Best Blogging of the Year

Bora’s beating the drum for submissions to this year’s science blogging anthology. He doesn’t seem to be suffering from a lack of submissions, but if you’ve got something you would like to see re-printed in dead tree form, submit it before December 1. I’m not clear whether this will be going through Lulu again this year, or if they have a regular publisher interested.

It’s earlier than I would normally do this sort of thing, but Bora’s post got me wondering about what I consider my best posts of the year. This isn’t by any means a comprehensive list, just what I came up with in a few minutes of searching the archives.

I’ve already had some posts reprinted in other venues. The Innumeracy of Intellectuals was reprinted by Inside Higher Ed, and Science Festivals, Science Books, and Science Funding was re-worked for the “Quantum Times,” the newsletter of an APS subdivision. I’ve also been asked for and granted permission to reprint We Are Science, though I’m not sure it’s come out yet.

Not reprinted, but widely linked, was What Everyone Should Know About Science, from back in March. There was also The Funding Issue, all the way back in January, which led directly to the post that “Quantum Times” reprinted.

In straight-up physics blogging, I was very happy with the way the The Metastable Xenon Project, a whole series of peer-reviewed blogging posts. I also did a series of lab visit reports following a trip to Maryland in March: Cavity QED, Cold Plasmas, Francium, Four-Wave Mixing, Unusual Lattices, and Biophysics. The User’s Guide to Vacuum Pumps (Noisy and Quiet) were pretty good, too.

Finally, I had three new posts discussing Relativity with Emmy: Relative Dog Motion, Time Dilates When You’re Chasing Bunnies, and Everything Is Relative in the Magic Closet. The first one got a lot of traffic, the other two sank with little trace, but I was really fond of the last one.

All in all, that’s a pretty respectable output, I think. Especially considering that I basically went on hiatus for a month and a half when I was madly revising the book-in-progress.

I haven’t nominated any of these for the Open Laboratory anthology, both because I’m lazy, and because it feels tacky to submit my own stuff. If you think any of them deserve it, feel free to submit something. If you hate all of my stuff, but are reading this anyway, feel free to submit something from a blogger you actually do like. And consider finding a different hobby.