In which the great blog recap rolls on to probably the most important event of the last ten years: the arrival of SteelyKid. And a bunch of other bloggy stuff.<\/p>\n
————<\/p>\n
There’s really no question what should be the featured image for this recap post: Clearly, it needs to be an early photo of SteelyKid, who arrived not quite four years ago<\/a>, and soon made friends with Appa the stuffed sky-bison<\/a>. Sadly, we haven’t been very good about doing regular pictures of The Pip, mostly because it’s so exhausting to keep up with the two of them.<\/p>\n Of course, regular blogging continued as well. This seems to have been the rare year without some all-consuming kerfuffle, at least on my part– there were a couple of big things that went on in the background, but by this time I had largely decoupled from the more drama-prone parts of ScienceBlogs. Which, on the one hand, was a little sad, because it ceased to be a real blogging community, but was much better on the whole for my sanity. And my blogging, which had a better balance of stuff.<\/p>\n PHYSICS<\/strong><\/p>\n I spent a lot of time during this year revising the manuscript of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog<\/cite><\/a>, so it’s not too surprising that there were a lot of conversations with the dog about physics. We talked about physical theories as dog toys<\/a>, general relativity<\/a>, and psuedo-quantum scams<\/a>, as well as some stuff that will turn up in a later section. I had forgotten the first and third of those, so it was fun to rediscover them.<\/p>\n This was also a good year for writing things that I keep coming back to. We had The Innumeracy of Intellectuals<\/a> (reprinted in Inside Higher Ed), We Are Science<\/a> (reprinted in some group’s newsletter), Science Is What Makes Us Human<\/a> (which plays a big part in the work-in-progress), Algebra Is Like Sunscreen<\/a> (not actually famous, but I refer back to it from time to time), and The Myth of the Abrasive Genius<\/a> (which, again, I refer back to now and again). That’s a pretty good run of stuff. There was also a lot of stuff along similar lines to those, though not quite as memorable: Peer Review Does Not Define Science<\/a> (in which I ally myself with Zombie Feynman), Innumeracy on Parade<\/a> (why is the Washington Post<\/cite> so prone to publishing desperately stupid articles about math, anyway?), and Geniuses Don’t Fail Out<\/a> (which might be a little too harsh, but I still think the “I’m just too smart for school” is more likely to be self-justification than reality). I also got to give a graduation speech at my old high school<\/a>, twenty years after my own graduation, which was pretty cool.<\/p>\n I also did a lot of straight-up physics writing. One of the things that I’m most proud of didn’t actually make it onto the list of top posts for the year, but I like it a lot even if nobody else does: the Metastable Xenon Project<\/a>, in which I went through and wrote up in detail each of the six publications that came out of my Ph.D. thesis work, along with a “making of” post telling some of the stories behind the papers. This was probably my single favorite physics-y thing of the year.<\/p>\n Also in physics content, there was a pair of posts about Many-Worlds (one<\/a>, two<\/a> (which is where I started to get fed up with Neil Bates…), two posts about photons (one<\/a>, two<\/a>), a book I really liked<\/a>, a discussion of numbers and units<\/a>, and a discussion of why Excel is woefully inadequate for scientific purposes. <\/p>\n There was, of course, pedagogical material, with posts on “gatekeeping”<\/a>, grading methods<\/a>, math in the intro courses<\/a>, and some early worrying about active engagement methods<\/a>, which became a bigger obsession last fall. If I had to pick one post out of the pedagogical stuff to save, though, it would be How to Email Your Instructor for Help<\/a>, which I think ought to be distributed to incoming students at first-year orientation.<\/p>\n I also had a bunch of sort of whimsical physics-type posts, looking at ways to apply physics to improve football<\/a>, and applying physical models to great works of fantasy literature<\/a>, and to bedtime<\/a> stories<\/a>. Those are hard to do on a regular basis, but a good deal of fun when I think of them, and I’ve continued to do some of this sort of thing.<\/p>\n Also, SteelyKid provided material for a silly physics post<\/a> of her own…<\/p>\n POLITICS<\/strong><\/p>\n 2008, if you remember, was a really bad year, economy-wise. This was the era of the great mortgage bubble crash, which I tried to explain to Emmy<\/a>. I also had a modest proposal for fixing the financial industry<\/a> that I still think would have worked. Actually, it would probably still be an improvement, actually.<\/p>\n In giant stupid blog kerfuffles, I again turned to the dog for an oblique comment<\/a>, and offered a resigned explanation of why I don’t write much about politics<\/a>.<\/p>\n 2008 being an election year, I also had some posts about data presentation in political-ish contexts, having to do with tax plans<\/a> and public transit promotions<\/a>. And that’s about it for notable politcal commentary.<\/p>\n POP CULTURE<\/strong><\/p>\n The highlight of the year, pop-culture wise, was the DonorsChoose fundraiser, for which I agreed to dance like a monkey<\/a>. Everybody got a good laugh out of that.<\/p>\n One of the most enduring posts of the year, weirdly, was this question about dog medication<\/a>, which continued to draw a trickle of new comments pretty much right up to the present. People have strong opinions about their flea and tick preventatives.<\/p>\n I also wrote about people saying dumb things about publishing<\/a>, a topic that keeps coming up these days<\/a>, and the too-narrow definition of high culture<\/a>, which ties back to the innumeracy of intellectuals thing from the start of the post. There was also a post about Tolkien<\/a> that almost belongs in the politics category, but not quite.<\/p>\n Finally, there was the requisite sports content, with a rant about baseball<\/a>, a look at a stupid story about halftime scores<\/a>, and a post about the story that put me off Malcolm Gladwell for good<\/a>. Which is another thing I refer back to a lot, which is as good a way as any to end the recap of this year in blogging.<\/p>\n Next up: the year I became a Real! Published! Author! Woo-hoo!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In which the great blog recap rolls on to probably the most important event of the last ten years: the arrival of SteelyKid. And a bunch of other bloggy stuff. ———— There’s really no question what should be the featured image for this recap post: Clearly, it needs to be an early photo of SteelyKid,… Continue reading Ten Years Before the Blog: 2008-2009<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":7220,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,2,668],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blogs","category-personal","category-ten_years","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7219","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=7219"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7219\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7220"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}