I appear to have a majority of Chinese readers, and the Russians are right after Sweden. Why? What is it with me and Communists?
Welcome to another new theme of the website! I think this one is all the more easier to read, especially now that I’ve been writing a lot more posts in the past few months.
This blog has slowly moved from covering all kinds of topics, to basically focusing on two – science and politics. When it comes to science, the most common theme is astronomy, and when it comes to politics, it’s almost exclusively pirate ideology. In my opinion, this is awesome. I have always wanted to have a more focused blog, and it’s wonderful to see it organically move into a well put arc. I tried to sum everything up in a piffy tagline, but failed. I finally ended up with “Your daily fix of space pandas”, referencing my new header and my absolute love for the red panda (Ailurus fulgens).
I still haven’t solved the problem of writing almost all political posts in Swedish, and almost all other posts in English. I consider creating a second blog especially for politics, but that might just make me end up with two rarely updated blogs. I suppose time will tell.
PS. In writing this post, I googled “pirate ideology” to find a good summary for those less into it. I ended up going with the link to Falkvinge’s blog as seen above, but I also realised that the term is not at all as used as I thought. My own blog even appeared as the fifth result. Is there some other term for the ideology of the Pirate Parties? DS.
Having gone off from traditional newspapers and TV reports more and more in the last few years, I’m now getting almost all of my news from RSS feeds (what is RSS?), anything from private blogs such as mine, to larger science blogs, news outlets and organisations such as NASA, and – let’s face it – a bunch of other stuff just for fun. I decided to make this post to go through all English language feeds I follow. Count all these feeds as recommended. In no specific order.
- xkcd: One of the best web series out there, with good nerd and science humour.
- Morito Ergo Sum: A promising, up and coming doom metal band.
- Richard Wiseman: A British psychologist, with lots of great visual illusions (like the one to the right), puzzles and interesting thoughts.
- SMBC Comics: Funny, skeptical comics from the SMBC team, which I’ve linked to several times in the past.
- To Posterity – and Beyond!: The blog of Cori Samuels, an audio book recorder I totally fell in love with after hearing her LibriVox rendition of William Morris’ “The Wood Beyond the World” (which I reviewed here). Her blog is extremely slow on updates, but still of interest.
- TorrentFreak: The best news source I’ve found concerning internet piracy and filesharing. Although extremely subjective (pro-piracy), they report a great deal on the recent news concerning police busts, laws, new technology, interviews and studies.
- Wuffmorgenthaler: Another web series, of much lower quality than SMBC and xkcd, but still fun sometimes.
Dinosaur Comics: Yet another web series, much wordier than the other, but (most of the time) a lot of fun. Plus, it has dinosaurs.- Just Bento: Cool pictures of and recipes for Japanese box lunches (like the one to the right).
- The Big Picture: With the tagline “News stories in photographs”, this is a news source which sort of focuses on the tragic events (such as the Japanese nuclear incident last March), and has a lot of excellent, provocative pictures to go along with them.
- WebUrbanist: Cool architecture. Sort of.
- Anton Nordenfur: My own blog. Just to see if the RSS feed is working properly.
- Ars Technica: The latest news in computer technology – computers, operative systems, smart phones, smart TV, tablets, et cetera.
- Astro-photo.nl: The astronomy blog of André van der Hoeven, the dude who took the Moon picture that I wrote about yesterday. Lots of cool space photos.
- Brainstorm Headquarters: The blog of Fredrik Bränström, rarely updated but excellent when it is.
- Discover Blogs: This feed includes multiple blogs under Discover Magazine, including the awesome Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy. A great way to keep up with science news from many different fields, some interesting and some less interesting.
- Explore. Dream. Discover. (and bring a parrot): The rarely updated blog of the fantastic Kaylee, a skeptic parrot owner. Sometimes in Swedish, sometimes in English.
- Hacking Chinese: A blog by Olle Linge on learning Chinese, which I’ve referenced a couple of times before.
LROC News: News released from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, which produced the Apollo 11 photo I wrote about a couple days ago.- NASA Breaking News: Constant updates about the work of the American Air and Space Administration.
- Neurologica: The blog of Dr. Steven Novella, probably most famous as the host of the podcast The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe, which I follow avidly since a year past or so. A practicing neuroscientist giving a “daily fix of neuroscience, skepticism, and critical thinking”.
