Monday, January 05, 2009

Geeky blog names


Sean Carroll is urging his non-blogging readers to start blogs of their own. He has even suggested some wonderfully geeky names for them -- The Error Bar sounds really cool, doesn't it?

A long time ago, I noted that academics have the coolest blog names -- from a geeky point of view. I mentioned Uncertain Principles, Preposterous Universe, and the coolest of them all, Moebius Stripper. While the first has moved to the ScienceBlogs empire, the second morphed into Cosmic Variance (another cool name, now a part of the Discover empire), and the last does not exist anymore.

And commenters chimed in with other blogs with geeky names: Not Even Wrong, Marginal Revolution, Zeroeth Order Approximation (not updated since 2005).

Among the academic blogs that came up later (which are on my Google Reader), I can think of two:

  • Tantu-Jaal by TIFR string theorist Sunil Mukhi; aparently tantu-jaal means a web of strings in Hindi.

  • E's flat, ah's flat too by Rahul Siddharthan. I have no clue what it means, but it sounds cool! [Update: Rahul has some details in the comments.]

  • Update: I should have added The Curious Wavefunction by Ashutosh Jogalekar. Also, Unruled Notebook by Arunn Narasimhan.

If you're a materials scientist/engineer, I think Screw Dislocations would be a cool name ...

Here's my bleg: Which other blogs have cool, geeky names (geeky with respect to their subject matter)?

3 Comments:

  1. Rahul Siddharthan said...

    My blog's name isn't geeky -- at least I don't think so. I tend to name things after whatever I happen to be listening to at the time, and when I started the blog it was Charles Mingus. He has a piece called "Hora Decubitus", which literally means "to be taken at bedtime". Whether it was taken at bedtime or not, my blog was mostly written at bedtime. So that's the domain name of my blog. The piece has the alternative title "E's flat, ah's flat too", which also sounds appropriate for bedtime... so I used that as the title.

  2. Marlin Jar said...

    Unruled Notebook and its former name, Nonoscience.

  3. Abi said...

    Rahul: Thanks for that note about your blog's name. Since you have many posts on music, the name has some geekiness to it -- in the sense that music insiders may find something chuckle-worthy there that others (like) me have no clue about.

    N: Thanks for the pointer to 'Unruled Notebook.' I have it in my update.