Follow the reluctant adventures in the life of a Welsh astrophysicist sent around the world for some reason, wherein I photograph potatoes and destroy galaxies in the name of science. And don't forget about my website, www.rhysy.net



Sunday 17 March 2019

O Rhysy where art thou ?

Are you one of the tiny handful of people who only follow me on this blog ?

Have you been wondering where I've been and why posts are even fewer lately than they normally are ?

Have you been secretly dreading that I must be preparing some absolute monster of a post that's gonna need a well-trained team of six stout mountaineers and a harpoon just to even read the abstract ?

Worry no more ! The reason has simply been that Google are a bunch of bastards who decided to cancel one of their greatest products : Google Plus. I shall save a paean on that for another day. Suffice to say that with the final shutdown approaching rapidly (2nd April), I did not particularly want to just watch my thousands of posts vanish into oblivion. Instead, using the Google Plus Exporter tool, I've been saving my assorted ravings and archiving into them into not one but two shiny new blogs.

Physicists of the Caribbean has evolved steadily over the years from wanton silliness to scientific analysis to philosophical ramblings. Posts here have also tended to spiral out of control in terms of length. See, what Google Plus let me do, apart from reaching an audience of some quite wonderful people, was jot down quick initial impressions without feeling obliged to explore anything in excessive detail. I've found that to be an incredibly useful experience and I don't want to lose it. Nor do I want to start doing the same thing on other social media only to potentially lose it all again one day.

That's where the new blogs come in. These are not just static archives but living notebooks where I can and do scribble down something quickly for later use - many of the posts here on POTC have evolved from these kinds of snippets when I've sensed that some general trend can be seen from specific examples.

I'm also aware that different people are interested in different things and not everyone wants to subscribe to a blog where the content is so incredibly randomised. But having a different blog for each topic doesn't suit me either. So here's how things stand :

  • First and foremost is this one : a place to write finished pieces, but also now with an increased effort on concision and, I hope, more silliness again.
  • Second, there's Little Physicists. That one focuses heavily on astronomy and data visualisation - stuff I can comment on professionally and quick, rough-and-ready data visualisation tests. 
  • Thirdly, the most active blog is Decoherency, which is basically a shorter version of this blog : everything else I'm interested in, but with much shorter and more focused posts. Lots of things about the latest political developments, rational thinking, nature, and whatever else I happen to find interesting.

These two new blogs are already active, so check them out, follow them if you like, and reshare anything you find interesting because it sure as hell won't reshare itself. Both still have "placeholder" posts which need updating and I'll also be going through all three blogs to replace links to Google Plus posts that might soon disappear. It's been a truly enormous amount of work to archive years of material, but it's now basically complete. And if you want to follow me directly on social media, you can find a complete list of my internet locations here.

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