All blogs are mortal; Skeptic's Play is a blog

I've decided to move to another location!  My new blog is A Trivial Knot.

If you follow me by RSS, please use my new feed!

I have fond memories of my eight years on Skeptic's Play, but let's not go overboard with the nostalgia since I'm still here blogging about more or less the same stuff.  If for some reason you do want to dwell on the past, this is the collection of my "best" posts.

Update: I moved my blog again, to FreethoughtBlogs.  The above links have all been updated, but if you're interested in the intermediate blog, it's here.

Comments on this blog are closed permanently.

Skeptic's Play is mortal.  Farewell.

8th Bloggiversary!

Today's my 8th and final bloggiversary!  As usual, I will celebrate by picking out my favorite posts from the last year.

Critical thinking
The moral horror that is ourselves
Make an ass out of you and everyone
What is an apology?
Sexual economics, a theory in need of reworking

Atheism
Five awful things about God's Not Dead
A critique of secular humanism
The tone argument, in retrospect

Asexuality
The nightmarish collision of FTB and Tumblr (FTBCon panel)
Asexual, because reasons
How identity is like a democracy

Social justice
My thoughts on trigger warnings
Cis diversity and Cis by default and privilege
Race is allowed to be complicated

Philosophy
An altruistic prisoner's dilemma 
Utilitarianism to deontology
Debugging the ontological argument

Miscellaneous
In praise of the most important relationship
Nintendo as cultural import
Ignoring the dystopia

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See this page for the collection of best posts from previous years.

This blog's history in numbers

I intend to close down Skeptic's Play very soon, and move to another blog called A Trivial Knot.  Now that I'm wrapping things up, I thought it might be interesting to summarize my statistics.

We can also correlate the statistics with a few major events in my life:
Late 2009: I came out as gray-A
Mid 2010: I graduated with a BS in Physics, and started physics grad school
Mid 2012: I launched The Asexual Agenda 
Mid 2014: I moved in with my boyfriend

In terms of page views, Skeptic's Play saw initial growth in the first couple years, and then it leveled off.  Initially, it might appear that coming out as asexual greatly increased my page views, and then after The Asexual Agenda was launched, those eyeballs shifted to the other blog.

But in fact, the drop in 2013 can be traced to a different event entirely.  On exactly January 1st, 2013, I saw a precipitous drop in search engine hits, particularly on this particular page.  This coincides with a big change in Google's search algorithm.  I'm not sorry for it, since people just wanted to use an image I posted.  It just goes to show how meaningless page views can be.

When I initially started blogging, I was much more prolific, basically because I was enthusiastic about this new hobby.  This fell over time, but soon leveled off.  Recently, in 2015, there's been an uptick in the number of posts.

Finally, when we look at the word count per post, there's been a very slow and steady increase in time, except in the last year.  I was surprised by this, since I recall many times over the years when I've set out to write shorter and sweeter posts.

In total, there were about 605,000 page views, 1,188 posts, and 642,000 words (as of last month).  For comparison, The Lord of the Rings is about 450,000 words, and the entire Harry Potter series is just over a million words.

Coming up: more modal logic

It's pretty much decided at this point that I will switch blogs come October.  I already have a title picked out, and I created a banner.

That's just the favicon.  You know, that tiny little 16x16 pixel image that appears in your browser tab.  Try clicking on it, you'll see it works even when tiny.

One of the consequences of moving is that I want to complete my Debugging the Ontological Argument series first.  I expected it to go on longer, but I think I'd rather have it all be on one blog rather than split across blogs.  That means you will get twice the density of modal logic for the next two months!  It's more modal logic than any rational person could possibly want!

Otherwise, the blog continue up until October 3rd as usual.

Should I move to Wordpress?

Ever since Disqus and Blogger started having a syncing failure, I've been thinking, is it time to pick up my stuff and move to Wordpress.com?  (FYI that's the free version of Wordpress, not the self-hosted version.)

Perks: I don't have to deal with Blogger's buggy built-in comments or Disqus's non-syncing comments.  I can finally get rid of comment threading, which really isn't appropriate for the volume of comments I get.  I can have a new blog title that matches the content a little better.

Problems: Moving and updating links is a pain and I'm just not sure it's worthwhile.  I don't actually have a new blog title in mind.  I also have some minor complaints about weird limitations in Wordpress's software.

Readers, your thoughts?

If I make the move, I'll schedule it for October on my bloggiversary.

Disqus and Blogger hate each other

In bloggy news, it seems that Disqus and Blogger have stopped syncing with each other.  That means that the comments RSS feed will not work, nor will the "most recent comments" on the sidebar.

