Some people spend their holiday vacations catching up on reading, or spending time with relatives. I like to take a day and devote it to fixing up my web pages, which tend to get sadly neglected over the year. (The erratum page for my book is embarrassingly out of date, I really should fix that.) This year I sat down and made a list of my favorite blog posts ever, from the heady and innocent days of Preposterous Universe to the practiced maturity of the blog you see before you today. Actually I tended more toward the “potentially useful” than simply my favorites. I think the Anatomy of a Paper series was the best of this year — much of my recent blogging has been of the short throwaway variety, but occasionally I work up the energy for something more substantive.

Interestingly, I still don’t know what to think about blogging in general. I read them all the time, and can’t seem to stop myself from posting even when things get busy. (It’s the quality that deteriorates, not the quantity, it seems.) But the technology is still quite new by any sensible standards, and the kinks have yet to be worked out. In the blogs I read, there seems to be some degree of shaking-out going on — the more successful blogs are ones where there are at least a couple of posts every day, and that’s a hard rate to keep up. It either means that you become a professional blogger, or at least a semi-professional for whom blogging takes up a majority of your attention. (As already admitted, I can’t seem to stop blogging, but at the same time I can’t really imagine devoting more than half an hour a day or so to the practice.) And very few people, of course, have quite so many novel and interesting things to say, so we find a lot of repetition or reacting to stories generated elsewhere. Some of the more casual and informal voice of the earlier days may be being lost. There’s no necessary reason for this, given the easy access to newsreaders like Bloglines or Google Reader — one could certainly imagine subscribing to an eclectic collection of provocative and unpredictable bloggers who only post a few times per month. But how do you find them? I think there’s a great opportunity out there for clever aggregators, who can figure out an efficient way to collect the best of what is already going on throughout the blogs and bring it to the appropriate readers.

Science blogging, I think, still has yet to find its comfort zone, despite the growing numbers of impressive science bloggers. There are important questions about how to you conceive of your audience, the best way to conduct research discussions in a public forum, and how to deal with comments generally. We’ve talked a little bit about this before — here, here, here — but I think this is a conversation that is very much ongoing. A sadly effective demonstration of the difficulties can be found in the Garrett Lisi thread, where everyone (including me) got snippy and annoyed at everyone else. The real problem there, in my judgment, was not the occasional bits of rudeness or nonsense, but the insistence on responding to the rudeness and nonsense, making the thread about the meta-conversation instead of sticking to the actual conversation. It’s pretty elementary internetology that the best way to deal with low tone is to raise the tone by being relentlessly high-minded, but that’s a strategy that requires almost everyone to go along for it to work. Or to have someone who is willing to spend their time carefully moderating hundred-comment threads, which our blog doesn’t have. Of course we could be very dramatic, requiring that commenters register, or disallowing anonymity entirely. Those sound like drastic steps that would likely change the feel of the blog beyond recognition. In any event, we’re still trying to balance our goals of conducting interesting conversations about ideas in a public forum, without actually spending much time on it — we’ll see how it goes.

And we have a Facebook group. Still don’t know what to do with that, but it’s great to see pictures of some of our regular readers. Happy New Year to all!

This has already been batted around a bit, but for those of you who depend on CV for absolutely all of your news, there is a new US/LHC website, brought to you by the collective US institutions involved in the Large Hadron Collider. Like any hip contemporary internet presence, it comes complete with a blog. A group blog, in fact, featuring four physicists working on different aspects of the LHC: Monica Dunford, Pamela Klabbers, Steve Nahn, and Peter Steinberg. (I thought Peter already had a blog, but apparently some people can’t be confined to just one.) It’s great that we’ll get more inside scoop about what is happening at the LHC, in addition to the awesome scoop you can already get here and elsewhere.

There has been some fretting that the LHC, scheduled to turn on next year, is already getting too much hype. On the list of my own personal worries, this does not crack the top million. If you’re someone who reads several physics blogs and scans the Science Times and the wire services for stories about particle physics, you may have been subjected to a lot of stories about an experiment that hasn’t yet collected any data. But the more casual reader is very far from reaching a point of LHC over-exposure. This is by far the most important experiment in the last thirty years in an undeniably significant subfield of physics. The excitement is perfectly justified, and there will be much more to come.

The ATLAS cavern. Those poor particles won’t know what hit them!

Over at Uncertain Principles, Chad Orzel is on vacation and has handed the keys to the blog over to Aaron Bergman and Nathan (last name mysterious), specialists in string theory and atomic physics, respectively. Good luck to them as they experience what the blogosphere is like from the other side.

