Gratuitous ramblings from Rob Knop about astronomy, cosmology, virtual worlds, or whatever he feels the need to rant on about
A new science blogs collective, Scientopia, is starting up today, and I will be a part of that! As such, the new location for this blog will be http://scientopia.org/blogs/galacticinteractions/.
I’ve just arrived in Squamish, BC, where I’ll be starting teaching at Quest University in less than a month. It’s going to be a very busy fall semester, but as I settle back into academia I intend to pick up the pace of the science blogging once again.
See you at the new site!
I have renamed my blog back to “Galactic Interactions”, the name of the blog that I started when I was still an assistant professor of physics & astronomy. After I started working at Linden Lab, I noticed that I wasn’t blogging about astronomy all that much any more, and what’s more I have to admit that I was feeling kind of sad that I wasn’t spending the time thinking about physics & astronomy that would lead me to spontaneously blog about it. As such, closed down my blog on scienceblogs.com and started a new blog entitled “Second Sight”.
Life changes. I no longer work for Linden Lab. Also, over the course of the last year, I’ve become involved with MICA, which has made me more active in the astronomy community — not as active as if it were my job, but it does give me a connection that allows me to keep it up on my own time. Especially given that MICA was founded by people who work in N-body calculations (i.e. the computational/theoretical arm that goes into dealing with, among other things, galaxies interacting), it makes sense for me to rename my blog back to “Galactic Interactions”. So here it is!
I may be changing the look of the blog a bit in coming weeks too. Being the nerd that I am, I don’t find themes or anything like that. I hacked the PHP and HTML for a standard Wordpress theme to get the current look, and I may hack it a bit more to make it more appropriate again to its new/old name.
I know, I’ve said that sort of thing before. I’m not a new blogger… until a couple of months ago, I was writing Galactic Interactions, a science blog that (like so many other blogs) was about everything under the Sun, but which tended to focus vaguely in the direction of astronomy.
Lots of things have changed in my life since then. I’m no longer in academia. I’m no longer an active physics & astronomy researcher or teacher. I’m now a computer engineer, working for Linden Lab, the company that has created and runs the virtual online 3D world known as Second Life. For a while, I tried to keep writing Galactic Interactions, but I was finding it difficult on a few fronts. First, I was quite busy learning my new job (my new career!). Second, I really am somewhat bitter about having had to leave physics & astronomy, and it was a bit of a bitter reminder. Most importantly, though, I was finding that I felt the need, the responsibility to post something about astronomy regularly (each week?) to Galactic Interactions, and it was starting to feel more like a burden. I wasn’t naturally running into random astronomy news tidbits as much as I had been, so the spark of “oh I must post about this!” wasn’t coming so naturally. What’s more, there are always nasty comments out there from people who know everything, and the personal attacks in the comments were making me feel like it just wasn’t worth being out there saying my say— even though they were rare in comparison to what quite a number of other bloggers at, say, scienceblogs.com.
However.