Back when I created this blog and still had some aspiration of being an effective communicator and advocate of science I actually did have a relatively concrete idea of what I wanted to do. There is all manner of cool physics happening in all sorts of odd places, like electric guitars or driving around curves. Between being unable to convince myself I really understand them and not being able to communicate them to a general audience, I just can’t produce content like that fast enough.
If you want to read content like that, though, you should be reading Dot Physics. Rhett Allen is amazing. He once wrote an article analyzing the claims that Fabian Cancellara had a motor hidden in his bicycle, which combines two of my favorite things: physics and bicycle racing. On the front page at he time this was written he has an article on the physics of Minecraft and another on Angry Birds. Move over Physics of Star Trek.
I’m also going to shout-out to Good Math, Bad Math, written by Mark Chu-Carroll. He takes a completely different approach, which is to write about interesting topics so unrelated to anything I know that I never would have known about them to look them up before he explained them. It seems like you can’t swing a dead cat in the blogosphere these days without hitting an astrophysicist, most with more credentials that me. So I really get a kick when I see people blogging about professions so far removed from my own that I’d probably never be able to access them otherwise. Like Swedish Archeology.
Which is partially how I started to gravitate towards statistics, since there does seem to be hole there. That brings us back to my lack of confidence in my understanding and ability to communicate. Besides, you can learn all of what I know from getting a copy of Bevington and Robinson and taking a week or two to go through it.