- Olle Linge: The personal blog of Olle Linge behind Hacking Chinese. Sometimes in Swedish, sometimes in English.
- Science-Based Medicine: A blog on scientific medicine, combating nonscientific medicine, basically. With editors and contributors like Steve Novella (who also runs Neurologica), Mark Krislip, David Gorsky and others.
- Skepchick: The skeptic women organisation Skepchick’s blog, with multiple contributors headed by Rebecca Watson (also of the Skeptic’s Guide, by the way).
- Universe Today: The best outlet for astronomy news, which is also the reason I’ve referenced them several times in the past. Headed by Fraser Cain of the podcast Astronomy Cast.
VODO: VODO is a great source for films and TV series released online under a Creative Commons license. The feed gives a constant update on new projects.- Pioneer One: The source for news about the VODO TV series Pioneer One.
- Quantum Diaries: News updates on particle physics and quantum theory.
- Astroblog: Astronomy news from Australian Ian Musgrave.
- Tom’s Astronomy Blog: Astronomy news from… well, Tom.
- Astronomy Blog: Another astronomy blog, this time British – okay, I consume a lot of astronomy news, so sue me. Following many different sources make evaluating and making sure not to miss anything much easier.
- Quantum blog: The personal blog of Jev Kuznetsov, a physicist and Matlab programmer.
- China Space News: News on the Chinese space programme, which is sadly rarely reported on on other astronomy news sources such as Universe Today, in spite of it being one of the most interesting programmes out there, definitely competing with NASA and the ESA.
- Reuters’ Top News: A good feed for staying up to date with the most important headlines out there. I also have a separate feed for Reuters’ science news, but couldn’t find a link.
I also follow a bunch of Swedish language blogs, mostly on Swedish politics. Yay.
anton.nordenfur.se was down Monday through Thursday but is finally up again. Apparantly it was a misunderstanding between my hosting brother and the web hosting service, but everything is now back on track again. It got me scared though, especially considering I had forgotten to backup my blog for quite some time.
When I started blogging in October 2006, now five and a half years ago (then at http://blog.mangaworld.se), I had no idea what the purpose of this blog would be. I still have no idea, even if it might be at least a tad clearer today. When I first started blogging, I was fourteen years old, and the posts were peevishly personal and dripping with hormonal hubris (and I’m still awesome at alliteration). The egocentrism of the posts has fallen off with the years, to the degree that I very rarely talk about my personal life. There are ofcourse exceptions, such as this post (and no, I still don’t know where it’s going).
All in all, this blog has always been (and will continue to be, in the foreseeable future) a ventilation of thoughts and opinions. The blog hasn’t got a specific purpose or destination, but is the hangar for multiple projects with varying seriousness and purpose. The longest-running project of this type is that of my political views, mostly concerning the Pirate Party but on occasion straining into energy policy, drugs and immigration. Other projects include my skeptical view of the world, my interest in science, and (since I started studying it in last fall) Chinese culture and language.
Why am I writing? What’s the purpose? I dare say that it’s not part hubris. Because no-one ever comments on any post that gets the slightest bit personal. It’s simply not interesting – and I am the same way when I follow other blogs, the personal stuff rarely interest me. But I still enjoy writing, and I enjoy looking through my old posts, including those that I find completely moronic and unscientific in hindsight.
And I would be lying if I didn’t find some occasional appreciation. The comments on my writings on political topics are often phenomenal, which I see when it comes to Facebook likes, Twitter mentions, flattrings and comments. Some people actually do find my musings interesting. That just adds to the enjoyment.
Cheerios.
Det är alltid kul att se hur högt bloggen ligger i googlesökningar. Nej, jag sitter inte och googlar själv, men de vanligaste sökningarna som tar folk hit kommer fram genom FireStats.
Sökningen “instuderingsfrågor stormakten” ger plats två till mina instuderingsfrågor från att jag läste historia på gymnasiet, en tre år gammal artikel. Andra sökresultat är bland annat olika skolors information om prov, Wikipedias artikel om svensk litteratur, och lektion.se.