Aaron has begun to talk a little about the multiverse — here, here. He has thereby earned grumpy mutterings, rolled eyes, and “help” from some sensible physicists, some crackpots, some curmudgeons, his guest co-blogger, and even himself. I don’t quite understand what all the angst is about. (Actually I do understand, of course; this is one of those times when you adopt a rhetorical stance of pretending not to understand some alternative position in order to emphasize how unimpeachably correct your own position is.)

People are very welcome to disagree with the presuppositions or conclusions of anthropic reasoning; that’s just how science goes, and is perfectly healthy. But in addition to the substantive disagreements, there’s a widespread urge to express dismay that it’s even being talked about all the time. Now, that urge can’t be sensibly directed toward the actual research being done, because on that score multiverse-type stuff is a tiny percentage of all the work that goes on. Peek at any day’s worth of abstracts on hep-th, hep-ph, gr-qc, or astro-ph; you might find something anthropic here or there if you’re lucky, but it’s a tiny minority. This stuff is not dominating science, or physics, or theoretical physics, or high-energy theory, or even string theory.

No, the complaint is that considerations of parts of the universe that we can’t possibly see tend to receive an inordinate amount of attention in public discussions — on blogs, in books, in magazines and newspapers. Which is completely true, as a factual statement. At the risk of revealing a trade secret: the public discussion of different avenues of scientific research does not faithfully reflect the amount of research effort being put into those questions. Eek! I’d be willing to bet that it has always been like that. And yet, science marches on.

You may ask why something like the multiverse exerts such an outsized pull on the public imagination. So let me break it down for you here: it’s fun. People like talking about other universes, and whether we could be living in a simulation, and what happened before the Big Bang. For one thing, anyone can dive in; you don’t need to be an expert on twistor space, or two-loop counterterms, or BRST invariance in order to pontificate about the conditions under which life could exist if the laws of physics were very different. (Comments from people who are more informed and thoughtful about the subject will generally be more useful, but anyone can say something.) For another, it’s just cool to contemplate these way-out possibilities. The lure of crazy ideas is what draws a lot of people to science in the first place.

And that’s … okay, as Stuart Smalley would remind us. It would be very bad indeed if unmoored philosophizing about other universes became the dominant paradigm in science, or any subset thereof, but there’s zero danger of that. Really. But there’s no reason why people can’t have fun contemplating some of the more provocative and accessible ideas out there. On this very blog we will occasionally write lengthy discourses on some piece of technical work related to observations — and not get anywhere near the number of comments that a two-minute toss-off about the anthropic principle gets. And yet, science has not ground to a halt. I think the enterprise is sufficiently healthy to survive a few more posts about the multiverse.

Just a brief note to report that we have escaped from Yearly Kos unscathed. The science panel was a great success; Chris Mooney and Ed Brayton gave sparkling talks, Tara Smith moderated with aplomb, Lindsay Beyerstein snapped pictures, and the whole thing went smoothly due to the organizational skills of Stephen DarkSyde and Jennifer “Unstable Isotope” Thompson. The hot lights of CNN and C-SPAN glared down upon us, but we refused to wilt. Ed has a brief report here, and Chris describes the session in detail at the Huffington Post.

The conference highlight was the Democratic Presidential candidates’ forum, featuring all of the major candidates not from Delaware. (See reports on the forum here, here, here, and a convention overview by Ezra Klein here.) It was a sprightly debate, ably moderated by Matt Bai. Despite (or perhaps because of) the restriction to very brief answers, real distinctions between the candidates did shine through. Bill Richardson, for example, actually volunteered his support for a balanced-budget amendment, essentially removing himself from consideration as a serious candidate. John Edwards was slick and said good things, but that was in part because he ignored all of the questions. Hillary Clinton was, predictably, strong and well-informed, but this wasn’t her crowd. She bobbled a question about accepting donations from lobbyists, claiming that just because she took money doesn’t mean she would be influenced by the lobbying. My own biggest problem with Hillary is that she’s too willing to buy into a dramatically reductive view of how the world works, whether in all sincerity or just as a political stance. She dismissed the importance of anti-American sentiment in the world, claiming it was just anti-Bush sentiment, and claimed that we were now safer because we have to take our shoes off before passing through airport security.

I’m a longtime Barack Obama supporter, and the convention reinforced my feeling. His performance at the forum was careful and specific, not letting his charisma shine through, but he was enormously compelling in a breakout session afterward. Obama gets what it’s like to live in a complicated world, because he encapsulates a complicated world all by himself: American mother, Kenyan father, born in Hawaii, lived for four years in Indonesia as a child, educated at Harvard, trained as a street organizer in Chicago. He has an incremental but ambitious health care plan, and was anti-war from the start. Still, I’d be absolutely thrilled to support any of Obama/Clinton/Edwards against any of the embarrassments currently in contention for the Republican nomination. It’s an incredibly strong Democratic field, which is something I never thought I’d see.

