Sister blog of Physicists of the Caribbean. Shorter, more focused posts specialising in astronomy and data visualisation.

Sunday 10 February 2019

Welcome to Little Physicists !

Greetings ! Some of you may be familiar with my first blog, Physicists of the Caribbean. If so you might be wondering why I'm starting a second. Well, I shall tell you.

For those of you not aware, PotC is a blog about everything. It started off as abject silliness, and fortunately it still contains no small amount of that. But over the years it's been getting more and more sciency, and the posts have been getting longer almost to the point of absurdity. At the same time, I've hitherto been active on Google Plus, which was a fantastic place to write much shorter pieces aimed at a scientifically enthusiastic but largely non-professional audience.

As the tragic shutdown of Google Plus approaches, I've begun the process of archiving the more interesting content I had there. In particular I had several astronomy-related threads in which I wrote short commentary and description of the latest astronomical papers - usually ones which don't make the headlines, and sometimes those that people expressly ask me to write about.

This blog is an attempt to preserve all that before it vanishes into the ether. PotC isn't going anywhere, and longer analyses will stay there (though I'm trying hard to reduce the length as much as possible). Little Physicists is an attempt at a much more focused blog about astronomy and the life of an astronomer. The main focus is on translating scientific papers into something more accessible to the general audience. Unlike PotC posts though, which are intended to be standalone, these ones often assume a small amount of background knowledge. I won't be trying to summarise every term or link to explanations of absolutely everything. This makes the posts much shorter and easier to write. Of course if you have any questions, just ask in the comments section.

Little Physicists is still a work in progress. Several posts are currently placeholders which will be updated as soon as possible. Right now it includes my commentary on papers and data visualisation experiments but little else. Over the coming days and weeks, I'll also be importing posts about observing trips and maybe some selected philosophical posts too, where they directly relate to astronomy. Again, the full, finished products can be found over at PotC or my website or YouTube channel, while this blog is a better place to find small, in-progress tests.

In the near future I'll also be starting a third blog, using all my non-sciency (mostly political and philosophical) Google Plus posts as a core. My hope is that by this new strategy of shorter posts in much more focused environments, it'll be easier to reach a more interested audience, make cross-posting much simpler, and give greater long-term security. More science, more win !

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