Just curious about how easy it is to set up a poll. Why not find out toward whom the CV readership is leaning these days? We promise your answers are not binding.

Updates: We are a famous physics blog!

And Ron Paul supporters have perfected a special brand of annoying.

And polls on the internet are useless.

None of which really qualifies as startling new information, I guess.

In our on-going quest to satisfy the demands of our readership, we introduce the launch of http://cosmicvariance.spreadshirt.com, where you can find clothes and accessories imprinted with the soon-to-be-immortal words of Mark Trodden:

“Once you have tenure, it’s all edible panties, firearms, and blow.”

Shirts with the CV logo are also available. (Note that the graphic we have for the logo is on the small size. If you order one, and it looks like crap, let us know and we’ll discontinue the logo shirts until we make a bigger version.) Any profit will be quickly reinvested in some combination of edible panties, firearms, blow, and paying our web hosting overlords.

We now have a Facebook group for Cosmic Variance! But let me work up to it.

I had heard about Facebook many times, but had effortlessly resisted the temptation to learn anything about it or get involved in any way. It’s a social-networking site, allowing people to keep each other up to date with stuff they are doing. A pastime in which I pretty much have no interest, despite what one might gather from the fact that I have a blog and all that. While I’ll tell stories about travel or amusing anecdotes for purposes of local color, and mention the occasional big event, for the most part I prefer to use the blog to talk about ideas and keep the fascinating details of my everyday life a tightly-shrouded mystery.

But at some point, the “everyone is doing it, how hard can it be, and maybe it could even be fun” argument kicks in, and in a moment of weakness you sign up. I blame Carl Zimmer, who just joined himself, with the usual disclaimers. It’s free, and easy as pie — you sign up, post a photo if you like, and that’s it.

The basic point of Facebook, according to my limited understanding, is to have “Friends.” That is, a set of other Facebookers with whom you have (mutually) agreed to allow access to your profile and information. There is a quite brilliant application via which, if you choose to allow it, Facebook can zip through a conventional email program (Gmail, apple, etc) looking for email addresses of other people with Facebook accounts, and let you ask them to be friends. And then there are networks of common interest and all that stuff. The obvious use is that you can simply tell Facebook when you’ve decided to quit your job and hike across the Andes, rather than emailing all of your friends individually.

But there is a deep problem of postmodern community ethics here — who is a “Friend,” in the official Facebook sense? One group would be, you know, your actual friends. Another would be people with whom you have some less tangible, but nevertheless pretty mutual and well-defined, relationship — maybe you’ve exchanged emails, or comments on each others blogs. It’s all up to you where to draw the line.

But personally, I wouldn’t count someone as a “Friend” if I had simply read their book, or visited their blog, or listened to their radio show, without them knowing me at all. And vice-versa. I mean, I think — to be honest, I’m new at this, and have no idea what the standards are. It might be very natural, for example, for regular CV readers to want to be my friend, but I’m not really sure it fits my notion of what friendship is really all about.

Then I noticed that Crooked Timber has its own Facebook group. Which seemed, at first, like the dumbest thing in the world — why do you need some proprietary social network when you already have the damn blog?

Upon digging deeper, however, I realized it was actually the smartest thing in the world. (A very fine line.) With the Facebook group, people can come together and share pictures, or relevant stories or rants, without being “friends” and dealing with constant updates about what they all had for dinner last night. (Although advancing to friendship — or more! — is always possible.) And in fact there are lots of blogs that have their own Facebook group.

So, now, so do we. Go ahead and join up. Upload your photo (or not). Share videos and pictures from the regular “Fans of CV” get-togethers which I’m sure happen all the time. The Pharyngula group has over a hundred members — you don’t want to be shown up by a bunch of godless cephalophiles, do you?

But there’s no way I’m ever having a MySpace page.

Update: Seems to be working! Over a hundred members, and the irrepressible Mark Jackson has even started a conversation about physics-related movie titles.

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.

Shakedown problems from our change of hosting services continue to pester us just a bit, but I think we’re getting the hang of it. We had to upgrade to a more powerful plan, which changed our monthly cost from “trivial” to “somewhat annoying,” so we’ve added some hopefully-unobtrusive Google ads to the sidebar. If you take our estimated earnings from the ads, subtract from that the piece demanded by the heavy hand of the state in the form of those collectivist utopians at the IRS, and subtract from what’s left the cost of our web host, you are left with a very good approximation of zero. Freewheeling public-intellectual leisure-time blogging is not the road to riches I was led to expect. (This despite the impression that I am only in it for the money.)