If my metrics are to be believed, this affects about three people, but one of those people is me!  Now I have to track comments by other less convenient means.  I may not see or respond to comments consistently, which I suppose should provide even less incentives to trolls, although the trolls I get don't read my front page anyway.

Apparently, the problem was caused by a recent Blogger update which killed a feature that Disqus uses to sync comments.  Fuck you, Google, next time I make a blog I'm using different software.  Disqus is looking for solutions but I have no idea if one will be found soon.

Oops

I seem to have broken Disqus.  So for the moment, all comments are reverted to the Blogspot comment system.  Because of the way Disqus works, it now appears as if all comments from the past couple years were made by me.

I'm sure I'll figure out how to fix it soon enough, but in the meantime if comments are super funky that's why.

Incidentally, I also have another problem.  Someone told me that I'm missing the "subscribe by e-mail" option.  I could have sworn I had a widget, but it seems to have disappeared.  I can't add a new one because Blogger claims that I already have one.

ETA: Never mind I fixed Disqus, although the other problem continues.

ETA: There is now a link on the right that says "Subscribe by e-mail".  I had to add it manually because the default widget is broken.  Also at some point I accidentally deleted an HTML/Javascript widget and I can't remember what was in it.  Oh well...

Ask me about physics

I'm not sure if I have enough readers to do this sort of thing, but it's worth a try.

Does anyone have any physics questions?  Whenever I look at physics blogs, I see lots of commenters with questions in the comments, most of which never get answered.  And while there are physics FAQs out there, you usually can't just send in any question and have it be answered.

Since I'm only a physics PhD student, I'm willing to answer questions informally, and even offer my subjective opinion.  If I have a short answer, I'll put it in the comments.  If I have a longer answer I'll write a post.

I study superconductivity, but I also know a lot about cosmology, quantum theory, and quantum interpretations.  And when I read popular articles about physics, I tend to have a better understanding than the typical lay person.

7th bloggiversary

This blog is 7 years old, which is 70 in blog-years.  At this age, the blog begins to become forgetful.  Like, I forgot my bloggiversary was actually last week.  I also worry about forgetting that I already wrote about something, and then writing about it again, possibly expressing a contrary opinion on it.  No matter.

This year, I introduced a new topic: my attempts to write a novel.  Another new addition was the Best of Skeptic's Play page.  I was too lazy to sift through a thousand posts and find the best ones, so I just link to all my bloggiversary posts.  It turns out my bloggiversary tradition of picking out my favorite posts of the year was good for something.

Without further ado, here are my favorite posts from the past year.

Physics and math!
Quantum Mechanics for skeptics, redux
Sleeping Beauty and Quantum mechanics
Infinite Utility

Atheism!
I am oppositional
Christian doubt
Atheist and skeptical student groups are such clusterfucks

Queerness!
Dear Allies
Social justice as cryptolect
Sexual assault in (gay) party culture

Skepticism!
How to argue
The cost of knowing
Why I am ambivalent about skepticism

Miscellaneous!
Why video games are so flammable
Fractal Maze 3
Japanese "herbivore men" hold up a mirror to our culture

Brief blogging break

Due to lack of time I will not update until April 15th or so.

Disqus transition successful

I had to fiddle with it a bit, but Disqus works fine.  I've switched my name to trivialknot.  I prefer that commenters refer to me by that name, just for consistency's sake.

There's no particular rationale behind the name "trivialknot".  I just tend to think of mathematical concepts when I'm searching for names.  A trivial knot is a loop that can be smoothly transformed into a circle without ever crossing itself.  In other words, it is a loop without a knot.  This name has been kicking around for a few years.

Disqus installed

My boyfriend, who is actually a robot, complained that he was unable to get past the Captcha codes used in Blogger's comment system.  If it were anyone else I would have blown him off, but this is my boyfriend who is also a robot.

I tried turning off the Captcha codes, but this appears to increase the volume of spam I get.  So I'm trying something else: a Disqus comment system.  I chose Disqus because I already have an account and it's easy to implement.  There won't be threaded comments.  Old comments will be imported over soon enough. (Edit: Disqus appears to require threaded comments.  Old comments already imported.  Yes, you can still leave comments without an account.)

Please let me know if there are any problems.  If you can't comment, let me know by e-mail: skepticsplay at gmail dot com.  

If there are no significant problems, then I will stick with Disqus.  And to reduce confusion, I'll likely switch my name to "trivialknot", to match my Disqus handle.

Another bloggiversary

Today is my sixth bloggiversary.  After the five-year mark, six years hardly seems special.  But six is still a special number, if only because it's the smallest element of the set of non-special natural numbers.  This year in blogging, I launched an origami series, and my "Fantastic Primer" series.

