This coming June will mark ten years since I started this blog (using Blogger on our own domain– here’s the very first post) and writing about physics on the Internet. This makes me one of the oldest science bloggers in the modern sense– Derek Lowe is the only one I know for sure has been […]
Category: Technology
Pseudonymity Is the Wrong Solution
I don’t think my point quite got across the other day, so let me try phrasing this another way. I think a lot of what’s being written about pseudonymity on blogs is missing the real point. The really important question here is not so much whether blog networks should allow pseudonymous blogs as whether employers […]
On Nymity
The whole issue of pseudonymity has come up again, both on Google+ and on ScienceBlogs. While I’ve been on the Internet for nigh on 20 years, my initial point of entry was through a Usenet group that strongly preferred real names (or something real-name-ish). As a result, I’ve never tried to maintain a separate Internet […]
Social Media Are Not Evenly Distributed
Back in June, when I was headed to DAMOP, I got email telling me that they had an official Android app. I installed it, and in with the meeting program and maps and things was a “Social Media” section, that included an official hashtag: #apsdamop. I posted a few things using it, but it rapidly […]
Imminent Death of the Book, Continued
A little more tab clearance: these are stories about the transformation of publishing that I’ve been meaning to say something about but haven’t got around to. First, some actual news: rumors of the imminent death of publishing may be somewhat exaggerated, as more books were sold for more money in 2010 than in a while. […]
Proposed New Rule
A well-known joke is “Rule 34” saying that anything that exists will have porn about it on the Internet. The introduction to this Inside Higher Ed piece about anti-law-school blogs reminds me that we probably need a higher-numbered rule stating that every field of human endeavor will also produce a bunch of blogs about how […]
The Inevitable Death of the Book, Aleph-Nought in a Series
A lot of pixels have been spilled lamenting the death of Borders books, a rather large fraction of them being used to say stupid things. Particularly in the “they killed off independent bookstores so good riddance to them” vein– it’s great that you lived in a place that had good indie bookstores and enough hipsters […]
Physics Android Apps?
I’m going to be at an amusement park tomorrow, for a meeting of the APS’s Committee on Informing the Public, which oversees the APS outreach program. Why an amusement park? Because a common outreach-type program is to do a Physics Day at an amusement park and talk about the physics of roller coasters and the […]
It’s Not Just Science Journalism
One of the tabs I opened last week and didn’t have time to get to was this Clastic Detritus post about what it takes to get science stories in the media, which is (quoting Michael Lemonick): I get it that a stories involving science need a little something extra to make it in a magazine […]
PNAS: Adam DeConinck, High-Performance Computing Systems Engineer
(This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists, giving the responses of Adam DeConinck, who works at a company providing supercomputing resources. The goal is to provide some additional information for science students thinking about their fiuture careers, describing options beyond the assumed default Ph.D.–post-doc–academic-job track.) 1) What is your […]