29 Comments on “Top-Ten List”   rss feed

1. astromcnaught on Mar 28th, 2008 at 5:39 pm

   Awesome is about right. First port of call for me.
   Un-drama blogging except when John lifts the lid on his culinary problems

   Excuse OT Sean, but are you still accepting cosmology type questions on a very ancient thread I remember seeing? I have a couple to add, or can I just plonk ‘em in here?

2. Sean on Mar 28th, 2008 at 8:50 pm

   Flattery is a good start. What are the questions?

3. Elliot on Mar 28th, 2008 at 9:08 pm

   I think we should all take it as a positive sign that there is such a quantifiable interest in this arena. I think there is something fundamental (no pun intended) in the desire to ask and possibly answer the “large” questions and that is why I believe people visit, participate, lurk, and learn here.

   e.

4. Krist on Mar 28th, 2008 at 9:28 pm

   Cosmic Variance and Bad Astronomy are tied as my favorite blog.
   The list seems totally random.
   I find it very surprising that such a bias and often, factually incorrect, blog like Daily Kos would be number one.

5. Luke on Mar 28th, 2008 at 9:29 pm

   I’m a little worried that Michele Malkin = Cosmic Variance to within sqrt(N). I don’t think the Theory of Everything explains this, although perhaps Malkin is your supersymmetric partner.

6. No. 9 on Mar 28th, 2008 at 9:41 pm

   Totally awesome you were before bragging about being associated with THOSE blogs. May have to rethink the bookmark.

7. James Gallagher on Mar 28th, 2008 at 10:52 pm

   Sorry to burst your bubble, but you’re ranked 4768 at

   http://technorati.com/pop/blogs

   Maybe these blogging rankings are (no!!) [b]unscientific[/b]

8. Traums on Mar 29th, 2008 at 2:25 am

   Wow! You guys beat boing boing!! Wicked….

9. John Ramsden on Mar 29th, 2008 at 5:10 am

   Sean wrote (#2):
   >
   > Flattery is a good start. What are the questions?

   While astromcnaught is getting his/her questions ready, I have a quick one if I may. I’d like to get a clear intuitive grasp of why a black hole colder than the ambient space doesn’t simply absorb energy and grow larger, as one might naively expect from the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

   I’m guessing it’s something to do with relativity, and the frequency shifts of distant radiation as one approaches the event horizon, so that perhaps it does absorb some ambient energy but then emits more Bekenstein-Hawking radiation so the total emitted energy, over all wavelengths, is positive.

   P.S. There’s no hidden agenda here or underlying challenge or any weird nonsense like that. I’m genuinely unsure and just want to get the facts straight.
   Just a sound reference would be great (and I’m not scared of a few “sums” either!)

10. MathandPhysics1 on Mar 29th, 2008 at 7:04 am

    Unrelated; but a good article about hypocrisy

    http://www.newcomensengine.com/2008/03/googleganda.html

11. Reginald Selkirk on Mar 29th, 2008 at 9:59 am

    I’m guessing they just couldn’t figure out how to spell Pharyngula.

12. Sean on Mar 29th, 2008 at 11:00 am

    It really was just a bug, people! We are not the fourth-biggest blog, or anywhere close.

    John, that’s an easy one — a black hole with a temperature lower than its surroundings certainly will absorb radiation and grow in mass. It would only start losing mass once the energy it was losing via Hawking radiation was larger than what it was taking in.

13. James Gallagher on Mar 29th, 2008 at 12:39 pm

    Well it was only 3 digits out, 6, 7 and 8

    http://technorati.com/blogs/cosmicvariance.com

    I’m not sure how accurate technorati ratings are, but at least your 4678 ranking beats Distler’s 2,124,856 place !

    http://www.technorati.com/blogs/golem.ph.utexas.edu%2F%7Edistler%2Fplanet

    Are there even 2 million serious blogs on the net??

14. James Gallagher on Mar 29th, 2008 at 12:52 pm

    oops, got the wrong blog for Jacques Distler, in the interests of science and accuracy, lets correct that

    http://www.technorati.com/blogs/golem.ph.utexas.edu%2F%7Edistler%2Fblog

    126,758th place

15. joseph duemer on Mar 29th, 2008 at 2:01 pm

    “I find it very surprising that such a bias and often, factually incorrect, blog like Daily Kos would be number one.”

    Yeah, LGF is so much more reliable.