But the really interesting news (to me) at the conference was that Bill Foster is running for Congress. Bill’s name might not be familiar to you unless you’re a particle physicist — he’s played a major role in a number of particle-physics experiments, including Fermilab’s antiproton Recycler Ring. Before becoming a physicist, he became independently wealthy when he and his brother founded a company (while at college) that has become the world’s leading provider of lighting systems for theaters. He’s running in Dennis Hastert’s district, although it’s not yet clear whether Hastert himself will be standing for re-election. It’s a Republican district, but not so much so that we couldn’t imagine taking it in a year when Republicans are as unpopular as they’ve been in recent memory. You can donate here to Bill’s campaign.

Wearing the little blue tag that identified me as a speaker at Yearly Kos, I was warned on multiple occasions to be on the lookout for Fox News and other nefarious media outlets, who were said to be lying in wait to ambush the innocent Kossacks, hoping to record them saying outrageous things for later broadcast. I was really looking forward to being thus ambushed, but it never happened. I spent hours lurking in the public areas, doing my best to look vulnerable and yet potentially outrageous, but no luck. My inevitable on-air showdown with Bill O’Reilly will have to wait for some other day.

p.s. It’s true, we did have non-YK fun while in Chicago. I’ll report later on our restaurant exploits, but I’d be remiss not to mention the trouncing at poker that was administered by Jeff Harvey on Friday night, thus falsifying (or at least offering one data point against) my conjecture about string theorists. Jeff had been dominating the local game since I left for California, and he proved on Friday that his success was no fluke. Or maybe it has been a fluke, but it’s a consistent one. Until next time, anyway.

In a few hours Future Spouse and I will be hopping on a plane for Chicago. All sorts of fun things are planned, but the nominal excuse for the trip is to attend the second annual YearlyKos convention, where perhaps we’ll score some party invitations. On Friday afternoon at 2:30 I’ll be speaking on the science panel, along with fellow bloggers Chris Mooney and Ed Brayton. The moderator will be Tara Smith of Aetiology, and we’ve even corralled Lindsay Beyerstein to be the official photographer; Stephen Darksyde, who put it together, unfortunately won’t be able to make it, but we hope to do him proud. Unconfirmed rumors suggest that the panel will be taped by C-SPAN for later broadcast, so don’t be shocked if you tune in hoping for some hot congressional-subcommittee action and catch science bloggers instead. It’s also supposed to be broadcast in Second Life, although I don’t know that means. Tara will also be moderating a science bloggers caucus on Thursday afternoon. Any CV readers who are at YK should certainly drop by and say hi.

Politics is a funny thing. Like last year, I anticipate being moved by the sincere passion for effecting political change in evidence among the participants, and also being a little creeped out by the attitudes of the less reasonable among them. Among the latter we are currently faced with the spectacle of Mike Stark, who decided it was a good idea to harass Bill O’Reilly at his house, putting up signs and stuffing reports of O’Reilly’s sexual-harassment lawsuit into his neighbors’ mailboxes (via Balloon Juice). This was Stark’s idea of a clever response to O’Reilly’s ludicrous attempts to smear Kos as a “hate site” by trolling thousands of diaries and millions of comments for outrageous remarks. Now, reasonable people can all agree that Bill O’Reilly is an obnoxious twit. But even twits shouldn’t be bothered at their homes, and that’s even true if they themselves have engaged in the tactic. “Two wrongs…” and all that. So it was depressing to read so many of the comments at Kos coming out in defense of Stark (although there were also many that took him to task).

Nevertheless, I have not given up my ambitions to someday be a big-shot A-list left-wing blogger. From my close readings of The Poor Man Institute and other sites, I gather that the accepted strategy is to post YouTube videos of progressive rock bands. All I can say is, if that’s the game you want to play, then don’t mess around.

Don’t. Mess. Around.

Did you know that there is a new Wikipedia entry for ScienceBlogs? And that there is even an entire category for blogs about science?

And yet there is no entry for Cosmic Variance. Just an unobtrusive little mention at the bottom of the entry on the actual concept of cosmic variance (not the blog).

Hint hint.

Simultaneously, and without apparent coordination, Phil Plait, PZ Myers, and Chris Pirillo put up posts that say basically the same thing: “I like to blog about stuff I am interested in, which includes more than one thing. If your interests do not precisely coincide with mine (which should hardly be surprising), you are welcome to skip over those posts you don’t care for, and enjoy those that you do.”

Hmmm. A daring, quirky, somewhat off-the-wall point of view. I wonder if it will catch on?