As with previous years, I will highlight some of my favorite posts:

Physics!
A portrait of an "unsolved problem"
What are topological defects?
Quantum interpretations are scientific

Atheism!
Faith in fiction is hard 
Scouts, Mormons, and doing the wrong things for the right reasons
Questioning atheist org priorities 
Another way of viewing the skepticism/atheism dispute

Skepticism!
Just how bad is evolutionary psychology?
Privilege and charity
Gaydar as cold reading

Asexuality!
Bayesian reasoning and asexuality
A skeptically-oriented Asexuality 101

Miscellaneous!
Evolution of prisoner's dilemma strategies
Math and Causality
Improving on the queue
Why do I blog?

You can see highlights from previous years by tracking my bloggiversaries backwards.

Possible blogging break

For the next two weeks, I will be in France.  It's not a vacation; I will be at a conference.  I may or may not post anything while I am there.

New topic: Modular origami

While I was writing about my motivations for blogging, I had a realization.  My modular origami hobby fits perfectly as a topic.  Blogging about modular origami will give me an excuse to learn more about it, and a reason to make cool models.  I already post photos on Facebook, so blogging about it makes sense.

Origami, of course, is the art of folding paper into pleasing shapes.  In modular origami, you fold paper into modules, and then fit many modules together to make a larger shape.  Typically the shapes are based on platonic solids.  Because the modules must stick together without tape or glue, and because the geometry needs to be just right, modular origami is a blend of art, functionality, and math.

Interestingly, like a science, modular origami actually advances and improves over time.

This is one of the things I've folded.  Already seen on my other blogs.

I used to do origami when I was a kid.  I folded tiny cranes from 1''x1'' paper.  I can't do that anymore.  But I got into modular origami a year ago after a well-chosen gift from my mother.  Now I have a shelf full of models.  Many of these, I find in the few books I have by Meenakshi Mukerji, Gurkewitz & Arnstein, and Tomoko Fuse.  I also occasionally look to the internet or try creating things on my own.

So here's what I'll do.  I'll post a photo of a model roughly once a month in the origami category.  Most of the time I will not include instructions, since I'm afraid of violating the copyrights of authors I respect.  I may discuss a few interesting things about the creation of the model, or I may go off about polyhedra.

Today's model is the "Flowered Sonobe" by Meenakshi Mukerji.  It's "flowered" because if I had made an octahedron or icosahedron instead of a cube, the vertices would have looked like flowers.  The cool thing about this model is the totally ace color scheme.  The modules are mainly made of black paper, but most origami paper is white on the back, so all I need to do is fold over the edges.  Then I insert purple paper into the black modules.  Colored inserts are a clever idea I had not thought of myself.

Why do I blog?

I'm going through one of those rare moments where I'm not an ever-flowing fountain of blog topics.  So let's go meta.  What's my motivation for blogging?  I've been around for over five years, maybe it's time I answered that question.

I first started reading blogs around 2006, when I started going to college.  At first I only read the Bad Astronomy blog.  Back then, the blog was hosted on the Bad Astronomy webpage, which I had serendipitously discovered through the Internet Anagram Server.  I remember discussions of astronomy, alternative medicine, pareidolia, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster (which was new at the time).  I remember periodically browsing the blogroll, which included Pharyngula, Skeptico, and Memoirs of a Skepchick (back then it was just Rebecca Watson).

At some point I discovered rss, and started reading lots of blogs regularly.  I tried most of the ScienceBlogs, the major atheist blogs, and skeptical blogs.  This set my expectations for what a blog should be like.  I read blogs written by ordinary people, as opposed to journalists.  But they were not about personal lives, they were about science, politics, religion, and opinions opinions opinions.  They were ordinary people who gained influence.

I was so much into blogs that of course I had to start my own.  It was a way for me to take a more participatory role.  I also harbored ambitions of being one of those ordinary people with influence.  But after a few years I decided being a powerful blogger wasn't for me.  Popular bloggers like PZ Myers and Hemant Mehta have to put a lot of work into it!  They probably get hundreds of e-mails, and post several things a day.  I'm also pretty sure I would not use my power very well.  Instead of doing things to help people I'd probably just talk about math and logical fallacies.  And then I'd upset my expert readers for saying stuff all wrong.

When I was more ambitious, I was very interested in increasing my hit rate.  But what killed it for me was when my hit rate became dominated by Google image searches for puppies and kittens.  This landed people on a page that really had nothing to do with puppies and kittens.  Man, page hits, what good do they do me?

Whether this is rational or not, the pendulum swings the other way, and now I just don't care if I have many readers.  Not that I'm trying to push you away, dear reader.  It's just... I realize I don't get very many comments these days, and that's just fine with me really.  I now see different advantages to blogging.

