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Decennial

Almost forgot again — the leap-year thing always gets me. But I’ve now officially been blogging for ten years. Over 2,000 posts, generating over 57,000 comments. I don’t have accurate stats because I’ve moved around a bit, but on the order of ten million visits. Thanks for coming!

Nostalgia buffs are free to check out the archives (by category or month) via buttons on the sidebar, or see the greatest hits page. Here are some of my personal favorites from each of the past ten years:

Here’s to the next decade!

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Back In the Saddle

So apparently I just took an unscheduled blogging hiatus over the past couple of weeks. Sorry about that — it wasn’t at all intentional, real life just got in the way. It was a fun kind of real life — trips to Atlanta, NYC, and Century City, all of which I hope to chat about soon enough.

Anything happen while I was gone? Oh yeah, dark matter was not discovered. More specifically, the LUX experiment released new limits, which at face value rule out some of those intriguing hints that might have been pointing toward lighter-than-expected dark matter particles. (Not everyone thinks things should be taken at face value, but we’ll see.) I didn’t get a chance to comment at the time, but Jester and Matt Strassler have you covered.

lux

Let me just emphasize: there’s still plenty of room for dark matter in general, and WIMPs (weakly interactive massive particles, the particular kind of dark matter experiments like this are looking for) in particular. The parameter space is shaved off a bit, but it’s far from exhausted. Not finding a signal in a certain region of parameter space certainly decreases the Bayesian probability that a model is true, but in this case there’s still plenty of room.

Not that there will be forever. If dark matter is a WIMP, it should be detectable, as long as we build sensitive enough experiments. Of course there are plenty of non-WIMP models out there, well worth exploring. But for the moment Nature is just asking that we be a little more patient.

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Bloggy Tweaks

I took a few minutes to update some stuff on the blog. As always, what is intended as an improvement might end up making things worse, so feel free to chime in. In no particular order:

  • The death of Google Reader reminded me that not everyone uses RSS feeds. So I’ve added a couple of features that make it easy for people to know when a new post is up (since that’s not every day). On the right you’ll notice that you can subscribe to posts via email, which seems to work pretty well. There’s also a new Twitter feed for the blog that will notify you of new posts. This is separate from my own Twitter account, which often links to new blog posts but not always.
  • You used to be able to edit comments, but that featured died when it started to think that everyone was a spammer. I’ve replaced it with a new editing plugin. Let me know if it works. Update: nope. See below.
  • More experimentally, I’ve installed a comment rating system, so you can up- or down-vote comments. Not sure if this is a good idea or not, and I worry that it adds clutter to the comment threads. So this one is definitely in a probationary period, feel free to chime in.

Some new tweaks behind the scenes, but hopefully those won’t affect the user experience.

Update: So the comment editor didn’t play well with the like buttons (annoying but forgivable) and inserted slashes after every apostrophe (unforgivable). I’ve deactivated it. Still can’t figure out why the previous comment editor (“Ajax Edit Comments”) thinks everything is spam.

Further update: Now I’ve installed yet another comment editor. We’ll see how it works.

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Another Year Blogged

Happy New Year! As is quasi-traditional, we will ring in the new arbitrary chronological signifier by recapping some of the greatest blogging hits of the last year. For last year’s list I actually did a bit of work, organizing things into sub-lists and using multiple criteria. What was I thinking? Without nearly so much effort, here are my personal faves from this year’s blogging.

I don’t know, there seems to be a lot of science in there. I’ll never hit it big as a multi-tool cultural commentator if I keep talking about quantum mechanics and cosmology and entropy.

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Welcome

Welcome to the latest incarnation of my blog-related programming activities. As our friend Lucretius says, “All that we see about us consists of transient arrangements of atoms. Some awaken to life. None holds forever.”

I’ve bid an extremely fond farewell to Cosmic Variance, with great memories and enormous respect for my co-bloggers there who are keeping the torch lit. But I wanted to shift to a less formal, more personal and carefree mode of blogging, one where nobody else but me was responsible in any way. I’ll still be doing my best to understand and explain cool ideas in physics, but the only common thread holding the content together will be “things that popped into my head.” It may be intermittent and even inchoate, but hopefully it will be fun.

