First Post

Following Titus advice (rather late, I am no longer a student, but a postdoc), I started a new research blog: https://metarabbit.wordpress.com (you’re reading it now).

I plan to publish at least three times a week and I have set up a beeminder for it, so I’m serious (if you don’t know about beeminder, check it out). I plan to post:

1. Reviews of papers I read and liked. This is the easiest because if I’ve read the paper and thought about it, the extra effort of writing a couple of paragraphs is small.
2. Thoughts on science and the Game of Science.
3. Observations that are science-related.
4. Discussion of my published work or results that will not be published.

I will not publish on my ongoing work so much, uneless it is truly marginal. I’d be all for full frontal nudity (in scientific terms), but this would very often involve other people’s ideas/projects as well. And they may be more prudish than I am. So, until something is published (or at least in press), I will not mention on-going projects.

On the other hand, it is often frustrating to leave some interesting tidbits out of published work or be forced to squeeze all your ideas into the page limits of a publication. So, I will be taking advantage of the lack of page limits on the blog to expand on some of what I publish. Of course, I also hope that it will increase the vivsibility of the papers, but this will only work if I write relevant posts.

I used to blog a lot about politics, but I grew tired of it (politics is the mind killer, arguing politics turns killing into whether your sports team is morally better). I am now writing a book about my political ideas. Once that’s done, I will no longer need to talk about politics. It will be in the book.

But I still need to talk about science because I still think science is fascinating and the time for a good idea to take hold is measured in years, not centuries.