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Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Bucked down 
| | This blog's PageRank was 8/10 for a long time. Now (my Google toolbar tells me) it's 6/10. Not saying I care all that much. In fact, I haven't looked at the PageRank thingie in a long time, for any page I visit. But somebody asked a PageRank question about another site, and I noticed the drop in my own, um, status. Oh well. Whatever, I guess. |
Blogging your life, a way
| | After two and a half years of virtually non-stop blogging, my perception of myself as a distinct individual has dramatically waned. My interior monologue has virtually disappeared. I no longer have aesthetic-based epiphanies, and I almost never concern myself with examining internal passions or emotions anymore. Blogging has not just changed the activities in which I engage--the activities in which I engage in order to be a successful blogger have profoundly altered the way my mind operates and the way I conceptualize my agency in relation to others. In effect, I do not exist in the same way I once existed. |
| | At first I thought the piece was a bit satirical. But it's serious. He concludes, |
| | We political bloggers have spilled a great deal of ink on analytical, meta-blogosphere commentaries, and on how we would like to se the political process be reformed. I think we can do an equally great service--both to politics and to blogging--by spilling a little more ink on ourselves. No one has ever told the story of professional blogging in detail. Before I read yet another book on how Blogger X would fix the country, that is something I would like to see change. I doubt anyone will understand what it going on in the blogosphere until at least one person, and preferably several, finally does this. |
| | I know a shrink who says human beings are natually obsessive animals, and that many of our psychological troubles are obsessive-compulsive disorders with other names. I think some of that may be going on here. |
Aurora alert
| | Sunspot 930 has just unleashed another big solar flare, an X3-class explosion at 0240 UT on Dec. 13th. |
| | As a result of the blast, a radiation storm is underway. Based on the energy and number of solar protons streaming past Earth, NOAA ranks the storm as category S2: satellites may experience some glitches and reboots, but astronauts are in no danger. |
| | The explosion probably hurled a coronal mass ejection toward Earth. (Confirmation from SOHO is still pending.) Sky watchers should be alert for auroras when it arrives on Dec. 14th or 15th. |
| | NOTE: A radiation storm just underway has overwhelmed solar wind sensors onboard NASA's ACE spacecraft. Solar wind readings reported above are temporarily unreliable. |
| | Lots of links at the Aurora Page. Among them are the Real Time Auroral Oval. Since the aurora manifest as curtains of light up to a thousand miles high, they are visible up to a thousand miles and more to the south of the oval in the northern hemisphere, and to the north of the oval in the southern hemisphere. |
| | Since we are nearing the solstice, visibility of auroras will be confined mostly to the nothern hemisphere. |
| | At the moment, things are quiet. Although they were getting hot just a few hours ago over Iceland. Watch for more pix here and here. |
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