Friday, February 25, 2011

Curious? Ask an Astronomer: a proto-blog?

Way back in 2001 (10 years ago!) when blogging was not a household term, I was a member of a group of astronomy graduate students at Cornell University who answered questions sent to curious@astro.cornell.edu. We decided a revamp of the website was needed, and set it up as a searchable MySQL database accessed by php. I was reminded of an old post of mine today, and realised that we in fact set up a proto-blog. If we were doing this today it could just be a blog with a series of posts answering common astronomical questions.

Anyway you can read some of the answers I wrote as a graduate student/young postdoc which are posted at Curious? Ask an Astronomer.  This link goes to all 154 questions answered by me which I posted on the website!

Turns out I have 3 of the 10 most read questions on the site. They are

What's going to happen on December 21st 2012? (viewed 577263 times)
What is the largest star? (viewed 191353 times)
What is a white hole? (viewed 184946 times)

 More than half a million people have read that top one. Yikes! That's some impact, and no wonder Google searches for my name return lots of hits. I also make the 2012 people really angry.......

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