To set the tone, here’s a little ditty from Paco de Lucia, Al Di Meola, and John McLaughlin. A mixture of heavy thinking and joyful exuberance. Something to shoot for.

PACO DE LUCIA , John McLaughlin , AL DI MEOLA

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Comment Policy

Editor’s Note: Way back in 2007, we here at the blog were struggling with a vocal minority of obnoxious commenters. [This post is from when I was still at the group blog Cosmic Variance — SMC.] I was stuck on a cross-country plane flight with my laptop, and took out my frustrations by banging out this proposed Comment Policy. Upon landing, I sent it to my co-bloggers for judgment. They were mildly amused, but didn’t think it accurately reflected our actual sentiments — and they were probably right. So we never posted it.

But now, since I’ve been busy and those same co-bloggers are pretty silent, we’re looking for content. So I’ve dredged it back up, just to offer as food for thought.

So, to be clear: this is not our comment policy. It’s simply what our comment policy would have been in a different universe, where my co-bloggers weren’t as good at talking me down from my less well-thought-out schemes.

Our current comment policy is that we delete obnoxious crap, and ban repeat offenders. Easy!

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Did you know that there are some blogs out there on the internet that don’t have comments at all? Amazing, but true. To us here at Cosmic Variance, comments are a crucial part of the joy of blogging, and we couldn’t imagine doing without them. Nevertheless, we get occasional visitors who don’t always “get” the whole “commenting thing,” at least as we understand and encourage it. But don’t worry, we’re here to help. In order to answer every possible question before it is raised, we have constructed a hierarchical explanation of how we conceive of the role of comments: a set of Deep Underlying Axioms from which all else can in principle be derived; a Fundamental Theorem of Commenting that concisely expresses the upshot of the above axioms; a Grand Explanatory Analogy that should serve to clear up certain common misconceptions; and a set of Specific Examples, Illustrated in an Entertaining Question-and-Answer Format, to guide the thinking of those who prefer concrete imagery to abstract thinking. We close with some inspirational final words on how the comment section is Your Chance to Shine.

All told, we’re pretty sure you will agree that this is the most awesome comments policy in the entire blogosphere. …

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A Year Well Blogged

‘Tis the season when bloggers, playing out the string between Xmas and New Year’s, fill the void with greatest-hits lists from the year just passed. But a question inevitably arises: how does one decide which posts to include? There are many different criteria, and preferring one to another might lead to very different lists. This is what’s known as the measure problem in blogospheric cosmology.

This year I’ve decided to confront the problem pluralistically. Thus: here we have five different Top Five lists, chosen according to completely different criteria. Let us know if your favorite Cosmic Variance post of the year somehow managed to not be on any of the lists.

First, the most crude and common measure, the posts with the most page views this year.

Next up, an equally quantitative and misleading measure of popularity: the top five posts by number of comments. …

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A Salon of Ideas

Matt Strassler’s post prodded me to look back and notice something: we really have had quite an amazing collection of guest bloggers over the years. There is a page on the site dedicated to keeping track (as well as a category), but nobody every clicks there, so I thought I would just reproduce the list here. We have a few more in the pipeline, keep your eyes peeled!

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How to Succeed on the Internet Without Really Trying

Keen eyes will notice tiny improvements in the look-and-feel of the Discover blogs today, thanks to behind-the-scenes work of our crack website team. One improvement is that the social-media buttons at the bottom of each post are a little more clear and logical. They also let you know how many people have passed along a post via each medium.

Which leads me to an entirely unoriginal observation: the internet loves Top Ten lists. Perusing our home page, it’s easy to be struck by the giant numbers for the Things Everyone Should Know About Time post. It’s true that I like to think the post was actually interesting. (People seem to be divided between whether #4 or #10 is the most striking entry.)

But still, I’ll be honest: being at the conference I hadn’t been able to blog much, so I thought it would be good to write something that would be popular but not too hard to write. Thus: a top ten list. Box office!

So why exactly is that? I’m not disparaging: a good list is a way to convey a substantial amount of information in a well-organized form. But still, would it have been as popular had it been Top Seven? What if each entry were three times as long? What if the exact same words were presented without the numbers and bold-face labels?

No grand theories here, just idle curiosity. Enjoy the tiny aesthetic upgrade.

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