I’m hoping that, for many of our readers, New Year’s Resolutions include getting off their duffs and starting a blog of their own. It’s certainly not hard; at the minimal level of effort, hop over to Blogger and set up your own free blog in a couple of easy steps. Only after you’ve established yourself can you hope to sell out to the Man and thereby cause the Death of the Blogosphere, like us.
But there are obstacles, for example: what to call the blog? We’re here to help. I was leafing through some old emails, and stumbled across the conversations we were having in the days before Cosmic Variance even existed. The heady days of youth, when we were trying to come up with good names for our new venture. Of course there are many types of blogs, from individual rants about the state of one’s personal life and recent dining experiences to focused discussions of the prospects for health care reform at the national level. We (including Clifford) wanted something that reflected our identity as scientists, but would attract and intrigue non-scientists as well, as we have always hoped to cast our discoursive net more widely than our particular disciplines. So we were looking for titles that played off scientific concepts, but didn’t come off as complete gobbeldy-gook to non-experts. Shores of the Dirac Sea is an excellent recent example of the genre — very much a physics in-joke, but one that isn’t completely off-putting to outsiders. If you call your blog “Laplace-Beltrami Operator” or “Gravitino Propagator,” you might amuse yourself, but your audience will be limited. (Apologies if there are any blogs out there with those names.)
Of course we came up with more than one, before settling on our perfect choice. But what was imperfect for us might fit you just fine. So, offered up free of charge, here are some of the names we were bandying around, plus some extras I came up with since.
- Tycho’s Nose
- Higher Dimensional Operators
- Extremize The Action
- Critical Phenomena
- The Residue Theorem
- But No Simpler
- De Revolutionibus
- Smooth Tension
- Ultra Deep Field
- Outside the Light Cone
- Primeval Atom
- Left As An Exercise
- The Error Bar
Personally I’m partial to Tycho’s Nose, but The Error Bar is an awesome name. That blog practically writes itself. So what are you waiting for?
Those who are too lazy and/or timid to start their own blogs are encouraged to suggest additional names in comments.
Comments
38 responses to “Blogs That Should Exist”
Wow. Those names are all pretty much awesome. But now I feel bad. I wish I would have thought about the name of my blog a little more before choosing the name. I think “Left As An Exercise” is my favorite.
Rhett
We used to have a friday night pizza and drinks gettogether at UQ physics called “The Error Bar”
I think the current student club is still running them…
http://theerrorbar.blogspot.com/
I have set up a “The Error Bar” blog… now I just need to wait for the content to “write itself”
😉
The cafe in our physics department (university of manchester) is called “The Error Bar”, for some reason with a phi where the o should be. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) it doesn’t sell alcohol…
Reminds me of conversations I had with people when starting my blog, originally to keep people updated on my study abroad exploits in New Zealand. For awhile “Upside-Down Orion” was a front-runner and I had a friend who insisted it should be named “Backwards Toilet” despite my explanations to the contrary. I ended up going for the name of a NZ candy, “The Chocolate Fish.”
Doing up a new blog now to prepare for a trip around the world I’m starting in less than two weeks assuming these dratted graduate school applications get finished. Right now it just has the title of “Where is Yvette?” so my friends can remember it, but hopefully I’ll think up something better. Now all I need to do is figure out how to integrate Google Maps, sigh…
[…] that sprang to mind* after reading the excellently named Cosmic Variance’s recent post “Blogs That Should Exist“. “Spherical Cow” could have been an excellent name for a blog, and I was very […]
I submit to you: “Life at the Newtonian Limit”.
No Google hits yet, either (with quotes, of course).
Balding Blackholes
Dark Grey Matter
Stringanistas
And one for Sean, if he wants to have another blog:
Quiver for my time arrows!
“Ultraviolet Catastrophe” has a nice ring to it, though it’s more of an album title than a blog name. “Critical Point” could be a book and/or movie review blog. “Virtual Particles” would be good for a blog consisting of short links to other things. “Berry’s Phase” is surname-dependent, but could work for somebody with the right parents.
I always thought old Jazz albums have some wonderful names that could easily double as blog names. Some examples that come to mind are “blues and the abstract truth”, “explorations”, “conversations with myself” and “in a silent way”, and the list goes on… I’ve actually used those last two on a provisional basis (in less public pages, for which the names are more appropriate).
On the other hand, I am glad that David came up with a more clever idea for our blog.
Title for the next Bourne Identity sequal: the Bourne Approximation.
Blog title: “The Brillouin Zone”.
I’m frankly disappointed that nobody has yet suggested “Philosophiae Naturalis”.
My suggestion for maths blogs:
The Gödel Sentence
Much Less Than Epsilon
That Ring To It (for algebraic contents)
Compact and Connected
Random Variables
The physics parodies by Siegel may give you some inspiration, e.g.:
“Nonabelian Wind-Mills”
“Strings with tomato sauce”
Dude, the Error Bar is not just a good name for blog. It is a good name for a bar.
[…] Blogs That Should Exist | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine I’m hoping that, for many of our readers, New Year’s Resolutions include getting off their duffs and starting a blog of their own. It’s certainly not hard; at the minimal level of effort, hop over to Blogger and set up your own free blog in a couple of easy steps. Only after you’ve established yourself can you hope to sell out to the Man and thereby cause the Death of the Blogosphere, like us. (tags: blogging) […]
I wish there was a blog as good as Cosmic Variance about neuroscience. Not sure what it would be called.
Is there one I don’t know about?
How about “The Hilbert Hotel”
e.
Someday, if we ever manage to get our act together, there will be a group blog on physics, math, and studying physics as an undergraduate. It’s registered as Fourier Transformers.
“Extremize the Action” would sound a bit less sexy as the more specific “Minimize the Action,” but the latter sounds more my style.
Here’s some blog names for cosmologists (individual or group):
The Einstein Ring
The Local Group
A Wrinkle in Spacetime
Baryonic Matters
The Cosmic Edge
The Naked Singularity
My World Line
If and only if
The Cornu spiral
blog title: “a matter of dark matter”
Post-Physics Cognitive Dissonance
The Music of The Tubes
And, courtesy of Prof. Bob Brown, CWRU:
Physics Is So Much Clearer After Three Martinis