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3tweets

It started with an innocent, and possibly joking, request on Twitter: “Can you explain M-theory?” Having previously been asked to defend the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics and various other topics, I didn’t take it very seriously.

But upon further reflection — why not? Obviously nobody is going to give a full and comprehensible account of any reasonably complex topic when limited to 140 characters, but it might be fun and even useful to try to distill the basic point of something down to its tweetable essence. Still, in a single tweet there is almost no chance to do much but introduce jargon, so I decided to allow myself three tweets. Here’s my go at summarizing M-theory. (Remember chronology is bottom-up.)

Obviously, there is more to be said, but I think some actual information is conveyed. Different people might choose different aspects of a subject to spend their precious three tweets on, but that’s part of the beauty. As someone pointed out, a poetic aspect results from subjecting yourself to such stringent limitations on what you can say.

And if it works for M-theory, what else? And thus a hashtag was born: #3tweets. Yesterday I took a stab at the Higgs boson.

This reminded me that quantum field theory is probably the single most under-popularized subject in all of fundamental physics. Particle physics, yes; string theory, sure; quantum mechanics, endlessly; but the structure of QFT itself is rarely explained in its own right. It’s worth at least a few tweets.

I certainly hope to try a few more examples. But — it’s everyone’s internet. Feel free to join in, with new topics or ones previously covered. I’m sure someone has a different take on quantum field theory than I do.

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Physics Stack Exchange

This is a fun thing to check out: the Physics Stack Exchange is a crowd-sourced approach to asking (and getting answers to) physics questions. (Hat tip to Chad.) Someone asks a question, others suggest answers, which then get voted up or down depending on how helpful they are perceived to be. It’s like an Urban Dictionary for Physics.

A quick peek around reveals that there are some really smart physicists answering questions there. See the FAQ for more details about how the system works. Note that it’s aimed at “active researchers, academics and students of physics.”

I know that I’ll be forwarding this site to people who email with physics questions. Which means that really I should contribute to answering some of them. You all should too!

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Hey We Got Nominated for Something

Usually I don’t pimp out blog competitions, as too often they end up honoring crackpots, climate denialists, etc. But here (via Phil) is a contest sponsored by Physics.org, where the other entries are all very good blogs:

Admittedly they left off some other very awesome blogs, but there’s always next year. So, yeah; I’m happy to advertise blog competitions in which I wouldn’t mind losing.

There are also competitions for best podcast, best online magazine, etc. Let your voice be heard.

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Working My Way Back

Okay, I think it’s time to step down from hiatus and get back into this blogging thing. I missed you guys! And I notice that the science blogosphere has completely blown up and re-organized since I left. Which is a good thing.

I don’t like to navel-gaze too much about the act of blogging, but a gradual evolution in my own style was the primary motivation for my hiatus. In the good old days I stuck mostly to very short posts, pointing to this or that and making simple comments without feeling obligated to provide elaborate justifications for every little thing. But over time, I found myself increasingly seeing every post as a multi-layered 3,000 word essay. (Even if they didn’t end up that way in actuality, that’s how they often were in my head.) Not a sustainable model for someone for whom blogging is a hobby, not a vocation. I promised myself long ago that if blogging ever started to take up too much time (roughly, more than 3 hours/week), something would be broken and I’d have to fix it.

So here I am fixing it. I really do very much enjoy the idea of blogging, both exploring ideas for my own sake and the wider conversation with other bloggers and with commenters. But given unitarity constraints on my time and energy, I need to concentrate on punchier posts, and comments that are not fully supported against every possible counter-argument. If the experience of writing a book nudged me toward longer forms, the success of Twitter demonstrates the value of the quick hit & link. Of course I will mix things up, which is part of the fun — longer posts here and there, the occasional video. There may be LOLcats. But I’ll try to refrain from writing poetry.

And now for dessert: chocolate extravaganza from my favorite restaurant, Alinea in Chicago. Ordinarily there are no tablecloths at Alinea, but for this course they cover the table with a thin sheet of silicone and — well, you’ll see.

Some of you might find this presentation too precious and extravagant to be enjoyable. I understand, and I’m sure you’ll appreciate the Oreo Blender Blaster at Denny’s.

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3QD Science Blogging Prize

6a00d8341c562c53ef01348177d943970c-800wi3 Quarks Daily has embarked on an annual hunt for the best blog posts in four areas: science, politics, philosophy, and arts & literature. Nominations have now opened for this year’s science prize; you have until May 31 to suggest your favorite science blog post from the last year; then there will be a round of public voting, and a final award bestowed by a celebrity judge. Last year the science prize was awarded by Steven Pinker; this year it will be Richard Dawkins. Someday I’m sure they’ll work their way up to having a physicist serve as judge.

Feel free, of course, to nominate your favorite posts from Cosmic Variance; I’m far too shallow to be reluctant to win awards. But even better would be to find a really great post at a smaller blog that not as many people know about, and use this contest as a vehicle for bringing more attention to really good writing. There’s too much good stuff out there, it’s impossible to follow all of it, so it’s always nice to hear about new bloggers doing great things.

