how to dress:
Let's start with your shoes. Anyone who has been to MLA knows that it is a big conference, and whether you are on a search committee, attending sessions, or interviewing, you are most likely going to be doing a lot of walking. In a city. Often in the cold (though not this year!). While it is certainly inappropriate to come in your Wellies, teetering into the room on heels that are as stable as a university's endowment sends the message that you might not be a…
drorzel | January 2, 2011Because I'm sure everybody is as fascinated by blog stats as I am, here's the traffic to this blog for 2010, in graphical form:
In case you can't numerically integrate that in your head, I'll tell you that the total number of pageviews represented there is a bit more than 908,000. We have yet to crack the million mark in any one year, but the total number of pageviews over the history of ScienceBlogs is just short of 3.9 million. Not too shabby.
Looking at the overall traffic states for the five years (five years!) that I've been blogging at ScienceBlogs, the thing I'm happiest about is this…
drorzel | December 18, 2010As has been mentioned in countless places over the last few days, Yahoo plans to shut down Delicious, the social bookmark service that lots of people use for lots of things. My interest in it is pretty narrow, but important for this blog: I use Delicious to generate the quasi-automatic daily Links Dump postings here. As I surf around during the odd free moment, I tag pages that strike me as interesting, and every morning, Delicious generates a blog post that I then copy and publish here.
I really like this feature, because it gives me a way to acknowledge the dozens of interesting things I…
drorzel | December 13, 2010A bunch of smallish items that have been failing to resolve into full-fledged blog posts for a little while now, thrown together here because I don't have anything better to post this morning:
-- When is doubt, start with self-promotion: Physics World includes How to Teach Physics to Your Dog in their holiday gift books guide, and says wonderfully nice things about it:
Chad Orzel talks to his dog about quantum physics. It is not clear what the dog gets out of this arrangement, but the rest of us ought to be grateful for it, because Orzel's book about their "conversations" is sure to become a…
drorzel | December 2, 2010The poor coverage of science in the media is an evergreen topic in blogdom, to the point where I've mostly stopped clicking on links to those sorts of pieces. This ScienceProgress post about newsroom culture bugged me, though, and it took me a while to figure out the problem. The author worked as a reporter in North Carolina over the summer, covering science topics, and writes about his dissatisfaction with the journalistic template:
I had one editor who required that I give him my story pitches using six words or fewer. But the message wasn't even simply to shorten; it was to make it punchy…
drorzel | October 21, 2010I haven't been flogging the DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge as hard this year as in past year, but I do want to post a reminder that the challenge is ongoing. If you donate, the money will go to help deserving school kids; if that's not enough, it can also earn you cool stuff like:
The largest individual donor will get a signed copy of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, and the chance to have their pet appear in the sequel. Want to read about your companion animal moving at relativistic speeds? Make a big donation (current leader is just over $370), and you can get it.
Too cash-strapped to buy…
drorzel | September 15, 2010So, I'm looking at the couple-dozen tabs I have open in Chrome for stuff that I think would be worth blogging about, and the slides for this afternoon's lecture that need revising, and the student poster that needs to be completed before tomorrow, and the committee stuff that I ought to be doing, and the laundry that needs dealing with, and it occurs to me that there's one thing I haven't had time for, which is the book I'm writing.
Thus, effective immediately, I'm putting social media on quasi-hiatus. There may still be some links dump posts here, as I will occasionally be reading stuff…
drorzel | August 31, 2010Over in Discover-land, Razib has a couple of posts about the content of science blogs, based on an analysis of the content of the top science blogs according to Wikio. Razib's second post is sparked by a pointed question from the author of the original study:
I'm now curious to find out why there are no 'popular' blogs in certain subjects. Do working condensed matter physicists who want to engage with the public write about astrophysics? Or are astrophysicists the only physicists who want to blog for the public? Or does the public only read astrophysics blogs?
This is, of course, an obvious…
drorzel | August 24, 2010I'm unaccountably sleepy today, and I have work to do, which is keeping me from deep, insightful blogging. So I'm going to punt, and throw this open to you all:
Leave me a comment telling me something I don't already know.
Well, OK, since I can't reasonably expect you to be mind-readers, that should be "tell me something that you think I won't be likely to know already," but you get the idea.
It could be trivia, it could be an important fact about something or another, it could be a pointer to an entertaining book or web page. Hopefully it won't be anything that it's not legal or advisable…
drorzel | August 23, 2010Derek Lowe's doing a lunch thing at the ACS meeting, and in passing mentions the age of his blog:
As the longest-standing chemistry blogger (perhaps the longest standing science blogger, for all I know), I'm glad to have a chance to speak.