The “latest comments” plugin and the “comment preview” plugin both seem to have recently decided to act up, for reasons that may or may not have anything to do with anything else. They are temporarily disabled, but hopefully will see a comeback at some point.

Since things are largely in working order, however, this is as good a time as any for me to take my quasi-annual Summer Blogging Vacation. Not a real vacation, of course; precisely the opposite. There are a handful of good ideas languishing on my laptop, which need coaxing and encouragement in order to grow into refereed papers in respectable physics journals, and I’m going to concentrate on that for a while. I have all sorts of things I want to blog about, but for the most part it would take time to do a good job, and it’s time I don’t have right now. So I’m going to disappear for a few weeks, leaving you in the capable hands of the rest of the crew.

But I should go without offering congratulations to members of the Supernova Cosmology Project and the High-Redshift Supernova Team, who have just been awarded the Gruber Prize in Cosmology for discovering the acceleration of the universe. This wasn’t their first prize, and it won’t be their last. Our universe is big, it’s getting bigger, and it’s getting bigger faster — Edwin Hubble discovered the first two of these facts, and these two teams discovered the third. Not too shabby. For some inside scoop you should refer to the blogging member of the SCP, Rob Knop, who is also celebrating a new job. A distinguished astronomer forwarded to me the following sites, ready and available for follow-up reading:

http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/Phys-Gruber-Prize-2007.html
http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/home07/jul07/gruber.html
http://newsinfo.nd.edu/content.cfm?topicid=23706
http://carnegieinstitution.org/news_releases/news_2007_0717.html
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2007/07/17_gruber.shtml
http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/press/2007/pr200717.html
http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2007/07.19/99-darkenergy.html
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22092372-12332,00.html

And of course I can’t resist:

“Cosmology is the most scientifically rigorous, aesthetically elegant, and the most poetic of the sciences.”
Peter Gruber, Chairman of the Board
The Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation

Hey, I’m just quoting here.

For Science!

Still in the process of changing hosts, and as you may have noticed, there is still a bug or two. Hang in there.

Update: Most things are now working! We have said goodbye to Bluehost, and are now in the apparently-capable hands of InMotion Hosting. Hopefully we’ll be seeing less of the dreaded “CPU Exceeded” errors from now on. There are definitely still a few bugs in the system, but we’re hoping to swat them away before too long.

Various comments left while the transition was in progress have disappeared (as predicted), although some have been restored. Some that were not restored were of the alternative-science persuasion. I think that from now on we’re going to be considerably more Draconian about deleting such comments without warning, trying to nurture a safe haven for dull old mainstream scientific orthodoxy here. It’s a big Internet, though.

Yeah, we know, you can’t read the blog. We are once again the victim of frequent “This Account Has Exceeded Its CPU Quota” errors. Apparently we have a bunch of slow mysql queries, and need to optimize our indices. Which might be very straightforward, if any of us knew what those words meant. Dammit, Jim, I’m a doctor, not a database manager!

Here is the kind of error message we’re getting:

# Sat Jun 9 01:23:22 2007
# Query_time: 4 Lock_time: 0 Rows_sent: 27359 Rows_examined: 83792
SELECT
comment_post_ID, post_title
FROM (wp_comments LEFT JOIN wp_posts ON (comment_post_ID = ID))
WHERE comment_approved = ‘1′
AND comment_type NOT LIKE ‘%pingback%’ AND comment_type NOT LIKE ‘%trackback%’
ORDER BY comment_date DESC

Full of important information, I’m sure, but I have no idea what it means or how to fix it. We might just change web hosts as a way to sidestep the problem, but that sounds like work. Any other suggestions?

Update: The particular problem mentioned here has been traced to a particular plugin and fixed. We’ve eliminated all of the noticeably slow mysql queries, but the problem persists. Once in a while an apparently ordinary request (”GET” a certain page, for example) takes 30 seconds, for no discernible reason. We’ve optimized the database, and even created some new indices, although I’m not even sure if that helps or hurts things. Maybe it will fix itself.

(Update: the spam filter does seem to be picky, so please do let us know if your comments don’t come through. Unless you’re a spammer, I mean.)

We were temporarily down, after apparently being hacked into. Currently trying to upgrade to fix things. Patience!

We’ve finally upgraded to the latest version of WordPress. This should mean, among other things, that we can retrieve comments that were mistakenly deleted by an overzealous spam filter. Let us know if anything seems to not work.

Man, people have even started marching against Cosmic Variance! See if you can identify the individual kvetchmeisters from the comment threads. (Via Crooked Timber.)

Thanks to Daniel’s post below, Cosmic Variance is presently the #1 Google hit for pretty pictures of love.

Who says we don’t have a sensitive side?