16. Melusine on Mar 29th, 2008 at 3:22 pm

    MathandPhysics1 on Mar 29th, 2008 at 7:04 am

    Unrelated; but a good article about hypocrisy

    http://www.newcomensengine.com/2008/03/googleganda.html

    Off-topic response: M&P1, there’s at least one good of it, and it’s something I seriously considered proposing when I lived in the overly-light polluted city of Houston and looked at stars from a parking garage: an hour of lights off for amateur astronomers to see better without going rural.

    Look at Sydney, Australia.

    I would have been yanking out my binoculars.

17. MathandPhysics1 on Mar 29th, 2008 at 4:14 pm

    Okay…If you want to propose a “Cosmology Hour”, I could get behind that…but only for an hour

18. Chris on Mar 29th, 2008 at 5:30 pm

    Dear James,
    The blog ratings are very scientific. It’s just that our idea of ‘best blog’ isn’t.

19. astromcnaught on Mar 29th, 2008 at 5:58 pm

    Right, thank you, here we go…
    I imagine time running backwards for billions of years. Space brings everything towards me to a point. The Big Bang I guess. Is it possible for other observers to see the Big Bang such that they are always disconnected from me? Or, is the big bang infinite in extent and infinitely dense at the same time? I mean does theory allow an infinite density that was infinite in extent and has expanded ever since?

    Another one.
    I kinda understand entanglement. I imagine an annihilation occuring as the observable universe cooled just enough to allow one of the photons to reach me, billions of years later. The photon interacts with me and makes the other do its thing. Does that mean that the effect of me observing a photon here in my living room has affected something else beyond the Hubble radius?

20. Justin K. on Mar 30th, 2008 at 1:14 am

    You’ll notice “Cosmic Variance” is on the sidebar of:

    http://malcolmpollack.com/

    However things turn out, keep in mind President Bush’s remark,

    “Information is moving—you know, nightly news is one way, of course, but it’s also moving through the blogosphere and through the Internets.”—Washington, D.C., May 2, 2007……http://www.slate.com/id/76886/pagenum/7

    If I were a physicist and able to talk like one, I’d be very careful of what I wished for.

    JK

21. MathandPhysics1 on Mar 30th, 2008 at 9:47 am

    Math is really hard

    http://www.newcomensengine.com/2008/03/new-math.html

22. MathandPhysics1 on Mar 30th, 2008 at 9:49 am

    Perhaps a better word would have been “difficult”, I wouldn’t want to mislead anyone about the nature of the article. It really is about math.

23. victor on Mar 30th, 2008 at 10:18 am

    Maybe the fourth place is related to the fact that, according to their statistics, your number of inbound links raised from 613 on 03/25 to 4863 on 03/26. A 790% increase (!?).

24. Badger3k on Mar 30th, 2008 at 11:03 pm

    Well, I see it was a bug, but it could happen. Racists and mental patients need to sleep sometime.

25. Albatross on Mar 31st, 2008 at 9:39 am

    I find these results disturbing, I had no idea the economy was so bad. But there must be a lot of unemployed pudgy white guys living in their parents’ basements. That’s the only explanation I can come up with for lines 2, 3, 6, and 9.

26. tommaso dorigo on Mar 31st, 2008 at 1:41 pm

    Hi Sean,

    at the risk of sounding jealous, envious, and green with livor, I have to say I do not rate your blog as awesome. It does not supefy, it does not startle, it does not cause shots of adrenaline. It has many pluses, of course - otherwise it would not be where it is, in the list above or in other ranking systems around.

    And you should be happy about that. A physics blog cannot, _cannot_, be a top ranking one. Beware. If you get there, you have mutated to something you might not have liked in the past. What are you, a guy with an opinion on everything ? A star writer ? Certainly both, but you first and foremost are a scientist, and if you forget your roots it gets dangerous.

    Just my two pence… and congratulations.
    Cheers,
    T.

27. Pingback from Keeping the Variance down « A Quantum Diaries Survivor on Mar 31st, 2008 at 2:05 pm

    [...] posts on those shortly), I will just paste here a comment I left at cosmic variance, where Sean boasts about his (really, really good) blog ranking fourth in a certain wishful ranking: Okay, there seems [...]

28. William.W on Mar 31st, 2008 at 3:23 pm

    What a funny result!

    I don’t suppose the number of inbound links increasing could be the fact that dailykos.com linked to cosmivariance.com? There was a main page story on 3/26 that linked here, and a couple of recommended diaries whose authors had cosmicvariance.com on their blogroll.

    Hell, that’s how I found the site originally, back when the site was younger. Been lurking ever since~

29. tommaso dorigo on Mar 31st, 2008 at 3:26 pm

    Hmmm I meant stupefy… I do not really know whether your blog supefies or not, whatever that means.
    T.

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