I was just telling a reader by e-mail that when I started this site in 2002, that I wasn't sure how much I'd find to write about. But (for better or worse) the material just keeps on coming. . .
Derek's blog pre-dates this one by a few months-- I specifically cite him in the very first Uncertain Principles post, so he's got me beat. I wonder, though, if…
drorzel | August 15, 2010A couple of new-to-me but good physics blogs to point out this week:
All That Matters by Joerg Heber. This looks like it will be updated weekly-ish, and has a couple of good entries, including a nice write-up of an ultrafast laser experiment that I had flagged to write about before I got distracted by crazy people and lab porn this week.
The Dayside by charles Day of Physics Today. This has roughly daily updates, on a wide range of stuff.
Both of these cover physics beyond the default particle-physics-and-cosmology that you can find in dozens of places, and Day even has a post titled Why I…
drorzel | August 3, 2010There's a great post at NeuroDojo on the Heffernan business this weekend, and what the take-away ought to be:
Yeah, let's criticize that she didn't get past the first impression of science blogs. We should expect Heffernan to look before leaping - she writes for the Times, after all, which still has a certain reputation as a paper of record and quality. But let's not pretend that her impression ain't shared by anyone else.
For instance, she took heat for recommending a climate denialist blog. But that's not the first time that blog got recommended by people who ought to know better. That…
drorzel | July 31, 2010A lot of Twitter energy was soaked up Friday afternoon by a half stupid article by Virginia Heffernan at the New York Times. Sparked by Sodamageddon, she takes a look at ScienceBlogs for the first time, and doesn't like what she sees:
Hammering away at an ideology, substituting stridency for contemplation, pummeling its enemies in absentia: ScienceBlogs has become Fox News for the religion-baiting, peak-oil crowd. Though Myers and other science bloggers boast that they can be jerky in the service of anti-charlatanism, that's not what's bothersome about them. What's bothersome is that the site…
drorzel | July 29, 2010I had intended to write up a recent paper for ResearchBlogging today, but I cleverly forgot to bring either the hard copy of the PDF home last night, which wrecked that plan. And I've got real lab work to do today, so it's not happening at work.
This seems like a good opportunity, though, to ask if there are things I ought to be explaining here that haven't occurred to me for one reason or another. So, as the post title says:
What topics in physics or related areas would you like me to write about here? This could be a recent paper, something from a recent news story ("I heard these guys in…
drorzel | July 20, 2010The fallout from the Pepsi incident continues to suck all the oxygen out of science blogging, with the latest news being the departure of Bora Zivkovic. If you don't have time to read his farewell novel, here's the short version: Seed Media Group management are insufficiently attentive to the blogs, and stuck in an old-media mentality. They should've re-invented themselves as entirely a blog company, and scrapped everything else. Really, if you've read Bora's stuff before, you can pretty much reconstruct the whole thing without reading it.
This post is being cited all around blogdom as…
drorzel | July 16, 2010I'm kind of curious about how people read the site, in particular the ScienceBlogs front page, so:
I look at the ScienceBlogs front page:customer surveys
As a bonus, if you feel so inclined, take a look at the front page, and leave a comment letting me know what you think. Is there something they ought to do with it that would make it more useful/attractive to you?
ksnyder | July 8, 2010Based on some of the (many) comments spurred by the appearance of PepsiCo on ScienceBlogs, we want to clarify Brookhaven's involvement on this site.
In April, Brookhaven was invited by ScienceBlogs editors to join the community as an institutional blogger, along with the Weizmann Institute of Science and the SETI Institute (and later, CERN and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute).
There's no money being exchanged between Brookhaven and ScienceBlogs.
Of course, we see this as a good public relations opportunity. But that doesn't mean that this space will only be used to redistribute press…
drorzel | July 8, 2010I suppose I have to say something about the Great Pepsi Blog Controversy, because it's sucking all the oxygen out of science blogging right now. I'll try to keep this short and self-contained.
At this time, I have no intention of leaving ScienceBlogs over the paid PepsiCo blog. I'm very sorry to hear that several of the other bloggers here have decided to leave, but they have their reasons, and it's their decision.
Ultimately, I suspect that the reason I am relatively unperturbed by this whole mess comes down to a fundamental split between how I view blogging and how they view blogging.
The…
grrlscientist | July 6, 2010
It's taken me a few hours to cool off enough to write coherently and without using (too much) profanity after I learned that ScienceBlogs added a corporate PR "blog" about nutrition written by PepsiCo. I think I've learned all I care to know about corporate "food" giants' definition of what is "nutrition" by being confronted daily by a flock of hugely protruding bellies and jiggling posteriors everywhere I go (yes, even here in Germany). I would link to that "blog" so you can see what I am talking about but quite frankly, I don't want to send any traffic to them. I think you can find them…