Daily Archives: July 21, 2008

Bloghide!

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Blogrolling, rolling, rolling, keep them blogs a-rolling

Blog Roll How To (howto) at Greg Laden’s Blog.

What does a blog roll do for the blogger? Well, it allows the blogger a way to give and receive link love. Link love is not a form of on line cybersex. It is in part a replacement for one on one professional contact that occurs in Meatland. Entry on a blog roll is a nice thing to do for someone else. If a blog roll is very short, you are either looking at a new blogger or an asshole. (I’m talking about the total length of blog roll, not the displayed portion). I know of several bloggers who have been blogging for quite some time but have fewer than 40 or so sites on the blog roll, three or four of them being links to the blogger’s own sites. Independent evidence suggests in many of thes cases that the blogger is an asshole. The correlation is astoundingly strong.

There are plenty of exceptions, of course. If you are reading this, you are an exception, I assume.

[…]
Most blog ranking services can easily detect and thus devalue links in blog rolls or blog rolling posts, but the truth is that if I put a link to your blog on my site, you get an increase in techorati ratings (and other ratings) …. and visa versa …. even if the link is in a blog rolling post. The ranking sites may devalue (depending) such links, but these links are not meaningless, so I assume that as ranking sites evolve over time, this is recognized for what it is.

(By the way, many bloggers claim that ranking is not important to them at all. Those would be the bloggers with low ranks.)

Linking posts you like or blogrolling blogs you read on any kind of regular basis is win-win, if people return the favor. To quote Chekov (Pavel, not Anton) “. . . and we all move up one step in rank.”

With all this in mind, it’s time to update physics-y blogs I’ve been visiting on occasion that somehow had not been added yet.

Faraday’s Cage is where you put Schroedinger’s Cat
sciencegeekgirl
The Mind of Dr. Pion
Cosmic Variance
Asymptotia

Decisions, Decisions

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No one knows why anyone does anything.
Why did I choose these socks today?

Trinity +1: the Decision to Use the Bomb, 17 July-6 August, 1945

The truth of the matter was that it was a very complex issue, an easily misunderstood tapestry of circumstance and consequence. The major issue of course was that the Japanese would not surrender, and that there would be “fanatical resistance” once the invasion of the Japanese islands had begun. The battle of Okinawa had just been fought—it was a horrible confrontation taking 12,5000 American lives and more than 1000,000 Japanese , demonstrating that even in impossible circumstances that the Japanese simply would not surrender (unconditionally). This is just one instance—there are many others, not the least of which was t he recent firebombing of Tokyo, taking 150,000 lives. Air strikes in general seemed to not make a difference in the will of Japan to fight—as was demonstrated again and again in the British and American bombing of Germany—as was further demonstrated in General Curtis LeMay’s and General Hap Arnold’s 60-city attack in the May-August span. The thought was that if there was an invasion that it could well cost the U.S. 1000,000+ casualties and would be completely devastating to Japan.

Something odd (in a US-centric way) going on with the numbers — 12,5000 and 1000,000 correlate to 12,500 and 100,000, respectively, when I compare to other accounts of the battle of Okinawa.

via Physics Buzz