Blog » Blogosphere gems

Blending poetry and, uh, economics, we have The Onion’s Asian Markets Fall Like Cherry Blossoms In Gentle Spring Rain.

In other news, I’m trying to write a thesis. Currently, however, I’m trying to finish the paper that will form a large chunk of the thesis — and we keep hitting problems.

And no, I don’t know what I’ll be doing after the thesis yet. There are … options.

This is quite possibly the most bizarre thing I have ever seen. I’m still deciding whether it’s great or just really, really weird.

Anyway, it’s a movie short set in Johannesburg in 1990, in the midst of Apartheid repression. Only thing is … the repression is against aliens, as in UFO aliens.

It captures the grittiness of the Apartheid struggle pretty well, and looks very authentic (though there are a few giveaways that it was filmed in the last three or so years). But I can’t decide whether throwing in UFO aliens is interesting artistic license, or disrespectful to those that suffered.

Anyway, the movie is here, linked to from MilkandCookies

It’s actually been around for a little while, but I’ve finally remembered to link to it: Suvir’s The Every Now and Then Blog.

That brings the total for the number of blogs belonging to friends of mine, in the Pasadena area, to ten. Not too shabby, considering that the total ran to just two at the start of this year. Which makes it time to provide my opinions on the spread of blogging.

It seems to me that two or probably three is a typical “critical number” amongst any reasonably-connected group of friends. One or two people blogging is a curiosity; three starts to make it interesting, in that everyone else can usually find a new post frequently enough to make it worth hitting the blogs fairly regularly. Thereafter, if our experience is anything to go by, within a few months about half the afore-mentioned reasonably-connected group of friends will have blogs.

Another friend’s blog to add to my list: Ted Brenner’s blog. For a change, Ted is actually a real person, with a real job — that is, not a Caltech student.

The blog is a good mix of posts and references to interesting articles on subjects ranging from economics and politics, to sports and even beer brewing. Also make sure to check out the just-formed blog covering The Los Angeles Angels baseball team — when you get those free tickets, Ted, remember who did some advertising!

Oh, and make sure to ask Ted for some good stories next time you see him — he’s got quite a few!

It brings me great pleasure to announce that EVERY MEMBER of our apartment now has a blog, with the unveiling of Greg’s Apparent Horizons.

It being barely more than a day since the concept was floated, I was most surprised to see a number of posts, and tons of comments, already on the blog. I suppose what they say about time moving ever faster on the internet is true!

A pretty cool cartoon blog: JamesFrancis. He mixes two cartoon strips: one set inside a mind, between different components of someone’s subconscious, and the other between various political figures. It’s mostly commentary on current events and politics, with a definite but not exclusively Southern Africa focus. I enjoyed them a lot, and there’s always a collection of links to read more on the background to any cartoon.

In the last year or two, we’ve seen the Rose Revolution in Georgia and the even-larger Orange Revolution in the Ukraine, where spontaneous popular protests, politicians with principles, and global support, overcame election fraud and abuse of power.

Now would be a great time for the same to happen in Togo. Togo is a smallish West-African country (about 5 million people), which until recently was ruled by the longest-serving president in the continent, Gnassingbe Eyadema. He died on Saturday, but instead of power passing constitutionally to the Speaker of Parliament, the army has kept the Speaker out of the country, and sworn in Gnassingbe Eyadema’s son as the new president.

One of my favourite physics-related blogs: Luboš Motl’s reference frame.

The content is about evenly split between very insightful discussions on the content and broader relevance of recent papers in string theory, and posts on politics and current affairs, from the perspective of a Harvard-based string theorist.

Be warned, though, that the technical discussions are fairly technical. For instance, here’s a great post on the recent Lin, Lunin and Maldacena paper, on a general solution for supergravity solutions, with a nice duality map to conformal field theory fermions.

Now if only he can get rid of his resident crackpot, Quantoken, who seems obliged to prove his ignorance with every one of his (many) comments…