The third edition of the Carnival of Mathematics is out: this time around, it’s hosted at
Michi’s Place.
The next edition will be up in two weeks at my fellow ScienceBlogger Jason Rosenhouse’s EvolutionBlog.
So as many other folks have been pointing out, the Koufax awards have come out with their “Best Expert Blog” nominations, and I’m incredibly pleased to say that GM/BM was nominated!
In case you’re not familiar, the Koufaxes are one of the really serious, prestigious web-awards, aimed primarily at the left-leaning blogosphere.
I realize that my chances of actually winning are pretty damned slim; on the other hand, since PZ is disqualified because he won last year, that means that the rest of us have a chance. Voting isn’t open yet, but when it is, I’ll mention it here. I would really like to make a good showing. The BlogAwards, where GM/BM came in fourth are a very sloppily run silly award; the Koufaxes mean something.
Thanks to whoever nominated me!
Many of my fellow ScienceBloggers have recently declared their membership in
Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique. I’ve been busy, so I haven’t been able to get around to signing up until now. That’s a shame, since some of the badges appear to have been designed specifically for me!
Just a quick reminder: the second Carnival of Mathematics is coming up this friday, to be hosted here at GM/BM. If you’ve written any math related articles, get me a link by thursday at the latest. You can either send it to me here at markcc at gmail.com, or via the carnival submission form.
Finally, the math geeks of the blogosphere are going to have a carnival of our own!
Alon Levy of Abstract Nonsense (which I really need to add to my blogroll!) has taken the initiative and started the Carnival of Mathematics. The very
first edition will appear on February 9th.
If you’ve got any math-related posts, send them to Alon with “Carnival of Mathematics” on the subject line.
I’ve gotten complaints from a bunch of commenters about problems with comments getting thrown into the moderation queue by the spam filter. Things with too many links, or with certain text properties, were getting caught even though they are clearly not spam.
In order to get around this, I’ve re-enable typekey authentication. You don’t have to login via typekey to post comments – it’s entirely voluntary. But you’re welcome to if you want, and if you do, your posts will be almost guaranteed to get posted without being pushed into the mod queue. (If you write a post containing links to viagra-selling websites, you’ll still get trapped by the spamfilter. But anything less egregious than that should go right through.
Here at ScienceBlogs, we’ve got our own back-channel forums for the bloggers to chat with each other. An idea that came up, which a bunch of us are interested in, is doing some posts about basic definitions and basic concepts.
There are many people who read various blogs around here who’ve had problems with definitions of some basic ideas. For example, there’s the word vector – there are at least two very different uses of the word vector around here at SB: there’s the form that people like me use (the mathematical vector), and there’s the form that epidemiologists/biologists use.
For another example, there are things like the logic and proofs – a lot of people just aren’t familiar with the concept of a proof, or how to tell whether an argument is a proper mathematical proof, or whether a conclusion follows logically from an argument.
So the question: what kinds of basic ideas or terms would you like to see a very basic-level introductory post about?
GM/BM has been pretty slow overall this week, both in new posts and in my responses to comments on previous posts. It was both bigtime deadline week on my project at work; and a very bad week for family health issues.
My dad, who I’ve mentioned on this blog a lot of times because of the fact that he’s the one who
got me started on math and geekery, has had some serious medical trouble lately, and he wound up
in the hospital this week with gangrene and a related blood infection. So I’ve been running to NJ to see him and help my mom, and back to NY to my own family and work. That hasn’t left much time for blogging, and
the time I’ve had, I’ve been rather distracted.
In particular, I really shouldn’t have posted part two of the sheaves posts. I’d just started writing it when I got the news about my dad, and I tried to just finish it up quickly so I could post it, and not leave part one hanging without part two. Unfortunately, the result showed how distracted I was. It’s definitely not up to the kind of quality that I aim for. When I have time, I’ll rewrite that one so that it actually makes sense.
Things should, most likely, be back to normal by next week. In the meantime, thanks for all of the votes in the blog awards! Last I checked, GM/BM was in *fourth place*! Coming in fourth in a group of people like
that is simple amazing.
Don’t forgot: GM/BM is a finalist in the weblog competition for best science blog. I’ve got no chance of winning, but there’s a slim chance that I could make third or fourth. You can vote once per day.
