{"id":7072,"date":"2012-05-08T09:58:11","date_gmt":"2012-05-08T13:58:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2012\/05\/08\/ten-years-before-the-blog-2005\/"},"modified":"2012-05-08T09:58:11","modified_gmt":"2012-05-08T13:58:11","slug":"ten-years-before-the-blog-2005","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2012\/05\/08\/ten-years-before-the-blog-2005\/","title":{"rendered":"Ten Years Before the Blog: 2005-2006 (Part I)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Continuing the blog recap series<\/a>, we come to the “split year” of 2005-2006. The blog was initially launched in late June, so that’s when I’m starting the years for purposes of these recaps, but ScienceBlogs launched in January 2006, so this year was half Steelypips and half ScienceBlogs. This post will cover the Steelypips half, June-January; I’ll do the ScienceBlogs stuff in a second post, once I figure out the best way to go through those posts (the ScienceBlogs archives aren’t set up well for reading straight through).<\/p>\n

In reading through this, I was amused to discover this pan of Seed<\/cite>‘s relaunch<\/a>, in which I call the magazine “Maxim<\/cite> for science geeks.<\/a>” Not quite three months later, they were paying me to write a blog… I remembered writing that, but didn’t remember how close it was to the launch of ScienceBlogs.<\/p>\n

So, what was on the blog in the second half of 2005?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

PHYSICS<\/strong>:<\/p>\n

Most of the stuff I marked as worth linking was physics-related this time out. This was near the time of the Great String Theory Backlash, and I contributed a few things to that, primarily a complaint about attitude<\/a> (which isn’t that great, but provides context), followed by some discussions of non-accelerator-based experiments to look for new physics, specifically the Eöt-Wash experiment<\/a> and two<\/a> posts<\/a> about EDM searches. I eventually wrote a magazine article (registration required)<\/a> about those, so this was good practice… <\/p>\n

I wrote up explanations of that year’s Nobel Prizes for Roy Glauber<\/a> and Ted Hänsch and Jan Hall<\/a>, and wrote up a fun colloquium talk about whether it’s possible in principle to detect a graviton<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This was also a particularly good stretch for life-in-the-lab blogging, with a post about fun with fiber optics<\/a>, and the Week in the Lab series<\/a> where I documented in detail a week spent working on a particular research project. I think that’s one of the best things I did in the Steelypips era of the blog, though.<\/p>\n

This was also a good stretch for academic blogging, some of which continues to be relevant. I talked about a brief attempt to teach myself about particle physics<\/a> (abandoned due to lack of time), and homework policy<\/a>, and the need for grades to keep students focused<\/a>, all of which seem highly relevant to the many silly things being written about online courses these days. In other pedagogical material, I also talked about the difficulty of designing tests of reasonable length<\/a>, something I still struggle with.<\/p>\n

There was a whole lot of academic job market stuff written that year, because it’s the year in which Sean Carroll and Dan Drezner were both denied tenure, which led to a lot of pieces talking about whether blogs sink your academic career. I contributed a couple<\/a> posts<\/a> to this, and threw in a more general statement about science blogging<\/a> as well. This is probably the most significant change I see in my own attitudes from then to now– at that time, I was pretty clear that I did not consider blogging a significant part of my professional activities. I’ve gone a little squishy on that point since– I still wouldn’t claim blog posts as scholarly activity (except for those cases where they get selected for “Year’s Best” anthologies), but I have gotten a number of very cool opportunities because of the blog, and it’s a more significant part of what I do. This shift mostly has to do with money– I now get paid for blogging, and running the blog is a significant part of promoting my books<\/a>, which again, earn me money. It would be very hard not to regard this as more of a professional activity given that…<\/p>\n

In academic-blogging events that I had forgotten about, I described my career trajectory<\/a> to that point– I still feel absurdly lucky to have gotten away with some of the stupid things that I did on my way to this job– and offered advice for people considering liberal arts college jobs<\/a> and students thinking about graduate school<\/a>. My favorite rediscovery from this round, though, was Notes Toward a User’s Guide to Synthetic Chemistry Talks<\/a>, which I hadn’t exactly forgotten, but hadn’t read in a while.<\/p>\n

POLITICS<\/strong>:<\/p>\n

Looking at the posts I flagged for inclusion, I find that there’s nothing in these bookmarks that’s a pure politics post. Not because I didn’t write anything about politics, but because I didn’t like any of it on re-reading.<\/p>\n

Just so this category isn’t a complete blank, though, here’s a post arguing for John Bardeen as an overlooked great American<\/a>, and one about how there will never be another Einstein<\/a>. Which are sort of vaguely political-ish. Kind of.<\/p>\n

POP CULTURE<\/strong>:<\/p>\n

A decent variety of stuff here: what I was listening to at the time<\/a>, a silly take on Battlestar Galactica<\/cite><\/a>, a thematic list of song titles<\/a>, the obligatory pick-up basketball post<\/a>, a list of favorite quotes from books<\/a>, and the start of the annual-ish tradition of Christmas Songs That Don’t Suck<\/a>. Pretty typical of my pop-culture output, really.<\/p>\n

And then, I totally sold out<\/a>, a decision with dramatic consequences, the earliest of which we’ll talk about in the next of these posts…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Continuing the blog recap series, we come to the “split year” of 2005-2006. The blog was initially launched in late June, so that’s when I’m starting the years for purposes of these recaps, but ScienceBlogs launched in January 2006, so this year was half Steelypips and half ScienceBlogs. This post will cover the Steelypips half,… Continue reading Ten Years Before the Blog: 2005-2006 (Part I)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,668],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs","category-ten_years","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7072","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7072"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7072\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}