The much-anticipated Bloggingheads.tv faceoff between George Johnson and myself is now available. We talk about string theory, religion, love, the anthropic principle, and plates. After this, any further episodes might just be superfluous.

This Saturday, at the invitation of science writer George Johnson, I’ll be participating in “Science Saturday” at bloggingheads.tv. If you don’t already know, the idea behind bloggingheads seems to be to bring together bloggers (or writer/pundits, more generally) for one-on-one conversations about subjects of mutual interest. Videos of the conversations are recorded using Quicktime on the participant’s MacBook Pros (or related pieces of inferior technology), and then shared with the world. Some day, of course, every room of every house will have a webcam broadcasting 24 hours a day, and we won’t need such artificial set-ups.

Most of the Science Saturdays have been discussions between George and John Horgan, and the most recent one is no exception. (I believe the redoubtable PZ is teaming up with John on the following episode.) In the closing bit, George advertises my upcoming gig and John responds by suggesting that George challenge me to a bet. John himself has a bet with Michio Kaku, detailed at Long Bets, on whether or not anyone will win a Nobel Prize by 2020 for “work on superstring theory, membrane theory, or some other unified theory describing all the forces of nature.” Horgan is voting “no,” Kaku is voting “yes.” I’m happy to bet on things, but when it comes to predictions I like to take even-money bets on propositions that I personally believe are at least 3-1 favorites. And that certainly doesn’t qualify. In fact, I suspect it’s not even money; nobody will win a Nobel for quantum-gravity type work until there is some experimental prediction that comes true, and the chances are running against that happening in the next decade or two. Beyond that, my powers of prognostication become pretty weak, at least where there’s money concerned.

Note that, earlier on, Horgan talks about inflation, segueing smoothly from “evidence for inflation is purely circumstantial” (true) to “inflation is not really a legitimate theory any more” (completely crazy). Evidence for inflation is indirect, and likely to remain so for a while even if the theory is true (which of course it might not be), but it’s still by far the dominant theoretical paradigm for thinking about the early universe. That’s what happens when your theory both solves pre-existing problems and makes predictions that come true.

I enjoy bloggingheads occasionally, even if one’s selection criteria for “good blogger” or even “good writer” aren’t necessarily the same as those for “engaging video personality.” Video has certain obvious disadvantages when compared to text — it’s much harder to skip quickly to the parts of interest, for example — but also some advantages — you can see the person’s face and peer through their eyes into the inner reaches of their soul. The highlight of the series so far, I think, was a well-publicized meltdown on the part of Ann Althouse. I doubt any such thing will happen between George and me, unless one or the other of us has at least a couple of martinis before our 10 a.m. taping. We’re both pretty laid-back guys by nature, so we need to come up with some good topics to get feisty about. Any suggestions?

Links people have been passing to me:

The Foundational Questions Institute Community Site now has a handy RSS feed:

feed://www.fqxi.org/community/rss.php

If, like me, you read your blogs in a newsreader (like Bloglines or Google Reader) rather than the old-fashioned way of actually visiting every damn blog, this is a godsend. Anthony Aguirre has an interesting post, inspired in part by the Alternative-Science Respectability Checklist, on How Do We Fund Einstein Without Funding Crackpots? (To a large extent I think the present system does a pretty good job at that, actually. I would love to see much more flexibility in how researchers with a good track record get to use their funding, and much less onerous reporting requirements, but I haven’t seen any non-anecdotal evidence that the next generation of Einsteins is being denied their fair share of grants. I’d be interested in hearing otherwise.)

I’m on a new American Physical Society Committee on Informing the Public, and one of the things (the only thing, really) I was able to help them with was some suggestions on improving their website. The APS runs a public-outreach site, Physics Central, that occupies some prime internet real estate — it’s a top-ten result when you do a Google search on physics. One of the things I suggested to keep the page current and lively was a regular update on interesting articles to appear on physics blogs — and lo and behold, they now have a regular Physics Blogosphere feature. From there, for example, you might be directed to Cocktail Party Physics, to learn about speeding Priuses, cloud chambers, the Iron Science Teacher competition, Cute Child Syndrome, the Exploratorium, and some insight into Rush Limbaugh’s manifold shortcomings. (That’s just in one post, of course; there are others.) It’s sort of like Seed’s Daily Zeitgeist, but just for physics. Now if we could only get them an RSS feed…

Finally, Terri Yu points to a series of podcasts by MIT physicist Peter Fisher on Life as an Academic. A good example is this episode on imposter syndrome — the nagging feeling that you don’t belong here among all of these actually-smart people. For the most part, they don’t either, so don’t worry about it.