I know every blogger says this, and I say it too: I blog for me.

Blogging gives me a much more active and interesting intellectual life.  It gives me an excuse to read about random topics, and a reason to try to get it right.  It's a sort of precommitment strategy to think about stuff on a regular basis so I have blogging material.

If it weren't for blogs, when would I ever have stimulating discussion?  Most people seem to go to internet comments, or they go to Facebook.  But pretty much everyone agrees that Facebook discussions are not very deep.  Blogging allows for deeper discussion, even if it's one-sided.  Getting to choose the topics is also nice, especially since I like to talk about stuff that would bore most of my meatspace friends.

Generally speaking, offline discussions pale in comparison.  In the local secular group some people don't even know what Elevatorgate was.  In local ace meetups, sometimes there are people who don't know what gray-A is.  I've attended local gay groups that thought the concept of transgender was just so novel.  I think it's a general principle.  I had a friend who liked to argue with 9/11 truthers, and he told me that offline truthers would mess up arguments that all the online truthers would get right.  It's true of conspiracy theorists, it's true in general.

Another advantage of blogging is that I no longer feel the need to participate in unenjoyable arguments.  I have blogging, which is a much better outlet.  Local discussion groups are great, but I don't need them for the discussion.  As for Facebook arguments, they are not missed.

I'm so attached to blogging, that I've stuck with it for over five years.  If "inability to give up on a blog" is a skill, I have it.  When I launched The Asexual Agenda, the point was to put this skill to good use.  Most asexual blogs are too short-lived, so my talent for maintaining a blog for a very long time is useful.  If only atheist activism were as easy as this!

TL;DR I blog because it leads to a richer intellectual life for me.

A fantastic primer on atheism and asexuality

I'm going to start a new blogging series, with a fantastic premise:

Suppose that I suddenly acquired a large number of asexual readers.  How would I explain my atheism to them?  Suppose that I suddenly acquired a large number of atheist readers.  How would I explain asexuality to them?

Of course, I mean "fantastic" in the sense of "fantasy".  And it's a rather self-indulgent fantasy, I'll be the first to say.  Furthermore, it seems unnecessary.  Writing a primer doesn't require a large readership by any means!  But in practice, I tend to write very differently depending on who I think my audience is.

The "fantastic" aspect also allows me to drift from the series' fictitious purpose.  I'm not really writing this to educate other people, so it's okay if I miss some details, or if I present a rather one-sided perspective.  It's okay if the series is considerably longer than any primer ought to be.  The real purpose is for my own enjoyment.  It offers opportunities for me to explore my interests: intersectionality, and comparisons between movements.  And if some people find it useful as a real primer too, that's fine by me.

Feel free to play along with the scenario by asking questions.  Perhaps I will pretend that dozens of people asked the same question you did.

This introduction is incomplete without pointing out that one of the fictional scenarios is less fantastic than the other.  While I am not a well-known atheist blogger, I am a relatively well-known asexual blogger.

Ref: Asexuality 101 (my real primer on asexuality)

The Fantastic Primer series:
1. Introduction
2. Why I don't trust you
3. Yes, I'm one of those atheists
4. A skeptically-oriented Asexuality 101 
5. Atheism as minority, atheism as political cause
6. Atheism and asexuality: a historical comparison 
7. Why atheism and asexuality taste great together

The next series?

Now that I've finally finished my excessively long series on the cosmological argument, and I'm also writing a cap to my mini-series on causality, I was thinking of whether I should start any new series.  Here are a few possibilities:

1. The ontological argument: This would be along the same lines of the cosmological argument, in that I'd meander through a bunch of pointless quibbles.  I've already written a lot about the ontological argument, which shows that I have stuff to say about it.  But I'll probably just end up saying a lot of stuff I've already said.

2. Some other apologetics argument?  Fine-tuning?  Pascale's Wager?  I'm not sure I would have enough to say about these to fill a series.

3. I could read Mere Christianity (which I've never read) and talk about how terrible it is.  Or maybe some other book!

4. I could reboot one of my really old series about basic physics.  I wrote about quantum mechanics and special relativity, and most of it wasn't very good.  My main goal back then was to explain stuff I had learned in courses, because that's fun.  If I were to reboot these, I'm not sure what my new goal would be.

5. I had a fantasy about what would happen if I suddenly gained a large atheist audience, and had to explain asexuality to them, or if I suddenly gained a large asexual audience and had to explain atheism to them.  What would I write?

Would any of these series sound interesting to you?  Is there anything else you'd like me to write about?

Blogging break

I am taking a break next week because I will be at the APS March Meeting.

Blogging break

Some bloggers will have holiday-themed blogging during the holidays, but my preference is to relax and take a break.  See you in a week or two.