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Blogginess

A handful of fun things that shouldn’t pass unremarked:

  • Natalie Wolchover, an aspiring science writer, has started a fun blog called Facto Diem. For those of you who didn’t attend Catholic school, that’s Latin for “Fact of the Day.” (Or a close enough facsimile.) I didn’t even know there were that many facts in the world!
  • In the more venerable sections of the blogosphere, Chad Orzel is running a poll concerning the most amazing application of lasers. Considering that “death ray” is not among the options, it’s a pretty good list.
  • We should also link to Scientia Pro Publica #27, over at Melliferax. (Clearly Latin is the lingua franca of the science blogosphere.) Most of the posts involve living things in some way or another, but they should nevertheless be of interest to those of us with more inorganic inclinations.

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Just a Frog on the Dissection Table

We’ve been studied. Bora points to a new paper by Inna Kouper in the Journal of Science Communication. The title is “Science blogs and public engagement with science: Practices, challenges, and opportunities,” which pretty much explains what it’s about. The author picks out a collection of eleven blogs — Pure Pedantry, Synthesis, MicrobiologyBytes, Bioethics, Wired Science, DrugMonkey, Scientific Activist, Pharyngula, Panda’s Thumb, and our own humble offering — and analyzes posts and comments to judge how effective these sites are at promoting science communication.

The list of blogs chosen is — okay, I guess. I have no idea how it was constructed, and the paper doesn’t seem to provide much guidance. Bora has a critique of the methodology that wonders about that, and about exactly how objective the study is. It’s very hard to assign numbers to things like “ratio of informative posts vs. rants,” or “degree to which the cause of collegial communication was harmed by use of intemperate language.” The paper reads like someone read a bunch of blogs and typed up their personal impressions.

For the most part I don’t disagree too strongly with the impressions, with the obvious caveat that it’s almost completely useless to study “science blogs” as a group. People don’t read randomly chosen collections of blogs; they read very intentionally chosen subsets that appeal to their own interests, and different reading lists will lead to wildly divergent impressions about what blogs are really like.

More significantly, though, I can’t really agree with the moral that the author draws from these experiences. Here is the telling quote from the paper:

The blogs employ a variety of writing and authoring models, and no signs of emerging or stabilizing genre conventions could be observed. Even though all blogs mentioned science or a particular scientific discipline in their descriptions, they differed in their voice representations, points of view, and content orientation.

It’s hard to disagree with that, but I think it’s a good thing, and the author clearly does not. Blogs differ in many ways, and happily avoid the encroachment of stabilizing genre conventions. That’s one of the biggest benefits of opening up communication channels to a tremendous variety of content providers, rather than restricting things to just a few mainstream outlets; writers can have their voices, and readers can choose who to read, and everyone is happy.

It’s clear that a lot of people want blogs to be just like some pre-existing communication medium, just with comments and occasional expertise. And there are blogs like that, if that’s what you’re into. And there are blogs that aren’t, likewise. I hope it stays that way.

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@JHabermas

Update: Totally snookered. Via Kieran Healy, the disappointing news that the Habermas account is fake. Yet more evidence that the internet is less than an ideal speech situation.

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I’m not the only person to find it endlessly amusing that Jürgen Habermas, octogenarian theorist of communicative rationality, has taken to Twitter. (The account seems to be legit, but it’s hard to be sure.) This is so over-determined that just last year Lauren Fisher gave a presentation entitled “If Habermas could Twitter.” Well, now we know.

He’s still trying to master the 140-character limit, though. Here’s his latest set of tweets:

habermas

Well, yeah. The internet is (in some sense) an egalitarian public sphere, but it raises the danger of fragmentation into self-reinforcing interest groups. Remains to be seen how it will all ultimately play out.

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Making a Virtue Out of Chronological Necessity

One thing about the Facebook era is: you can’t forget it’s your birthday. Facebook tells all your friends, and they send along cheerful greetings. And then you feel all happy until you find that Neil deGrasse Tyson has the same birthday as you, and many more Facebook friends. But he’s older, so there. I like to think my best years are still ahead of me.

I know what you’re thinking: “Gee, Sean, here it is your birthday, and me with no way to send you a present.” But that’s not true! Because I would consider it a wonderful present if you could send $10 to, for example:

Ms. V’s classroom in Louisiana, where junior-high students in a high-poverty area need some calculators to help in their science classes.

Ms. H’s classroom in Oklahoma, whose kindergarten students need some white boards to fit group lessons into their crowded room.

Ms. W’s classroom in New York City, where young children with autism need basic learning aids to help them tackle math.

Or any one of various other worthy classrooms. And don’t feel constrained by that $10 suggestion — there’s plenty more room for larger donations! It’s like you’re giving me a present, and you benefit yourself from the feeling that you are doing something awesome.

In return: actual bloggy content on its way this week.

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