Sökningen “bokanalys” är otroligt vag, men ger ändå plats fem till min relativt nya analys av “Kina: den haltande kolossen”. Andra resultat är främst beskrivningar av hur bokanalys är upplagda, men även ett par andra faktiska bokanalyser.
Sökningen “kattbjörn” ger plats sex till min artikel om djuret, utöver resultat som Nationalencyklopedin och Wikipedia. En av bilderna i artikeln är dessutom resultat två vid sökning på bilder.
Två bildsökningar som varit populära väldigt länge är på Simone Simons (sångaren i Epica) och Tuomas Holopainen (keyboardist i Nightwish). En sökning på “simone simons hot” ger två bilder från min blogg på plats fyra respektive nio. Sökning på “tuomas holopainen” ger en bild av honom på plats 22, samt en bild på Tarja Turunen (fråga mig inte varför) på plats tio.
…and try to figure out why this has been my most visited post for quite a while now (even ahead of the startpage by 40 % or so). It may simply be the obscure reference in the header leading forth many Poe fans, but I can’t find a lot of her in the general Google searches leading here.
Anyways, for more info: the traffic to the blog has been steadily increasing since early October, which I guess is good. The most popular Google search words are still “simone simons hot” and “tuomas holopainen” (the first almost twice as popular than the latter), but there have also come several new claimers of the throne. Both “Taikatalvi translation” and “taikatalvi lyrics nightwish” appear on positions 3 and 5 (both leading here). Other search words related to Nightwish and their new album Imaginaerum (more specifically concerning my reviews on Imaginaerum and on “Storytime“) appear on positions 8, 9 and 10.
While the majority of my audience is international (the biggest majority is 14 % from the USA), the 12 % majority of Swedes are apparently very interested in the red panda, and the search word “kattbjörn” (Swedish name for the red panda) is on position 4.
There’s also a second Simone Simons search phrase, simply “simone simons” on position 6, and my article from when I considered buying a KORG PA-50 is for some reason still interesting, leading to “korg pa 50” still being a steady search word on position 7.
Summary, common Google search phrases leading to my blog:
- “simone simons hot”
- “tuomas holopainen”
- “Taikatalvi translation”
- “kattbjörn”
- “taikatalvi lyrics nightwish”
- “simone simons”
- “korg pa 50″
- “nightwish storytime review”
- “nightwish imaginaerum review”
- “imaginaerum review”
Interesting, huh?
The professionalism of my photographic skills, a testament to my egocentric, materialist, atheist values, and (I believe) the first self-portrait uploaded to this blog in its five-year lifespan.
2012. It always feels weird when facing a new number, every year the same number. I’m enticed to say that the years feel more and more science fiction and futuristic in the 21st century, but I’m sure it felt exactly the same when predicting the near future or facing new years in the 1900s, or for that matter long before that.
It feels weird as always, but I’m sure it’ll be fantastic. 2012 is the year of the first new Hobbit release. It is the year of the end of the world (and while I don’t care for these folks who haven’t even checked their original sources, it’ll be interesting to see what happens – not that I think a megavulcano or a Planet X will strike, but in that I’m scared of a second Heaven’s Gate). It is the year (hopefully) of my first academic graduation, and the year (hopefully) of my first academic studies in engineering and sciences. It is the year, if all goes as planned, that I finally check through the final edition of my completed 500-page novel The Tempest and send it off to some publishers for evaluation. It is the year, if all goes as planned, that I get a part-time job and get my own apartment after 20 years of living with my mom.
All in all, it is the year I grow up. Let’s hope I don’t crash and burn while escaping Earth orbit.
Aki
Today is my blog’s fifth birthday! The blog started on October 29th, 2006 at the URL blog.mangaworld.se, and has since gone through a bunch of stylistic changes and an URL change to the current anton.nordenfur.se, but it’s still cool to have had an ongoing project for such a long time. I was fourteen when it started, and I’m now 19, so obviously my thoughts and ideas have changed a lot in the process as well.
Still, I don’t think I have ever deleted a post in hindsight. I am outright embarrassed concerning some, especially a few religious ones, but I have never deleted one. And it’s not like I’ve dropped the blog for periods during these five years – at least one post has been posted every month. The number of posts per month is between one and 39 (the most was in January 2007).
The first blog post, “Testing” is still readable here.
