June 22, 2012 will mark the tenth anniversary of the founding of this blog. While I would like to one day be famous enough to be able to staple together a collection of loosely related blog posts and call it a book, I’m not there yet. This particular arbitrary numerical signifier does, however, seem worth some commemoration. Also, while I have some idea of how the site has evolved over the last ten years, it’s been a slow process, so I thought it would be interesting to troll back through the archives and see how things used to be.
Next Friday, appropriately enough the 13th, will be exactly ten weeks short of the ten-year anniversary. So, my vague plan (more of an aspirational goal, really) is to go back through the archives, starting with the original blogger site and highlight some of the most notable stuff from each year of this blog’s existence each of the next ten Fridays.
So, why am I mentioning this today, which is not a Friday, in a post which does not contain any outstanding historical bloggage? Well, for one thing, most of my mental processing cycles are currently taken up by unpleasant stuff that I can’t blog, but can’t stop thinking about. More importantly, though, there’s a vast amount of material here, and to go through it quickly will require a lot of skimming, and I might miss some stuff.
So, consider this post both notice of the upcoming series of posts, and also an open forum to suggest things from this blog’s past that I ought to keep an eye out for. If there’s an old post that you particularly liked, leave a URL in the comments; if there’s something you sorta-kinda remember, leave a description and I’ll try to find it as I go through old stuff.
And if any publishing types out there would like to buy a shaggy best-of collection of blog posts by a physics professor and midlist-y pop-science writer, email me, and we can talk….
Just be like Rhett and make an e-book!
While I’m egotistical enough to believe people will read my blog posts, I’m also kind of lazy. And re-formatting everything to work as an e-book is not the kind of thing I’ll do unless there’s some reward to it. In Rhett’s case, his ebook of physics posts has some educational value, and I’m not vain enough to think that anybody would get that much out of the eclectic mix of stuff I’ve posted here.
I’ve always been partial to your back-of-the-envelope calculations on fairy tales, scifi movies, and whatnot. Those are a nice mix of entertainingly absurb and occasionally surprisingly practical.