Blog

Blogs

You will find various blogs on our web:

• Blog of Elena
• Blog of Fabrice

and also

• Our Science Blog — comments on science.
• Our Blog Notes — a collection of research or curious notes on scientific topics.
• Our Hacks Blog — a collection of tricks and hacks.
• Our Tech Blog — a collection of observations on technology and computer topics.
• Fabrice's Dad Blog — what you do when you loose your better half.
• Our Cooking Blog — on culinary matters.
• Our Meteo records — on the weather, where we happen to experience it.
• Our Chess Blog — on games I play.
• Our Trifles Blog — on everything else.

On Sotito:

• Sotito's Garden
• Sotito's Library
• Sotito's Pub
• Sotito's Conservatory
• Sotito's Reforms

In other languages:

• Le Blog de Fabrice (en Français) — My blog in the French language.
• El Blog de Fabrice (en Catellano) — My blog in the Spanish language.

In dormancy:

• Madrid Blog — on our life in Madrid.
• Polyphasic — an attempt at polyphasic sleep.
• Brexit — Going through Brexit.

Our $\mu$blogs

Twitter blocked their API to external applications, so we cannot process tweets from here anymore! You need to go on twitter to get them.

Under the hood

Our blogs on this website are powered by ou home-made MediaWiki extension BlogTitles, a graft of WikiLog from Juliano F. Ravasi. The rationale for this choice can be read in our first blog entry under that approach: Blog:Fabrice/The Bliki way.

Previously we were using WordPress, which is a nice piece of software but didn't best match our purposes.

What is and Why a blog?

In its most mundane form, a blog is merely an online public diary that whoever feels like update with their daily humeure, rant or enthusiasm.

In The Salmon of Doubt, Douglas Adams gives the perfect definition of blogging, even though he died short of the concept actually emerging in real life.

[The Internet is] chaotic, but it’s also a place where people are starting to talk to each other in new ways, sharing their thoughts, their stories, their obsessions, without needing a publisher or a newspaper to mediate. It’s messy, but it’s alive, and it’s only going to get messier and more alive as time goes on.

—Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

Douglas is, after all, the one who foresaw the web 2.0 before the cozy version from the military, as well as social networks, which is what most people know the Internet for, nowadays. When it started, people knew it for Usenet and the Internet Relay Chat. Email is not yet a relic entirely but is smoothly going down the drain (people use WhatsApp instead).

Although everybody has something interesting to say, but also because not everybody is a gifted writer, typical blog posts go "It's been a long time since my last post" or "Many people have been asking me to express myself about this topic" or "This is something that I have always wanted to do but could not before for many reasons"... A great expedient has been Jack Dorsey's insight of Microblogging, although he was more on the SMS side of things. In fact, the initial 140 Twitter limit was due to the 160 SMS limit (reserving 20 characters for metadata). This then doubled to 280, people got the ideas of threads and 𝕏 removed the limit entirely (for subscribed users).

Even in this simple, straightforward social-media packaging, most people would refrain from saying anything, even if they are avid lurkers, thus spitting at the Internet, at Douglas Adams and at the Universe.

We believe it is a duty to blog, to bring our bit to the collective pot, which is not quite the cultural trash that opponents sometime describe, but like the cultural compost. It's made of a lot of trash, but something good comes out of it.

Blogs we like

• Stephen Wolfram's blog, from the father of Mathematica, and...
• Mathematica blog, from his team.
• Galileo unbound.

of interesting people

• What's new, by Terry Tao, the modern Leonard Euler. These blog posts eventually end up in publications (like Euler's piles of scribblings).
• Shtetl-Optimized, by Scott Aaronson.
• Azimuth by John Baez (the non-recognized inventor of blogging).
• BackRe(action), a theoretician's blog on a bit of everything.
• Vũ Ngọc San, from this author (French Mathematician in Rennes).
• Juliana Lima Dehne (and husband), filmmaker(s).
• Joaquín Fernández Rossier, físico teórico, profesor titular del departamento de Fïsica Aplicada de la Universidad de Alicante.

In French:

• Actualités du droit par Gilles Devers.

In Spanish:

• Rebeca Tabales, a novelist (and a friend of Elena).