Ten Years Before the Blog: 2011-2012

In which we reach the end of our decade-long historical recap.

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So, at long last, the recap of my decade of blogging has reached the current year. And I do have a file of pre-filtered links from the current year (well, up through early May, when it was put together), which I was going to go through and post in the same manner as previous years.

But you know how when some magazine does a list of the “top 40 songs of the last 40 years,” or whatever, there are always 6-8 songs from the last couple of years, and you say “No way. It may be a big hit right now, but it’s too soon to call it a classic. Come back in 10 years.”? Yeah, blog posts are kind of the same way.

So, rather than do a big recap of the last twelve months, I’m just going to point you at the 2011 blogging recap, which includes several items from the last six months of last year (including the 99% spoof that provides the “featured image” above), and throw in mentions of a few other things:

— The “Roller Slide Physics” series of posts: one, two, three. This turned out to be a fun little project, and I eventually used it in class last fall. I’ll probably use it again next fall, too.

— The “Sad Balloon” posts: one, two. This is one of those things that it had never really occurred to me to wonder about , but once I did, it turned out to be a nice bit of physics.

— How Good Are Polarized Sunglasses. This was another experiment done specifically for the blog, and was good fun to do. I was also surprised at the result– the polarizers in the lenses of a $10 pair of shades picked up at CVS were a whole lot better than I would’ve guessed.

— Scientific Commuting: another investigation, both theory and experiment, with a later question and answers, followed by yet another application, to football and sprinting. Not only were these fun to do, but they’re a nice demonstration of how once you get a useful result, you can find all sorts of applications of it.

— The Advent Calendar of Physics, an equation a day in the run-up to Newton’s Birthday.

— Eratosthenes Blogging, in which I teamed up with Rhett Allain from Dot Physics to replicate the famous measurement of the circumference of the Earth from around 200 BC. This was probably the longest in the making of any post in the history of the blog, as we had to try three or four times before we both got decent video to use for the comparison.

And that’s some of the best stuff from the last year. I could provide a lot more links, but given the inherent lack of perspective associated with such recent blogging, I don’t think it’s worth the typing. In another ten years, maybe.

And that’s the whole recap. Ten years is a good long while, especially in blogging terms, and it’s been a pretty good run, all told.