Second Silver Anniversary

A quarter century of blog

I very nearly forgot that today marks the 25th anniversary¹ of the first post on my Uncertain Principles blog. Here’s an image of that, courtesy of the Wayback Machine² [EDIT: Awkwardly, I mixed up my time at Union with the count of years— it’s the end of my 25th year as faculty, but only the 24th year since starting the blog. I can’t math.]:

This was not technically my first blog— I had started a book log the previous August³— but it’s the blog that made me nerd famous. I was pretty careful not to tell anyone at work what I was doing, but a few people found out about it all the same. A few years later I was invited to join ScienceBlogs for its initial launch, and things really took off.

The tagline of the original blog was “Physics, Politics, and Pop Culture,” and I leaned into the political stuff a lot more back in the early days. That first page of posts includes a bunch of stuff in response to Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds who at that time was the biggest blogger on Earth. I started to shift away from the heavy emphasis on political stuff a year or two after moving to ScienceBlogs because I realized it wasn’t really good for my mental health to be picking fights with strangers on the Internet⁴.

From the beginning, though, I was pretty clear on where I had a chance to add value— the combination of explaining science concepts and providing a glimpse of academic life. I credit that to Derek Lowe who, incredibly, is also still in the blog game— his original blog was a big inspiration for me launching Uncertain Principles, as noted in that introductory post. Also, a bonus shout-out to Jim Henley who called his blog “Unqualified Offerings” and thus helped me think of the title.

There’s definitely been some evolution in my online writing since, but after skimming a few older posts, they do still sound like me. A younger, slightly more abrasive me, but there’s a core combination of discursiveness, referentiality, and an attempt at a conversational feel that is pretty much what I still do in this space. The epitome of this was, of course, the whole talking-dog thing, a story that doesn’t really need to be repeated here.

Anyway, it’s been a wild ride, and while I don’t have anything really substantial to say today, I didn’t want to let the anniversary pass without comment. Somewhat more substantial writing should resume here in the near-ish future— the academic year at Union has limped to a conclusion at long last, and I am looking forward to a summer without administrative responsibilities so I can refocus on things that I actually enjoy doing. Which means writing, among other things…

Considerably older, not necessarily wiser

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So, yeah, I’m old. If you want to see more from a shambling dinosaur, here’s a button:

And if you also happen to recall things from the distant epoch, the comments will be open:

1. The second 25-year anniversary this month, as referenced in the post title— Kate and I got married at the start of June 2002. Which ended up with one of our photos in a CollegeHumor video (skip to the 1:30 mark if you don’t want to endure the whole thing), which isn’t even the most bizarre thing to come out of events of that month.

2. Like a great many things from the golden age of the Internet, the original site is pretty thoroughly borked, in ways that are largely unrecoverable.

3. Following Kate’s lead in that.

4. It’s a little ironic that I’ve gotten more cautious since getting tenure than I was in the days when I could’ve been kicked to the curb more readily. This is mostly due to changes in the overall Internet raising the stakes of intemperate commentary, but I will also admit that the general pattern is very common in academia…